Magical Patterns in Stories

I write and read in pictures. For me, all books are illustrated. Yes, it’s the words that do the hard work – God love ‘em. In the end, however, what counts is what those words help me to see.

You might think I’m talking about visualisation – reading a scene in a book and having it play out in your mind’s eye like a movie. Or, conversely, imagining the movie first then writing it down. Both these things do happen for me (although not all the time), but that’s not what I mean. I’m talking about seeing story.

I’ll try to explain.

Stories have a pattern. You could argue that stories are pattern. The loom of history spews out events in a random weave. History is, as Toynbee said, just one damned thing after another. But the human mind insists on joining those things up, creating beginnings and endings, dramatic twists, ironic fates, whatever. That’s what story is.

What we’re doing when we tell a story is snipping out a bit of the random weave, holding it up and saying, ‘Isn’t this neat? Don’t you just love the way all these threads tie up in this one corner? Isn’t this little square of material just so right?’

When I’m writing – or reading – this is the kind of pattern that I’m looking for. In my head it’s capitalised: Pattern. The words are just the threads that make it up. When you glimpse the Pattern – and it is only ever a glimpse – you get that transcendent feeling that only the very best stories can give you. A sense that a veil just dropped away, that you’ve understood something you’d never even imagined was there, or that you’ve touched a truth you’ve always known, but could never articulate. That’s what Pattern is, and what it does to you.

Pattern describes something fundamental to all storytelling – to basic human perception, actually. In that respect it’s a kissing cousin of Terry Pratchett’s Narrativium, that exotic element that drives the flow of history on Discworld. In my opinion, Pattern is pretty close to being authentic magic. So close, in fact, that I’m pretty sure I’ll write a story about it one day. I just need to decide which bit of the cosmic weave to snip out.

And where to start weaving.