Personal Narrative Plot Structure Diagram

Introducing my new personal narrative plot structure diagram. This revamped version includes color, shading, and text effects.

The Summer of Ordinary Ways

The Summer of Ordinary Ways
by Nicole Helget

The Summer of Ordinary Ways combines succinct prose with lyrical, poetic sections. This contrast in prose styles illuminates the barrier between the fairly ordinary details of life in rural Minnesota and the intense family interactions. The sections where Helget switches to second person point of view are that much more haunting because of the immediacy of the prose and lack of remove offered to the reader.

Helget taps into relationships, what really sets people apart in life and what really matters. Immense attention to relationships seems to be one of the major components of all the great memoirs I’ve read. For all that The Summer of Ordinary Ways is brief, the relationships explored are very complex and indicative of a longer work. I attribute this feeling to Helget’s control over her details. Everything she chooses to incorporate into her memoir seems to have a place and is explored in the right amount of detail. The Acknowledgements section at the back makes these relationships seem even more real, though I think the statements to individual family members could be interpreted by some readers as undercutting the relationships she was trying to portray in the memoir.

The chronology was somewhat difficult to get used to. Her narrative jumped around a bit more than I’m used to, especially in the Summer of Ordinary Ways chapter. Interrupting narrative is a good way to break and rebuild tension, but at times, I had to go back and clarify if she was recounting memories from the 1980’s, describing the present, or giving an account of the not so distant past. Her short sections of interweaved vignettes reminded me to some extent of Joan Didion’s style. I see the merit in interlacing two stories with very different overtones to build thematic development, like in the chapter Stain You Red. The contrast of Colie learning how to play baseball from an overbearing father and the pitch-forking incident informs both stories. The interlacing of stories also assists in character development. Without Helget’s portrayal of her father from the perspective of frustrated major league baseball player stuck in rural Minnesota, the audience would have disliked him, and found him un-relatable as a character, after the animal cruelty to Big Jenny. The baseball sections, the longing for failed and unrealized dreams, bring out his humanity and make him tolerable as a character.

Blackbird and Wolf

Blackbird and Wolf

by Henri Cole

Thirty-one of the thirty-eight poems in Blackbird and Wolf are sonnet length. Henri Cole utilizes short lines without restricting himself to iambic pentameter or a rhyme scheme. A couple of the sonnet-like poems have stanza breaks like the Petrarchan form and have a turn in the eighth line, e.g. “Hymn.” Some of the split stanza sonnets, like “The Tree Cutters” and “Self-Portrait with Red Eyes,” have stanza breaks between the seventh and eight lines, bisecting the poem and allowing Cole to describe a new image or idea to contrast with or expand on the previous stanza. The rest of the sonnet poems resemble the Shakespearian sonnet, with the turn closer to the end of the poem, as in “Beach Walk” where the turn is in the last two lines: “We fall, we fell, we are falling. Nothing mitigates it. / The dark embryo bares its teeth and we move on” (41).

The short lines are emphasized by the heavy use of end-stops in many of the sonnet poems. Ending many, or most, of the lines with commas, semicolons, or periods forces the poem to use short independent or dependent clauses. This puts one or multiple complete thoughts in each line: “I found a baby shark on the beach. / Seagulls had eaten his eyes. His throat was bleeding” (41). His lines are sparse, with simple words occasionally interrupted by less common (sometimes multisyllabic) words, drawing attention to them: “personification” (8), “amphibious” (10), “ misprision” (19), “etherizing” (30). The result is that the language describing images and ideas is simple, while the ideas and images themselves are complex and multifaceted: “I want nothing / to reveal feeling but feeling—as in freedom, / or the knowledge of peace in a realm beyond, / or the sound of water poured in a bowl” (25).

The incorporation of nature into the majority of the poems works as a foil for the human element. Nature—animals, plants, landscapes—is always experienced through the narrator. Occasionally nature is personified, speaks to the narrator: “‘Hey, human, my heart feels bad,’ the crow asserts” (9), “says / the onyx water, ‘come into my deep’” (28), “The wind was stroking it, / saying, ‘My weed, my weed’” (35). Sometimes the narrator verbally responds, as though trying to engage nature in a dialogue: “‘Mr. Weed,’ I said, ‘I’m competitive, / I’m afraid, I’m isolated, I’m bright. / Can you tell me how to survive?’” (35).

The title of the book perplexes me. On a general level, I see the blackbird and the wolf as representatives of nature and therefore fitting. Birds are introduced early in the form of gulls and crows. Blackbirds don’t show up until the last two poems: “Even the blackbirds,/ squealing in long-haired willows” (53), “and a solid blackbird flew into view, / catching a bee in its mouth” (58). Bears, predators like wolves, also make an early appearance, but the wolf itself is noticeably absent. Being particularly interested in wolves and their role in ecology, I began to theorize why the wolf remained absent (or if the narrator or someone in the poem was meant to represent the wolf).

Rising Falling Hovering

Rising, Falling, Hovering

by C.D. Wright

The mood of Rising, Falling, Hovering is expressed through word choice, line breaks, formatting, and the broken narrative. I picked up on the emotions of the title poem fairly easily, though the narrative usually eluded me.  I felt that Wright used words with dual connotations effectively to create a somewhat elusive and broken narrative.  For example, in the lines “his half-delineated face / already in twilight    the batting pouring / from the clouds below,” the word batting is used in a quilting metaphor for fluffy clouds. When used in a section about relationship trouble, however, and next to imagery about a face, the word takes on an abusive connotation linked to a bat or battery (14).  Through the entire poem, I couldn’t find an explanation for the discord between the main female character and her romantic interest, so I was grasping for possible reasons, like money troubles or physical or verbal abuse (29).  The most straightforward information I can find is in this monologue: “About the other night     I know you are sorry     I am sorry too    We were tired    Me / and my open-shut-case mouth     You and your clockwork disciplines” (15).  This indicates to me that the couple is feuding and that blame plays a role.

I experienced difficulty decoding the narrative and the identities of the speaker and the main characters in the title poem for a number of reasons, many of which are linked to the successful conveying of emotion.  I am able to determine that there is a troubled relationship between and unnamed man and woman (somehow related to a boy fighting in Baghdad, perhaps their son) and they are traveling to Mexico, then reach Mexico and hear news of the bombings in Baghdad, then there seems to be some anti-war ponderings and sentiments, then I lose the narrative.  In “Rising, Falling, Hovering, cont.,” more narrative about familial relationships emerges, though making the connections between people and circumstances is still a struggle for me.  For the longest time, I was trying to connect the woman and the man and their son learning Spanish to the couple and the boy in the first title poem, but I couldn’t figure out why the relationship wouldn’t have been explicit in “Rising, Falling, Hovering.”  Part of my trouble, I believe, stems from the formatting.  As soon as I got adjusted to one format and the way information was released in it, the formatting changed.  The couplets and the single lines were easy for me to understand, the lines mostly connected and the format being familiar.  The almost randomly arranged lines, the maxims like “The writing in the trees remains illegible,” and the prose poem-like sections were more difficult for me to transition to because I was less familiar with the format and occasionally the imagery and narrative would be disjointed.

As a nonfiction student, I usually want either a stronger narrative or no narrative in a poem.  With the broken narrative, I became distracted from the imagery and the emotional core of the work.  I spent most of the time trying to make connections between the sections, the characters, and the places and felt that I somehow missed the bigger picture.  I also became stuck on the Spanish (and German) used in the poem, knowing that I should not try to translate it—she often gave the equivalent in the same line or the one before—and focus more on the sound, rhythm, and texture.

Hello!

Hello!  Welcome to my blog: A Brief History of T.

About me:

I am a Southern Minnesota native.  My hobbies include writing, reading, photography, acrylic painting, hiking, watching astronomy and prehistory documentaries on the History and Discovery Channels, trying to solve the incompatibility between the theory of quantum mechanics and the theory of general relativity, and a bunch of other less interesting things. 

I have two dogs and am in constant need of help from the Dog Whisperer.

Lily is an overly hyperactive Jack Russell Terrier and is currently medicated with Doggy Prozac (she chews on sheetrock and windowsills when bored):

Buster is a Blanket Monster:

He is a Miniature Pinscher (like a 13 pound Doberman Pinscher but his breed existed 300 years earlier!).  He also lacks all ambition that is not motivated by food or warm blankets straight from the dryer.

Obviously, they both have characteristics that take after me.