Introducing Polystories

A structural option to help fix troubled stories

Image by Pexels from Pixabay

Two weeks ago, I discussed the concept of separation of concerns and Kitchen Sink Disease and I stated that the only real inoculation to Kitchen Sink Disease is to cut. This is true, but what do you do when a story is so riddled with Kitchen Sink Disease that you simply can't cut all of the details? What if there are many arcs and dependencies that you can't cut one or the whole thing falls apart?

Let me be blunt: what do you do when you simply love all of the many, many stories that are contained within your single book? When, for whatever reason, the sum of these arcs are greater than any of them taken individually? When together they create a cohesive whole?

Because there are stories that are composed of many integrated arcs, each one dependent on each other. I call them polystories.

In software engineering, we have monorepos, or repositories of code that are organized in specific, segmented sections that are usually related. This allows for easy code organization so you know where everything is. A polyrepo is essentially the opposite of that; a bunch of very, very small libraries of code that can be deployed separately and, when integrated carefully, can form something that, if you take a step back and squint really hard at it, you'll see as a single piece of software.

In the same way, a monostory is a single story told cohesively all the way through. Usually, this means a single viewpoint, though it does not have to be. A romance novel, for example, would probably be a monostory even if it has two character’s points-of-view, because it’s focused on telling just their particular story throughout the book.

A monostory is what most people write, and is (probably) the easiest thing to write. It’s sort of how we see ourselves, a single story arcing out towards oblivion.

On the contrast, a polystory is how we see our family; a loose collection of stories or arcs which tell individual, isolated stories, with recurring themes.¹

Do you see the stories your family tells that way?

Identifying a Monostory vs a Polystory

Alright, so you've heard me say that maybe your story riddled with Kitchen Sink Disease could be saved and turned into a polystory. But it isn’t a sure thing, so how do you know? How can you be certain that transforming your story into a polystory will actually help you?

Well, nothing is absolutely certain in this world, but if you think a polystory structure will help you, ask yourself this question: Who is your main character?

Did you struggle for a moment? Did you hesitate? Because if did, then an edit to transform your book into a polystory might be worthwhile.

As I said before, a monostory is easy. A monostory is when you have a very particular, and very precise, story you want to tell, all the way through, from beginning to end. In other words, you organize a book by story.

But a polystory is a different beast altogether. This is a book organized by theme.

A quintessential example of a polystory would be the book I (lovingly) made fun of in the previous article: One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Marques. While the book starts from the viewpoint of Colonel Aureliano, it quickly jumps between the many different members of the Buendía Family to show how history and events can rhyme hundreds of years apart.

Another example would be the Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury. Each story within the book has different characters in different situations among different time periods. Sure, the book is grouped by the fact that everyone is on Mars, but that isn't truly the organization of the book; it's just an arbitrary categorization to get all of these stories together. Really, it was more that Bradbury had a bunch of stories that just felt like they went together for whatever reason and they all just happened to take place on Mars so it was pretty easy to come up with a name.²

In order to highlight the difference between polystories and monostories, let’s compare a monostory and a polystory which deals with the same theme: loneliness.

Winesburg Ohio by Sherwood Anderson³ contains many short stories, each of which focused on a different character, examining loneliness from a wide variety of perspectives, in common and uncommon ways. These stories jump back and forth across time and focus on the myriad ways that different people can feel isolated from each other, even when they are still together.

In comparison, A Man Called Ove by Frederick Bachman focuses on a single character, Ove. While it jumps backwards and forwards through time, Ove remains the main touchpoint for us as readers, and we spend our time exploring his particular form of loneliness and isolation and the choices he has made (or the choices made by others) that allow this loneliness to end.

Editing using Dependency Maps

Okay, so, you’ve decided to try it, decided to try creating a polystory!

First thing first: you can't work on anything until you get it all down. Write all of it, get everything down on paper, even if it doesn't make sense and none of it fits together. If you're struggling to do this, just put down one word after another: it is exactly that easy and exactly that hard. Remember, you can't fix anything up if you don't have anything down first.

Now you have a Shitty First Draft sitting in front of you. You are looking down at this mess of a story, trying to figure out what exactly you’re seeing and how it will work, trying to understand how everything influences each other and interacts with each other to create the grand vision you have in your head.

One way of figuring out how all of these work together is what we in the software engineering business call a dependency map. In software engineering, a dependency map (or dependency graph as Wikipedia calls it for some weird reason) is a graphic representation showing all of the pieces of software that your software depends on.

For stories, it’ll be the same thing: showing how all of the arcs within your story interact with each other and depend on each other to form a whole. Get a piece of paper and write down the names of all the major characters in the book, leaving a good bit of space underneath. Then, identify what each character wants and needs.⁴ Do all of these wants and needs align? Are they all roughly about the same theme (loneliness, longing, community)? If you have any that don't match up, you should be able to identify them here and cut them.

Ah, you thought you might be able to get away with not cutting anything, eh? Image by candoyi from Pixabay

After you've done this, and cut any unnecessary characters, start putting together an arc outline for the character (you can use these articles if you're trying to figure out what that looks like: 1, 2). Ideally, these should be relatively short so that you can fit them all on the paper, but if you need to re-write on a new a piece of paper, go ahead.

Now, the fun part! Start drawing connections between the individual beats. How does character A influences character B's need (or vice versa)? How does scene Z contradict the statement about the theme in scene Y? This allows you to figure out what is missing. A polystory is made up of these dependencies, so if you have a beat that doesn't connect between any of the other beats, now is the time to identify it and try to figure out how it can.

If you are looking down at the piece of paper, and it feels a bit like a mess, re-draw it on another piece of paper. This should also help you identify where different beats could connect, and you can draw new arrows that you could implement in a future draft (through putting in a callback, for example).

A Genius or a Mess

For a monostory, you may not need a dependency map (or, at the very least, may not need one this complicated) because you are telling a story one scene at a time, slowly moving forward. But in a polystory, you don't have that luxury; you are telling a story where part of the draw is the dependencies that these stories have on each other, so identifying the way these work is just as important as creating an outline for a monostory when you get to that point.

But in a polystory you also don’t have the luxury of a familiar narrative. I’ve talked before about how making a choice that may be unfamiliar to a reader could increase the strain it takes for them to read your book. You may have also noticed that the examples I've provided of polystories are considered among the best books in their genre: the Martian Chronicles is a classic and Winesburg Ohio is still taught in fiction classes throughout the country as one of the great short story cycles. A polystory is (by definition) a collection of monostories that are stripped down to their bare bones, and made to interconnect. It is harder than just writing a single monostory from start to finish.

So, the question becomes, do you think your story is good enough to be a polystory? Because you can do anything. The real question is, can you pull it off?

1. Or maybe this is just how I see my family.

2. I know that isn't really how it happened, but for all intents and purposes, it might as well have. You can't go bursting into every single English class, pushing your glasses further up your nose and saying, "Um, actually. Ray Bradbury was asked to bundle these stories together in a collection."

3. In fact, Ray Bradbury first pitched the Martian Chronicles as a re-imagining of Winesburg Ohio but on Mars.

4. If you've been reading me for a while, you may have recognized that this is basically identifying your requirements