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What is the Shape of Your Novel? Some Unconventional Structures for Unconventional Novels
by Writing Workshops Staff
47 minutes ago
Somewhere in nearly every writer's education, a teacher draws a triangle on the board and calls it the shape of a story. Miranda Schmidt, author of the novel Leafskin (Stillhouse Press) and the instructor behind The Unconventional Novel: A Year of Writing and Revising Support, has spent a career setting that triangle aside. In the essay below, written for WritingWorkshops.com, the official education partner of Electric Literature, they trace a different lineage: Ursula K. Le Guin's carrier bag, Ariel Gore's inverted pyramid, Jane Alison's spirals and meanders, Richard Powers's tree. Then they hand you the exercise that shaped Leafskin, the one they run with every group of students they teach.
The Unconventional Novel is a year-long, application-based program for intermediate fiction writers whose books bend genre, braid points of view, or think like poems. Over four ten-week seasons and 40 live Zoom meetings, you will workshop up to 100 pages of your manuscript, receive four critique letters and four one-on-one conferences with Miranda, and come away with a working vocabulary for structures beyond the plot pyramid. The cohort meets Tuesdays at 8:00 PM ET beginning January 5, 2027. Applications are due December 10, 2026, and a free online info session runs Monday, November 30, if you want to ask questions before you apply.
Here is Miranda's essay:
What is the Shape of Your Novel?
Some Unconventional Structures for Unconventional Novels
By Miranda Schmidt
Many of us writers have had some variation of this experience: We are sitting in a writing or literature class. We are talking about plot. Our instructor is explaining what a plot is, how it drives a story, how it is shaped. And, on the chalkboard or the whiteboard or the screen, they have suddenly drawn the shape of a triangle and called it the shape of a story.
This is the Freytag Pyramid. Developed by 19th century novelist Gustav Freytag to visually represent a classical five act story structure, this plot pyramid is now commonly taught in classes from elementary school through MFA programs as the shape a story should take. A triangle, or, as Ursula K. Le Guin describes it in The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, the course of an arrow "starting here and going straight there, and THOK! hitting its mark (which drops dead)," can be a fitting shape for a narrative. But, what is often forgotten in the conventional western writing classroom, is that it is not the only shape a narrative can take. In fact, a narrative can take many shapes. It can be, as Ursula K. Le Guin argued, a bag:
"I would go so far as to say that the natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meaning. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us."
What I have always loved about Le Guin's way of thinking about the novel is that it is driven by relation, which is different than what we are often taught: that a story is driven by conflict. Conflict is simply one type of relation. There are so many more. There is desire. There is grief. There is care. There is love. Holding things in relation and allowing whatever force forms between those things to drive a story gives us space for so many different kinds of stories to take shape.
"Conflict is simply one type of relation. There are so many more. There is desire. There is grief. There is care. There is love."
It creates, as Ariel Gore demonstrates in We Were Witches, potential space:
"If we invert Freytag's pyramid, what belongs at the center of a book? Perhaps not a culminating climax so much as potential space."
Gore shows us an inverted pyramid that includes "deepening action" rather than the conventional "rising action" that culminates at a climax. Thinking of a story as a deepening radically changed my relationship to narrative. If the purpose of a narrative does not have to be to take us through a climax, but can instead be to deepen our understanding and experience, a whole world of story opens up to us.
If your novel deepens rather than climbs, spend a year with writers who get it. Applications for Miranda's year-long program close December 10, 2026.
Apply to The Unconventional Novel →This is why I love Jane Alison's Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative. In this book, Alison shows us that the shapes of our narratives can be as diverse and multifaceted as the shapes we find in nature. A story can take the form of a spiral, a meander, a fractal, or any other natural forms.
When I was writing my debut novel, Leafskin, I thought of its shape as that of a fern unfurling. It was a spiral that moved, unwinding itself, leaflet by leaflet, until it opened entirely and you could see its full shape. I don't know if a fern is what readers think of when they ponder the shape of the novel, but the shape inspired me as I was writing and guided many of my structural decisions.
Richard Powers has described the shape of his novel, The Overstory, as mimicking that of a tree. First, the roots, represented by many characters who begin in their separate strands before coming together in a single narrative moment (the trunk) and branching off again (branches).
I created The Unconventional Novel: A Year of Writing and Revising Support, to explore this, alongside many other craft techniques that are often left out of conventional novel courses. The Unconventional Novel is one that explores alternative techniques, embracing the potentials of hybrid, cross-genre, and liminal forms. Sometimes these novels will follow the shape of a pyramid. Sometimes they'll invert it. Or sometimes, they'll be another shape entirely: a series of wavelets, a snail's meander, a spiral, a carrier bag.
"When I was writing my debut novel, Leafskin, I thought of its shape as that of a fern unfurling. It was a spiral that moved, unwinding itself, leaflet by leaflet, until it opened entirely and you could see its full shape."
This is an exercise I love to do with my students because it's one that has so deeply influenced my own work as a writer. Everytime I take a group of writers through this exercise, it unlocks something for many of them. It's a very simple exercise. All you need to do is visualize the shape of your story.
Exercise: Visualizing Your Narrative
Imagine the narrative structure of your project is a shape—what shape would it be? Try to draw it. Chart it. Is it a pyramid, an inverted triangle, a bag, a spiral, a wave, a line, a seed, the arc of a bird taking flight, a mushroom, a root system, a tree? It can be any shape you want. It doesn't have to fit exactly. Think about the movements of your piece, the tensions and relationships of it. Consider what drives it. The point of this exercise isn't precision so much as thinking of all the different ways we can conceptualize a narrative. It's about opening up possibilities.
Draw the shape. Then bring it to a room that will take it seriously. That is the promise of The Unconventional Novel: a full year with Miranda Schmidt and a small cohort of writers whose books also refuse the pyramid, with up to 100 workshopped pages, four critique letters, four one-on-one conferences, and four unconventional novels read together. Whether you have fifteen pages or a finished draft that keeps getting told to behave, applications are open through December 10, 2026. Your fern, your spiral, your carrier bag. There is a seat at the table for it.
The cohort begins Tuesday, January 5, 2027. Apply by December 10 and bring the book only you can write.
Apply to The Unconventional Novel →WritingWorkshops.com is an independent, artist-run creative writing school and the official education partner of Electric Literature. Since 2016, we've helped writers strengthen their voice, develop a greater understanding of craft, and forge a path to publication.
