The structure of The Fifth Season features both mirroring and inversion. How do these structural shifts interact with the three POVs? On today’s episode, we talk about the parallelism of the perspectives and the linguistic references to seasons. This leads us to the question, how many things need to work in sync in order for readers to feel the cyclical nature of the plot (and life)? How does N.K. Jemisin use structural arcs, beats, and elements to create upheaval? And finally, how can you create overlapping emotional states and narrative rhyming in your own writing? (And what is narrative rhyming you may ask? Don’t worry, we define it for you!) 

Thing of the Week: Who Lost, I Found by Eden Royce

Homework: Take a look at one of your main character’s arcs, and then try to rework another character’s arc to match similar beats and structure to the first one.

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Transcript

As transcribed by Mike Barker

Key points: Parallel structures. 3 POVs. Mirroring structure with inflection point in the middle. Inversion. Fifth season of catastrophe. Narrative rhyming. Echoes, imagery, emotional states can create parallels. A knife in the hand can create parallels. Read this book twice. How do you do this? Ask a question, again and again. Revision!

[Season 19, Episode 43]

[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.

[Season 19, Episode 43]

[Howard] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] A Close Reading on Structure: Parallelism and Inversion

[Erin] 15 minutes long, because you’re in a hurry.

[Howard] And we’re not that smart.

[DongWon] I’m DongWon.

[Erin] I’m Erin.

[Howard] And I’m Howard.

[DongWon] So, this week, I really wanted to talk about the parallel structures that are present in Fifth Season. We talked a lot last week about perspectives and POV and how those shift. And we got a little bit into parallels, just inherently in that, but the way Fifth Season is structured has two major structural things, in my view. One is you have the three POVs of Damaya, Syonite, and Essun that all have their own arcs. Right? They all have the arc of being pulled through the story in a beginning, middle, end way. There’s also an inflection point somewhere in the book where you have this mirroring structure of beginning with a child’s death and ending with a child’s death. Right? We have Essun/Syonite losing both of her children, or two of her children. The inversion of her husband killing her son, and then her killing her own son at the end of Syonite’s story is this absolutely devastating mirroring effect as we have the inversion across the book. That works because we have these three parallel structures. So I just kind of want to toss it to the group a little bit. Like, is that something you grokked in the moment of the sort of rhyming between the different narratives, or did they feel really distinct to you?

[Howard] I did notice that there were parallels… I’ve only read it once. You have the advantage of a second and perhaps a fifth read on me.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] I think three total now. So, yeah.

[Howard] I’ve only read it once, so a lot of my time was spent figuring out what’s going on. But, by the end, I definitely noticed the parallelism of the three POVs. The other thing that I noticed, and it took me a while to really grasp the in-world terminology of Fifth Season. The Fifth Season is not there have been four seasons and now there is a fifth. A fifth season is a season in which a catastrophe adds a season to your year…

[DongWon] Or your 10 years.

[Howard] And it… Yeah. It adds a season to this year…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] And that season may span multiple years…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Or decades. And there was a parallelism to that, because they kept coming back to previous… Or talking about previous fifth seasons. The choking season. The season of teeth. The… Oh, what was…

[DongWon] The acid season.

[Howard] The acid season. The idea that there was a season in which they learned metal just doesn’t last well…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Because we get acid rain and it will destroy these nice things you’ve made.

[DongWon] This goes back to secondary world contextual tension that we were talking about many episodes ago now. But it’s such a wonderful idea of seeing that in-world understanding of the context of a thing, where Syonite will look at the metal doors of the rich… What was the term for the towns?

[Howard] Yumenes.

[DongWon] Oh, no, no, no. There’s like the whole… Like the towns with…

[Erin] Comms.

[DongWon] Comms. Thank you. Where she would look at the big metal doors on one of the Comms and just be like, “These damned fools have no idea what they’re doing,” because of the contextual sort of history there. So, yeah.

[Howard] Coming back to the parallelism, there was this idea… And I didn’t get this until, oh, 80 percent of the way through the book, the idea that Damaya, Syonite, Essun’s life is itself punctuated in the same way the world’s life is punctuated by fifth seasons. There are these periods of disaster, these periods of upheaval, and I love that.

[Erin] I’ll say, for me, it felt more cyclical than parallel. I think I felt more like life changes, but does it change?

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And I think the fact that it’s called the Fifth Season sets me up contextually… If you think about it, the title is the most obvious piece of contextual thing that you give your reader. It’s the one thing that no one in your story knows. They do not know what the story is called. You do. So I was set up for a cycle, but I’m curious to ask, what you think is required to make something parallel? Like…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] How many things need to work in sync for it to feel like a parallel structure for you?

[DongWon] Yeah. I think it’s almost maybe more narrative rhyming than parallel, exactly. Right? Because I think you’re right, that it is cycles, especially in this book. Right? So much of what N. K. Jemison is trying to get across is the way cycles of violence and abuse perpetuate themselves, the way cycles of exploitation perpetuate themselves, the way cycles of seasons… All of that. So, to me, I think it is rhyming of certain things. Right? Like, it’s hard for me not to connect Schaffa and Damaya in some of those early scenes with Syonite and Alibaster going to the Node Maintainer. Right? As we see two endpoints of the same logic, as we see two aspects of the absolute horror of what the Guardians are. Right? Then I think there’s also later rhymings of seeing the Guardians die when Damaya goes and finds the socket versus I think the later scenes we see of the Guardians, both the truly horrifying attack on Alibaster…

[Erin] Yeah.

[DongWon] When they’re in the city where… The coastal Comm…

[Erin] Yeah.

[DongWon] Then, sort of seeing them again at the end of the book. There’s sort of this thing of, like, what the hell is going on with the Guardians? Is, like, such a big question. Right? So, like, I think those rhyming things really do kind of set up that parallel. I don’t think you need parallel arcs, like… I don’t think every beat needs to be the same. But I think having points here and there that echo each other, that have overlapping imagery, that have overlapping emotional states, I think all three of those can be ways in which you can create a parallel.

[Howard] I talked about this in the class I taught using Beethoven’s fifth and some other musical pieces, just talking about parallels and how you don’t need much. If you put a knife in someone’s hands in two different scenes…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] In the book, they are completely different people, they are completely different knives, the reader will create a parallel out of that for you. That’s an extremely useful tool. Just reading that one sentence, one bit of imagery, one element of a paragraph on a page can be enough to forge a parallelism in the reader’s mind. Once you’ve done that, you can play all kinds of games.

[DongWon] Yeah. It’s drawing the connection between two dots, and once you have that connection established, then they will feel on parallel tracks or on similar cycles, too, I think play with as a writer.

[Erin] Yeah. I love the concept of narrative rhyming that you just dropped in here, which I don’t know if you… Like, I know what you mean by it, but it might be good to sort of talk about what you mean when you talk about narrative rhyming?

[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, I think narrative and visual rhyming is, like, one of the most important techniques in all of storytelling. Right? It is to… I’m trying to find a way to describe it that isn’t just relying on other metaphors…

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Like, to me, it’s like a leitmotif, right, in music. It is a thing you return to over and over again, and as you do so, you can layer on more meaning to it. Right? So, like a very simple example is the way Stonelore works in the book. Right? Where Stonelore references in all these different moments in the book, and every time we get a new piece of Stonelore or someone telling us the lore of the Stonelore, so, this is Alibaster explaining the secret tablets and things like that a little bit, the apocryphal text and things like that, we’re getting all those extra layers and that adds richness and texture to our understanding of it. Right? So that’s like a very simple form of… That is a very simple form of that rhyming. Right? Another example is the moments in which parents understand that their child is an orogene. Right?

[Erin] Yeah.

[DongWon] like, hey, they have that power and the ways in which they respond to…

[Howard] [garbled]

[DongWon] Whatever it is. And then, of course, we have Essun’s husband literally killing one of the children and then leaving. Then we have the other parallel on the island of how they treat orogene children. Right? So we have this rhyming, and each time, we see a new one, it’s a different layer, different kind of hostility, different learning about what the world is.

[Erin] Yeah.

[Howard] I think of… When you say narrative rhyming, my mind immediately goes to The Bells by Edgar Allan Poe. Because the word Bell is used over and over and over again, and technically, it’s not a rhyme, because it’s the same word. Of course, it rhymes with itself. But it is a concept, and parallel to it, or sitting alongside it, is the types of metals. Iron and silver and gold and brass are all part of a narrative rhyme, because they are all a metal and they are categorizing what we are getting from the bells.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] And I like distilling it down to something tiny like a poem that super effective because it extrapolates out big for me more easily.

[DongWon] Rhyming creates a pattern which creates tension, because then you can resolve the pattern in one way or another. While we are back on patterns for a moment, let’s fulfill our pattern, and take a break.

[DongWon] This episode of Writing Excuses is sponsored in part by Acorns. Money can be a difficult topic for writers and creative professionals. It’s not like earning a regular paycheck that comes in at reliable intervals. It requires more careful planning to make sure that that advance covers you not just this year, but set you up for the future as well. Learning to invest and be smart with your money takes time and research, and it’s easy to put that off in favor of short-term goals. I encourage all the writers I work with to read up on the options out there and do their homework to figure out what makes sense for them. Acorns makes it easy to start automatically saving and investing in your future. You don’t need a lot of money or expertise to invest with Acorns. In fact, you can get started with just your spare change. Acorns recommends an expert-built portfolio that fits you and your money goals. Then automatically invests your money for you. Head to acorns.com/wx or download the Acorns app to start saving and investing in your future today. [Lots garbled]

[A] I’m so sorry I’m late. I was just talking to my sister about protecting abortion rights.

[B] Wait. Didn’t we already do that in Ohio? We passed Issue One last year.

[A] I know. By a wide margin, too. But now it’s up to our state Supreme Court to decide whether they enforce it or ignore it.

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[B] Um. I don’t know if I can remember that. Listen, I can barely remember what I had for breakfast this morning.

[A] Here’s a trick. All you have to do is remember Don’t Stop Fighting.

[B] Don’t Stop Fighting? Oh, I get it. D, S, F. Donnelly, Stewart, Forbes. I love that.

[A] Tell everyone you know. If you supported Issue One last year, Don’t Stop Fighting. Vote for Donnelly, Stewart, and Forbes.

[C] This message was paid for by Red, White, and Blue, a community of women who care about reproductive rights as much as you do.

[Erin] Eden Royce is one of my favorite short story writers ever. I had the pleasure of editing an issue of Strange Horizons that featured her story Every Goodbye Ain’t Gone, which, like, just from the title, right, you’re there. It joins another story of hers, the Shirley Jackson nominated Room and Board Included, Demonology Extra, and 17 other short stories in her new collection, Who Lost, I Found. So, Eden is an amazing black Gothic horror writer from South Carolina, and she brings Geechee-Gullah culture, which is the culture of the sea islands and the coastal areas of the Carolinas and Georgia into all of her work and all of her stories. They’re written in ways that make you tense, but also make you feel filled with love. So, please check out the amazing Eden Royce’s stories in Who Lost, I Found.

[DongWon] So we talked a bit about sort of the narrative rhyming in the parallel structures, the cycles. One thing that I think is super interesting… I kind of mentioned this at the beginning, but it starts with a truly awful moment and ends with a truly awful moment. These are paired in a certain way, and there’s sort of an inflection point in the middle that we get somewhere that creates sort of this inversion by the end of the book. I’m wondering if people have thoughts about, like, how that structure works, some sort of end to end rather than layered?

[Mary Robinette] I think one of the things that you can do is introduce surprising elements, like, hello, everyone.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] For me, the thing that was interesting about that was that they hit that beat of a parent killing a child more than once. There’s a point in the middle of the book which sets up, besides the beginning setting it up, there’s a point in the middle of the book where she says that… In one of the Syonite’s sections where she says that she would later understand why sometimes killing them was more… Was kinder than sending them to a Node Outpost.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] That… When you hit the first arrival at the Node Outpost, you’re like, oh, okay. Then when you get to the moment where she kills her own son at the very end, you also realize… For me, there were two things about that. One is that is… That predates the killing at the beginning.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And it is only… What it does is it recontextualizes our understanding of why that death… The many, many layers of why that death was so horrible for her.

[DongWon] Yeah. I love a reveal or a twist that echoes back through the narrative you’ve experienced before and rewrites your understanding of all of those beats up until that moment.

[Howard] This, per the episode that we just had where we were talking about whose perspective is it anyway, why do you break up a timeline and tell a story in media res so that you can align emotional arcs differently. The emotional arcs aligned via this parallelism, via this inversion, are so much more powerful when you discover that the killing of a child that happens first… When you learn about it, and so it now re-informs your whole understanding of the thing that we opened the book with.

[Erin] I’ve been thinking about, like, earthquakes and epicenters and sort of as its own thematic element… I’ve been thinking about how… Thinking about this book and I was thinking about Ring Shout and how I would summarize them, like, in a word or two. To me, like, Ring Shout is about the power of community, and Fifth Season is about breaking the world.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] I love that in some ways, this is like a seismologist, like, going back and finding where the actual break was. Where was the worst break? It’s the one that we end with.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Even though we start with the worst on paper, like, for the world break, we end with the worst emotional break. Like, we been sort of tracking back to it the whole time.

[DongWon] It’s the reveal that Stonelore is wrong, you don’t look to the center. It’s not just the center, it’s… The epicenter can be somewhere other than a perfect circle. Right? So the elliptical nature of these two points that create this… This sort of ovoid space of the novel. Right? I don’t know, there’s something about that that’s really powerful.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. There’s a line in the book where she says, “This is what you must remember. The ending of one story is just the beginning of another.”

[DongWon] Oof. Yeah. Right. Oh, I’m so mad at her sometimes.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Very much so. Very, very much so. And one of the things that I love about the way she is using the inversion and the parallelism is that she’s… Sometimes people call this foreshadowing where you set something up. That’s not exactly what the way N. K. Jemison is wielding this. Because it is the… It’s, like, yes, something bad is going to happen later. But it is the recontextualization of that first element because of the bad thing that happens later. So it’s not just foreshadowing, it’s that that thing that is a foreshadowing becomes re-contextualized.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Because of the thing that happens later…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And that’s that inversion, the parallelism, that’s the power of that.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So, also, just FYI readers. You should read this book twice. Because when you read it a second time, there are layers upon layers of this kind of thing that are happening all the way through it.

[DongWon] Exactly. I mean, I think what we were talking about in terms of rewriting itself by the end of it and being able to see all of those tricks up front. It’s just an absolute master class and, on a craft perspective, you just learned so much about structure, about rhyming, about all these different things if you just go back through the text a second time.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] That actually brings me to a question, which is, let’s say I’m writing something and I’m not N. K. Jemison, which I’m not, like, how do I then figure out how to create this kind of, like, layered parallelism in a story? How do I rhyme narratively?

[Mary Robinette] Some of the techniques that I have been playing with, because I have the same question…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Much of it rising after reading this book the first time. But, one of the things I’ve been playing with is thinking about it when you go into the book, about a question that you want to ask. So, she’s not… Like, rather than saying, I am going to tell a story about, you say, how does this affect? What are the ways… How does a parent feel when they have to kill a child? And then you ask that question…

[DongWon] What a question to ask.

[Mary Robinette] Right? Yes. Okay. So. But then you ask that question again and again, and that allows you to set it up. Or, like, what does it mean for a world to end? How do you define world? Is it a personal world, is it a larger world? And it’s a question that she’s asking over and over again, what does it mean to end a world. What does it mean to start again? And she doesn’t do that much starting. Like, we see the aftereffects of the world ending. We see a little bit of the starting again for the Syonite version of her. But it’s a lot of… There’s a lot of endings that happen over and over again.

[DongWon] And we can see Essun starting again. It’s just… There’s a middle part of the start again that we don’t see of her life in the Comm. But we do see her have to start again… With the knowledge that her husband killed her son, and how do we survive this season. Right?

[Mary Robinette] I guess that I feel like that is all part of the ending. I feel like that is still part of her [garbled]

[DongWon] [garbled] beginnings.

[Mary Robinette] right? That’s fair.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Mary Robinette, when you said foreshadowing but not really foreshadowing, I had a bit of an epiphany that I’m now going to go ahead and share. The etymology of foreshadowing is the idea that something is coming toward you and it’s backlit and so its shadow arrives first. Then I immediately went to Plato’s cave, the idea that the shadow is not the thing, and the idea that some of these parallelisms are foreshadowing because you are being told the shape of the thing, but not the thing in advance of the thing arriving, so that when it arrives, you realize, aaa… I was staring at it the whole time, but the light was coming from a different angle, and so I didn’t recognize it.

[DongWon] This is the power of the rhyming, and this is the power of the perspectives, is every time you see the thing, you’re seeing it from a different angle. So, from that parallax, you begin to understand more and more the true shape of the thing or the consequences or the context. So that repetition is adding more and more power to your encounters with the object.

[Erin] I also thing, like, circling around, thinking of circling around an object is really interesting because one of the things that I really like is we talked earlier about how you’re like, why would someone break the world? And at the end, you’re like, why wouldn’t they?

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And there is… There’s something really interesting there, in that looking at the exact same action and being able to see it from all sides.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] The thing that is both horrible and necessary is the same action. I think that there’s something really powerful in that.

[DongWon] Yeah. Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. To get back to your question, Erin, about how you do that. One of the things that I want to also flag for readers is that as brilliant as this book is, and as brilliant as Nora is, this did not spring out of her head in this form. You have to do revision. That’s the other way you can get this kind of parallelism and these inversions, is during the revision process.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So don’t feel like setting yourself up with I’m going to be thinking about these things. You can do that. But a lot of that’s going to come as you layer it through the revision process.

[DongWon] Yeah. I was literally last week working on this with an author actually, where we are breaking it back down to the outline, and looking at each of the character arcs, figuring out what needs to be here, what doesn’t, and then also how to enhance the parallelism of those arcs. How do we line up certain beats? And really, taking things from act five, putting them in act one, taking things for Mac two and putting them at the end. Like, so much moving around and restructuring so that we can get that rhyming repetition rhythm going through the book that will build to a conclusion.

[DongWon] So, on that note, I have a little bit of homework for you that kind of builds on what Mary Robinette and I and Erin, we were all just talking about here in terms of how to do this. Right? So what I want you to do is to take a look at one of your main character’s arcs. Then, try to rework another character’s arc to match similar beats and structure to the first one. This can be a villain POV, this can be a love interest, this can be a traveling companion. But see if you can take the arc of one and then have that rhyming structure in the second arc. See what that adds to the overall emotional state of the book.

[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You’re out of excuses. Now go write.

[Howard] Have you ever wanted to ask one of the Writing Excuses hosts for very specific, very you-focused help. There’s an offering on the Writing Excuses Patreon that will let you do exactly that. The Private Instruction tier includes everything from the lower tiers plus a quarterly, one-on-one Zoom meeting with a host of your choice. You might choose, for example, to work with me on your humorous prose, engage DongWon’s expertise on your worldbuilding, or study with Erin to level up your game writing. Visit patreon.com/writingexcuses for more details.