Between Creativity and Chaos:
On Finding Structure, Rhythm and Coherence.
Fridge Magnet Poetry - the outcome of a spontaneous word game at a friend’s dinner party.
English, like all languages, is a frame of reference into the nature of Reality. By naming invisible things, we give them shape. They become objects of reference, allowing us to perceive, interpret, relate to and communicate our experience of reality to others.
All day, every day, we do this using only 26 characters, arranged from left to right, across and down the page. Of course, this can offer only a very limited presentation of reality. And English, by and large, remains quite an underdeveloped language.
We have only one word for love. This tells you everything.
However, it is necessary to work within the structures we know and recognise. We need containment in order to feel safe enough to make sustainable progress.
Creativity is the ability to innovate within constraints.
Our minds act as reducing filters. If we overload ourselves—or each other—with too much information too quickly, we can feel as though we might burst. But language is not static. It grows. It develops. It expands. It contracts.
Our work as writers is to contribute towards that development: to expand and improve our ability to communicate—to ourselves and to one another—what it is that we are experiencing.
Many people who gravitate towards creativity do so, in part, as an overcompensation for having existed within—or been subjected to—structures that harmed them and restricted their ability to self-actualise and expand spiritually.
But creativity does not give us a free pass to reject structure altogether. Rather, it is the means through which we experiment with creating new structures.
That is partly my role as your guide and facilitator of this experience: to show you that structure is good—or, at least, that it can be. You have the power to examine it, deconstruct it and reconstruct it according to what best serves your story.
The rest is just content.
When the structure is solid and sturdy, content flows naturally—without needing to be forced or pressured.
From Idea to Form
At the beginning of a creative process, we choose an idea and allow ourselves to fall in love with it. Then comes the more difficult commitment: creating a structure, rhythm and routine sturdy enough to carry that idea through its first materialisation into a first rough draft.
Story Structure is what allows an idea to move from the invisible world into the material one. It gives the writer a series of reference points. A place to begin. A direction in which to travel. Something against which to test every creative decision.
This structure does not need to be permanent. It does not need to be perfect. It only needs to be strong enough to hold the story in its earliest stages of development. We want to start as simple as possible and then build into complexity as our practice grows and writing muscles strengthen.
The Existing Structures of English Literature
English organises literature according to a particular taxonomy: an evolving framework of categories and subcategories that help us recognise, discuss and work with different kinds of writing.
These categories are not absolute. They overlap, contradict one another and change over time. But they offer us reference points: a library of structures, techniques and examples from which we can learn.
The broadest of these reference points is literary form.
Literary form describes the shape a piece of writing takes and the conventions through which it communicates. Within it, we find overlapping categories such as prose, poetry, fiction and non-fiction.
Prose uses language in sentences and paragraphs rather than organising it primarily through metre or verse. It is the form most closely associated with ordinary speech, although literary prose can be highly stylised.
Poetry concentrates language through rhythm, image, sound, metaphor and symbol. It may follow strict formal rules or reject them entirely. Either way, the arrangement of language is part of the meaning.
Fiction uses imagination to construct characters, events and worlds. It may contain factual material, but its primary responsibility is not factual accuracy. It is responsible for creating an internally coherent and emotionally convincing reality.
Non-fiction is rooted in events, people and experiences presented as real. It can still make use of emotion, imagination, imagery, scene and narrative technique. The difference lies in the writer’s relationship to factual truth—and in the promises being made to the reader.
No form is entirely pure. A memoir may read like a novel. A novel may contain archival research. An essay may move like a poem. A poem may document history.
This is where the categories begin to stretch. And, where writers begin to innovate.
The Elements of Story
Across these forms, stories are usually composed through some combination of plot, setting, point of view, conflict, resolution and character.
Plot is the sequence and arrangement of events. It is not only what happens, but the order in which the reader is allowed to experience what happens.
Setting is the time, place and wider environment in which those events unfold. Setting is not simply a backdrop. It creates possibility, pressure and limitation.
Point of view is the perspective through which events are witnessed, interpreted and narrated. It determines what the reader can know, what remains hidden and whose understanding of reality is given authority.
Conflict emerges when something stands between a character and what they want or need. These obstacles generate tension, rhythm and pace.
Resolution is what becomes possible after that tension reaches its turning point. It does not always mean that the problem has been solved. Sometimes it means that the character—or the reader—now understands it differently.
Character gives the story a body through which to move. The protagonist carries the central desire, question or idea. The antagonist is not always a person; it may be a system, belief, environment, memory or internal pattern that resists change.
These elements are then orchestrated into a narrative arc: the shape of the external journey the protagonist must travel. This is often mirrored by a character arc: the internal journey or transformation produced in response to the outer one.
Showing the Journey
One of the most familiar principles in storytelling is: show, don’t tell.
This does not mean that writers should never explain anything. It means that the reader must be given opportunities to experience the story rather than receiving only its conclusion.
Through scene, image, action, dialogue and consequence, we recreate a sequence of experiences. We invite readers into our worlds so that they can understand how an idea emerged, how a belief was formed and why a character has become who they are.
We give readers the agency to interpret the evidence. To decide what they believe. To agree with us—or not.
The architecture of a story determines how that evidence is revealed. What comes first. What is withheld. Where the story accelerates. Where it slows down. Which patterns repeat. Which moment is allowed to change the meaning of everything that came before it.
The Patterns Beneath Stories
Over time, writers, psychologists and literary scholars have noticed recurring patterns within stories told across cultures and generations.
Carl Jung used the term collective unconscious to describe his theory of a shared psychic inheritance populated by recurring symbols and archetypal patterns. Thinkers such as James Hillman later developed these ideas through archetypal psychology.
Whether we understand these patterns psychologically, spiritually or simply as the accumulated inheritance of storytelling, they offer us another set of reference points.
The caregiver. The rebel. The trickster. The innocent. The exile. The seeker. The ruler.
The departure. The descent. The ordeal. The return. The transformation.
These are not complete characters or stories. They are underlying patterns. They become complex, relatable and alive only through the particular human details we give them.
A writer does not need to reproduce an archetype exactly. We can recognise the pattern, deconstruct it and reconstruct it according to the reality we are trying to communicate.
Popular Examples
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by J.K. Rowling
Popular Examples
Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
The Odyssey by Homer
Popular Examples
A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin
Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Theme, Genre and Audience
The story is further shaped by theme, genre and audience.
Theme is the deeper idea, question or pattern the story explores: love, freedom, belonging, power, memory, identity, grief, transformation. The theme is not necessarily a lesson. It is the territory of meaning through which the story travels.
Genre is a set of creative and commercial expectations. It helps readers, publishers, booksellers and distributors understand what kind of experience a story is offering. Genre provides a structure—but writers may choose to fulfil, combine or disrupt its conventions.
Audience describes the people for whom the story is being shaped. During a first draft, it may be useful to write primarily towards the truth of the work itself. But audience becomes increasingly important during revision, particularly when writing for younger readers or within a specific cultural, historical or social context.
Each of these categories gives us something against which to make decisions. Not rules to obey blindly. Reference points.
The Shape of the Story
Once the pattern of your story begins to reveal itself, you can begin mapping the journey. You might sketch a narrative arc. Build a sequence of scenes. Arrange fragments across a wall. Draw two timelines moving beside one another. Begin with the ending and work backwards. Follow a straight line. Move in a circle. Or create a structure that breaks apart and gradually finds coherence.
You do not need to invent this architecture entirely from scratch. You can borrow an existing structure—or combine elements from two or three—and reconstruct it to suit what you want to communicate.
A plot outline is not a prison. It is a provisional map. It gives you enough direction to focus on the living details of the story without becoming entirely lost inside them. And you remain free to redraw it as your understanding of the story develops.
This is how we move between creativity and chaos. We create enough structure for rhythm to emerge. Enough rhythm for the fragments to begin speaking to one another. Enough coherence for the invisible idea to materialise into form.
Interested in continuing this work?
Join our next 8-Week Creative Writing Discovery Course, where we explore the journey from the first spark of an idea through to developing and materialising it into form.
Learn more about the programme, or email tanika@hatuakali-storytelling.org to reserve your place or arrange a discovery call.
