The Four Seasons

This isn’t necessarily a structure, but more of a challenge based on some interesting ideas. We’re nearing the end of this course, which means I think you’re ready for longer and more complicated ideas. You’ve practiced so much with stories, arcs, characters, and more, that I believe you’re finally ready to combine them all into longer stories or even series.

This is an easy one to start with.

What’s the idea

A man called Northrop Fyre was one of the first, in modern times, to try and create a theory around narrative. He divided stories into the four seasons:

• Spring myths are comedies
• Summer myths are utopias (or utopian fantasies)
• Fall myths are tragedies
• Winter myths are dystopias (or dystopic nightmares)

To him, these were the only four unique story types. As you can see, they mirror each other like the seasons. Comedy and Tragedy are two sides of the same coin. Utopia and Dystopia are two sides of the same coin.

We’ve already discussed comedies and tragedies at Freytag’s Pyramid. A tragedy starts off at utopia, but ends at dystopia. A comedy does the reverse: it starts with a bad situation that gets worse and worse, until it gets cleaned up and ends at utopia.

A utopia is simply a setting or world in which everything seems amazing and people would surely want to live. A dystopia is the opposite: a setting that’s almost entirely constructed out of nasty and bad characteristics, in which no reader would want to live.

The default arc in a utopia is that life is amazing now, but something threatens to destroy that. Conversely, the default arc in a dystopia is that characters try to escape this terrible life, or make it better.

Note how these don’t necessarily restrict the genre or content of your story.

• You can write a comedy that’s also an epic fantasy quest
• You can write a utopia that has serious drama
• You can write a classic Greek tragedy as a modern sci-fi story
• You can write a dystopia in which people make jokes and go on exciting adventures

These seasons only restrict your arc and setting/feeling.

What do I do with this?

You can apply this in several ways.

• If you’re writing a story with multiple main characters, connect one to each season. The season not only determines their personality, but also their arc. (For example: as the story progresses, the Fall character slowly reveals itself to be on a path to tragedy.)
• Or you could split a story into 4 acts, and connect each act with a season. Your story starts out a comedy, turns into a utopia in act 2, but then turns towards tragedy in act 3 and ends in dystopia.
• If you’re writing a book series, you might cycle through these four seasons. (You can start anywhere, then move through the seasons in order. Each book is one season.) It gives you a nice framework to make each entry feel different, but complement the others.

Or, more subtly,

• If you’re picking a general theme for your next story, you might ask yourself “what season do I most closely associate with this idea of mine?” Then pick the type for that season.
• If you feel like a character in a story of yours just isn’t working, ask yourself “what season do I most closely associate with this character?” (or “what season am I still missing in this story”). Then align the character with it even more.

As always, the structures I present won’t work for everyone or every story. They are simply tools. Tools that challenge you, let you practice, and might come in handy with later stories.

This structure is a nice way to create bigger and richer stories, with diverse storylines.

Now write!

It’s probably a bit much to write a book series with 4 books for this challenge :p That part of the structure is more useful once you start writing and publishing professionally.

I suggest trying out the first applications.

• Write a story with 4 important characters, each of which relates to one season. Their season determines their arc and general mood.
• Or write a story with 4 acts, each related to one season. The season determines the arc and mood of all the events from that act.

When I tried this, I found it very interesting and useful. Perhaps there’s some intuitive truth here about the seasons, and these 4 types being the “only” story types we know. We’ve already seen that humans view stories as cycles, so structuring them like the seasonal cycle just makes a lot of sense. There’s something satisfying about using this structure. It makes a story rich and interesting, merely by following simple rules.