The Universal Story in the world around me
How writing a story is
like riding a wave
Living by the ocean, water and waves carry great significance.
When I was a kid learning to surf, I was taught to wait for the 7th wave with the promise that the 7th was always the biggest. The pattern of how this happens mirrors the rhythm of the Universal Story.
Waves travel from afar, move through solid objects and often piggyback on other waves. Scenes travel out of the past, move through time and space with ease and often piggyback on other scenes. The highest wave is higher thanks to all the smaller waves around it, just as the Energetic Markers in novels, memoirs and screenplays are higher energetically and with more excitement thanks to all the smaller scenes around them.
The rhythm of waves break with surprising regularity just as I’ve found the rhythm of scenes in a story rise and fall with startling regularity. The highest wave just like, say, the crisis or climax of a story, won’t always be exactly on time — sometimes as waves enter and leave the group the pattern is disrupted and the big scenes come sooner or later — it isn’t random, either.
Watch the world around you for similar echoes of the Universal Story. The better able you are to generalize the story ideas in a variety of life applications, the better you’ll be able to tap into your creativity and intuitively integrate the rhythm into your writing.
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