What Is GriotsWell
Our world is a world of stories.
GriotsWell: our world and the worlds of stories.
One name, two things
GriotsWell names two things, and it helps to keep them apart. The GriotsWell Universe is the whole of this work. Its line is Tracing the origins of story. GriotsWell, the site you are on, is one of the three sites in that universe.
The three sites are peers. Each has its own shelves, its own voice and its own line, and each traces the origins of story from its own side:
GriotsWell
Our world and the worlds of stories.
The peoples’ own stories and mythology, the GriotsWell World Story Worlds and GriotsWell Classic Story Worlds built from them, and the World Story Plot Architectures that show across them.
DarkerSpace
Visions of past and future from the deeper parts of space.
World Mythology, the Cosmological Record of the skies, and the science fiction the world’s peoples have written out of them.
AfricanBookMarket
We stand on the shoulders of the past to see into the future.
African writers and their books, and the lore, peoples and histories of the continent the stories come from.
How the work is built, from the ground up
Everything on GriotsWell is built in one order. It starts with a people, not with a theory.
1
A people’s own stories
The base is each people’s own data: their stories, their mythology, their tribe and their history. How they say the world began and who they are within it. Who the powers and figures are, which places are sacred, which stories are told at night and which in performance, generation after generation. That is worth knowing for its own sake, and it is what everything else on this site traces.
2
Their GriotsWell World Story World
From one people’s data we build that people’s GriotsWell World Story World: the Akan Anansi Web, the Mandé Griot Performance Cycle, the Dogon creation cycle, the K’iche’ Maya Popol Vuh, the Haudenosaunee, the Māori, and many more. Each one carries its people’s order of telling: how its stories open, turn, gather and close. That is what makes it a World Story World, and that is why each is named for the people it comes from. Where a Story World is shared by many nations, as the Songlines are shared by the many distinct First Nations of Australia, each with its own language, Country and Law, we say so plainly.
Each Story World is also a plotting tool. Bring any idea, in any genre, and the Story World gives it that people’s shape, never its subject.
Beside them stand the GriotsWell Classic Story Worlds: the Hero’s Journey, Three-Act, Seven-Point and Four-Act, the methods most writers already know. They have origins too, in the long line of story-teaching that runs from ancient Greece through Europe to the modern page and screen, and they are built and shown here the same way as every other Story World.
3
The World Story Plot Architectures
Lay the Story Worlds side by side, by how they are built rather than what they are about, and shapes show across them. Peoples who never met built the same shapes, each in their own way. We call these shapes the World Story Plot Architectures. Nine have been identified: Linear, Cyclical, Spiral, Balance-Seeking, Web / Network, Non-Conflict, Geographic, Multi-Trial and Negotiation / Reciprocal.
Linear is one of them, the one we know. All of them are equals. The architectures were not decided first and then filled in; they are what the Story Worlds showed when we laid them together. And one story can be told in more than one of them.
World Mythology
Under all of it is mythology. World Mythology is named to show the world: the stories every people told about how things began, what holds them together, and where they are going. It is not raw material that disappears once a Story World is built. It is what the whole GriotsWell Universe traces.
On GriotsWell, each people’s mythology sits in its own entry, beside its Story World. World Mythology and the skies are gathered at length on DarkerSpace, and African lore, peoples and writers on AfricanBookMarket.
The Academy
The Academy belongs to the GriotsWell Universe: one Academy for GriotsWell, DarkerSpace and AfricanBookMarket.
What a Story World does not do
A Story World does not write your book. You answer the people’s own questions with your own idea, and it returns a blueprint: the whole structure of your story, in the order that people holds it. The writing is yours.
Nor does a Story World retell a people’s sacred stories or hand them to someone else. It takes the shape of the telling, never its subject. Where a ceremony or a story belongs to its keepers, we say so and leave it with them. Cultural Respect →
Where to go next
The explanations, in reading order: