One people’s own way of telling a story, built from their stories, their mythology and their history — and set out step by step so you can bring your own idea into it.
Every people tells its stories in its own way. The Akan tell Anansesem, the spider stories, at night, with the audience answering back. The Mandé jeliw sing the Sundiata epic in full at Kangaba every seven years. The K’iche’ Maya wrote the Popol Vuh, the council book of how the world was made and made again. Each people’s stories, mythology, nations and history together make up the way that people tells — and that is where the work begins.
So the base of everything is a people’s own data: the stories they tell, the mythology those stories carry, the nations and lineages that tell them, and the history they were told through. That mythology is not raw material used up on the way to something else. It is what the whole GriotsWell Universe traces.
A GriotsWell World Story World is built from one people’s data. It takes the shape their stories actually have — where they begin, how they turn, what they return to, how they end — and lays that shape out as a series of steps. Each step teaches the part of the structure it holds, in that people’s own terms, with their own stories as the example. That is what makes it a World Story World: it comes from a named people, and it says who they are.
Where a way of telling is carried by more than one nation, the Story World says so plainly and names them. The Songlines are the clearest case: they belong to many Aboriginal nations across Australia, each holding the songlines of its own Country, and the Songline Story World names that breadth rather than folding it into one.
A Story World gives your story a people’s shape. It does not give you their stories to retell. You bring the idea — any genre, any setting — and the Story World gives it the structure that people built.
The GriotsWell Classic Story Worlds sit beside them: the Hero’s Journey, Three-Act, Seven-Point and Four-Act, the four story structures most writers already know. They have origins too — Aristotle’s Poetics, Joseph Campbell and Christopher Vogler, Dan Wells, Kristin Thompson — and each Classic Story World names its own.
There are 54 Story Worlds today, across 11 world regions, and each new one is added the same way: from a people’s own stories first.
Lay the Story Worlds side by side and their shapes begin to match. The Akan web and the Haudenosaunee Great Law are both woven of many threads joined at many points. The Sundiata epic and the Hero Twins of the Popol Vuh both prove a destiny through trial after trial. Japanese kishōtenketsu and the Tang poets both turn a story with a change of view rather than a clash. These shared shapes are the World Story Plot Architectures.
Their stories, mythology, nations and history: the World Mythology the universe traces.
The shape of their own telling, built from that data and named for them.
The shapes that show when the Story Worlds are laid side by side: Linear, Cyclical, Spiral, Balance-Seeking, Web / Network, Non-Conflict, Geographic, Multi-Trial and Negotiation / Reciprocal. Linear is one of them — the one we know.
The architectures are not boxes the Story Worlds were sorted into. They were found in the Story Worlds, and every Story World page names the World Story Plot Architecture its people’s stories show. Each architecture stands as an equal; none is the measure of the others.
Choose by people, by region, or by the World Story Plot Architecture you want to work in. The top of every Story World tells you whose it is, where it comes from, and the architecture it shows.
Every step explains what this part of the story does and why it is there in this people’s telling. The Anansi Web’s steps are what they are because of how the Akan build meaning: understanding the origin is understanding the structure.
At each step you answer for your own idea. The Story World holds the shape; the characters, world and events are yours.
When you finish, the Story World gives you your complete blueprint: every structural beat mapped to your story, named for the Story World and the people it comes from. Download it, or save it to your account if you are signed in, and write from it in Scrivener, Word or Docs.
Knowing a list of steps is not the same as knowing a structure. A Story World builds the reasoning of its people into every step — because the reason an Anansi story has a spider at the centre instead of a single hero on a road is the logic of the web. A writer who understands that builds a very different story from one who follows a list.
A Story World prompts; you answer from your own knowledge of your story. It teaches you to think in that people’s shape. The creative work stays yours.
Every Story World ends with a note of respect. Each people is living, and some knowledge is theirs to keep. A Story World teaches the story structure the public record shows, and points you to the people themselves for the rest.
Your story’s structure mapped beat by beat, with the key turns identified and filled in for your story — and enough of the people’s own telling to use it with understanding, not imitation.
Take it into your writing software. It becomes the outline you write your story from.
See One for Yourself
Open the Akan — Anansi Web, the Story World of the Akan of Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire. It is open without an account.
Open the Akan — Anansi Web →