The shapes the world’s stories share, found by building up from each people’s own stories
The World Story Plot Architectures are the shapes of how a plot moves. There are nine of them on the map today. Linear is one — the one we know. The others are Cyclical, Spiral, Balance-Seeking, Web / Network, Non-Conflict, Geographic, Multi-Trial and Negotiation / Reciprocal.
They were not invented first and then filled in. They were found, from the bottom up, in the stories of the world’s peoples.
A plot architecture is not a genre, a theme or a style. It is the load-bearing shape underneath a plot. It answers four questions:
How does time move? Along a line, around a wheel, down a spiral, across a landscape, outward through a web?
Who is the protagonist? One person, a community, a lineage across generations, the land itself, order itself?
How does meaning build? By escalation, by return, by connection, by repeated trial, by exchange, by a turn that rereads everything before it?
What is resolution? A goal achieved, a cycle completed, a balance restored, a pact kept, a pattern made whole, a meaning understood?
Two stories from peoples who never met can answer those four questions the same way. When they do, they share a plot architecture, however different their gods, landscapes and words.
The World Story Plot Architectures sit at the top of three layers. Each layer is built from the one beneath it.
Everything that makes up one people’s stories: their stories themselves, their mythology, their tribe and lineages, their history, their cosmology and the way they keep time. This is the mythology and lore, and it stands on its own. Beneath it lies the deeper drill-down data on African lore, tribes and mythology.
Each GriotsWell World Story World is built from one people’s data, and from no one else’s. That is what makes it a world story: the Akan Anansi web from the Akan, the Diné Blessingway from the Diné, the Songlines from the Aboriginal nations whose countries they cross. A Story World is that people’s own way of telling, laid out so a writer can understand it and plot inside it.
Lay the data of all the individual Story Worlds side by side, and shapes show. Peoples on different continents, with no contact, turn out to move their stories the same way. Those shared shapes are the World Story Plot Architectures. They are built from the data of the Story Worlds; the Story Worlds are not built from them.
The architecture is what one people’s way of telling shares with the ways of other peoples. The Story World is the people’s own.
Because they come from the data, the architectures are not boxes the traditions were sorted into. A Story World does not belong to an architecture the way a book belongs on a shelf. The Akan in West Africa and the Māori in Aotearoa, oceans apart, both tell stories as webs — meaning carried by connection, the community as the protagonist, resolution as a pattern made whole. Neither borrowed it. The web is simply there in both peoples’ data, and in the data of others besides:
Akan — Anansi Web · Yoruba — Ifá / Orisha Realms · Haudenosaunee — Sky Woman / Great Law · Trobriand & Melanesian Peoples — Ancestor Presence · Māori — Whakapapa
That is the discovery: the same few shapes, arrived at independently across the world. Each one is complete, and each one is equal. The map is still being drawn, and a new Story World can show a shape more clearly, or show one not yet seen.
Linear is one of the World Story Plot Architectures. It is the one most of us learned first: a protagonist, a disruption, rising conflict, a crisis, a resolution. The GriotsWell Classic Story Worlds — the Hero’s Journey, Three-Act, Seven-Point and Four-Act — are Linear, and so are World Story Worlds such as the Norse sagas and the Lakota vision quest. Because we know it, Linear is the natural one to explain first. It stands beside the other eight as one of nine.
A story structure is a people’s own codified way of telling — the stages, names and principles they set down. A World Story Plot Architecture is the shape that structure shares with others. What Are Story Structures? explains the first; this page explains the second.