Glossary
The names used across the GriotsWell Universe
The Names
The GriotsWell Universe
The whole of this work. Its line is Tracing the origins of story. It holds three sites that are peers of one another: GriotsWell, DarkerSpace and AfricanBookMarket.
GriotsWell (the site)
Our world and the worlds of stories. Each people’s own stories, the GriotsWell World and Classic Story Worlds built from them, and the World Story Plot Architectures that show across them. “GriotsWell” names both the universe and this site.
DarkerSpace
Visions of past and future from the deeper parts of space. World Mythology, the skies each people recorded, and world science fiction.
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 Academy
The Academy of the GriotsWell Universe: one Academy for all three sites.
GriotsWell World Story World
A Story World built from one people’s own stories, mythology and history, named for that people. It carries their order of telling, and it is a plotting tool: bring any idea and it gives the idea that people’s shape, never its subject.
GriotsWell Classic Story World
The Hero’s Journey, Three-Act, Seven-Point and Four-Act: the methods most writers already know, from the story-teaching of Greece, Europe and North America, built and shown the same way as every other Story World.
World Story Plot Architecture
A shape that shows across the World Story Worlds when they are laid side by side, by how they are built rather than what they are about. Peoples who never met built the same shapes. Nine have been identified, and Linear, the one we know, is one of them.
World Mythology
The stories every people told about how the world began, what holds it together and where it is going. It is what the whole GriotsWell Universe traces.
Movement
One step of a Story World: a place where the story opens, turns, gathers or closes, in the order the people holds it.
Blueprint
What a Story World returns when you finish: the whole structure of your story, in your words, in that people’s order. The writing is yours.
The World Story Plot Architectures
Each architecture is shared by the Story Worlds of many peoples. A few of them are named with each.
Linear, the one we know
A goal, a road, a change: forward-moving time, rising stakes, a peak and a changed state. The Hero’s Journey, Three-Act, Seven-Point and Four-Act; the Icelandic sagas; the Lakota, Cheyenne and Crow Vision Quest.
Cyclical
The ending returns to the beginning at a deeper level. The BaKongo Dikenga, the Dogon creation cycle, the K’iche’ Maya creation cycle, the Sacred Hoop and the Medicine Wheel.
Spiral
Each return goes deeper, and the past is present in the telling. The Mandé griot performance, the San, Irish and Welsh telling, Korean Pansori.
Balance-Seeking
Order is disturbed and restored; the story moves toward balance. Kemet’s Ma’at, the Diné Blessingway, Javanese Wayang Kulit, the Rasa of the Nāṭyaśāstra.
Web / Network
Many threads, each tied to the others; meaning comes from the connections. The Akan Anansi stories, Yoruba Ifá, the Haudenosaunee, Māori whakapapa.
Non-Conflict
Meaning grows through juxtaposition and a turn that reframes everything before it. Japanese Kishōtenketsu and Ma, the Tang poets’ Qǐchéngzhuǎnhé, the Zhuangzi parables.
Geographic
The land itself carries the story. The Songlines of the First Nations of Australia, Polynesian wayfinding, the Guaraní Land Without Evil.
Multi-Trial
The hero is proven through trial after trial. The Popol Vuh Hero Twins, the Sundiata epic, Gilgamesh, the Kalevala.
Negotiation / Reciprocal
The story is carried by exchange and by what each side owes the other. The Thousand and One Nights, the Quechua and Aymara quipu, the BaAka forest spirits.
The Peoples' Own Terms
Griot (jeli)
The oral historian, genealogist and storyteller of the Mandé peoples, who carries history and lineage through performance. A role held through training and community recognition.
Anansi
The spider of the Akan peoples of Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire: trickster and keeper of stories. The Akan call the spider stories Anansesem.
Ma’at
The principle of ancient Kemet (Egypt): truth, justice, balance and order, set against isfet, disorder.
Pachakuti
A Quechua term from the Andes: “world-turning”, the overturning and renewal of the world.
Songline
Among the First Nations of Australia, the songs and stories that hold the land and the journeys of the ancestral beings across it. Each nation holds its own, under its own Law.
Kishōtenketsu
The Japanese four-part order: introduction, development, a turn, and the reconciling close in which the turn reframes everything.
Whakapapa
The Māori genealogy that orders people, land and the world itself into one web of descent.
Ifá
The body of verses and divination of the Yoruba, through which every situation is tied to stories of the past.
A Term Missing?
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