Episodic Writing

Episodic writing:  different structures

Select a theme or subject or topic which really speaks to your life. Your theme might be about your relationship with a significant person in your life, or with a sport, activity or pastime that has been central in your life.   You can also focus on a larger idea such as racism, poverty, fear, loyalty, friendship, or responsibility, but you must anchor these big ideas in specific experiences from your life.

Brainstorm a list of memories or episodes from your life related to the theme.  They should be anchored to specific experiences or memories so that you can present them in theme.  Try, as much as you can, to focus on specific moments.

Select episodes around which to develop vignettes or scenes.   Try to imagine the scene for each.  You might close your eyes and try to visualize the scene in order to provide rich details.  These scenes are often written in the present tense, although they do not have to be. Write these and arrange them in a way that creates the effect you are looking for, or seems most interesting to you.

The episodes are not supposed to be whole movies, but more like still slides.  Imagine that you are flipping through a collection of photos on your phone, but these photos are of some of the most memorable moments in your experience snowboarding.  What you want to do in a paper like this is to describe one picture and then describe another picture.  But the pictures don’t tell the whole story the way a movie does.  They simply capture a single moment.  That’s what you want to do in the episodes.  It’s tricky to master and it seems really weird when you first start to do it, but it’s really a helpful thing to learn how to do.  It’s like Anne Lamott said in her reading about small assignments:  all you have to do in each episode is describe what you are seeing through a small picture frame, and then you do it again in the next episode.

Eight Rules About Episodic Writing

1.       The work involves a dynamic character (in this case, you) one who develops in fits and starts throughout the course of the story in relation to the theme.

2.       Episodes vary in length.

3.       Episodes are roughly chronological, but not necessarily so.

4.       Often, a single unifying device (such as an object) can run throughout the story, appearing in each episode.

5.       Episodes are not related directly by cause and effect; instead, all are related to a central theme.

6.       If a traditional short story is a movie, moving in a linear fashion from beginning to end, an episodic story is more like a slide show or a music video.

7.       And finally, to borrow a rule from George Orwell, "Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous."