In Season 3 of the very excellent TV series Ted Lasso, the eponymous character “discovers” a “new” tactic of playing (non-American) football after hallucinating about triangles in an American bar in Amsterdam. If you haven’t seen the show (shame on you), here’s a clip of what happened, entirely out of context:
And then someone later tells Ted that his epiphany was had decades ago. But no matter—it was new to him. And it was new for the team.
Like Ted, I recently learned some geometry that’s probably age-old wisdom in the field of writing. And, like Ted, my lesson was about trianges.
But let me back up: before I talk about geometry, I have to talk about math as a whole. For many years, I thought math was something adults invented to make life unnecessarily difficult. It took me years to learn how to carry the one. I got my first B (gasp) in a math class. I wrote it off as something I’d never need and spent as little effort doing math as possible.
And then, in college, I read Nassim Taleb’s excellent Incerto series. One of the books (I forgot which) offhandedly mentioned math as a language, as an alternative—and sometimes better—way of understanding the world. After that, I was angry at myself for weeks for not taking math more seriously.
Understanding math well is tantamount to understanding a new language. As a writer, I understand that not everything can be explained in words. I’m now growing to understand that sometimes, math is a better way of brainstorming or expressing certain ideas.
math and writing
There are some relationships between math and the written word that make intuitive sense: the “arc” of a story, for example. Here’s writer Anthony Horowitz (of Alex Rider fame) on how math plays into his writing process:
“[W]hen I’m creating a story, I do think of it as having a particular, geometrical shape. For example, I was about to start work on Moriarty…and it had occurred to me that the twisting narrative, which would turn in on itself at the end, was rather like a Möbius strip. The House of Silk had the appearance of a letter Y.”
Anthony Horowitz, The Sentence is Death. pp. 230
As a side note, reading his most recent books was great because he writes as a fictionalized version of himself and gives us a peek into his writing process. When I’m writing, I often think: “Where is this going?” It’s fine in the brainstorming stage to let your mind wander, but if you waver too much in the later stages, you will lose the reader. All the stories I wrote as a child ended up trailing off, unfinished, because my imagination was writing checks my work ethic couldn’t cash.
Over the past few years, I’ve been watching more sports. As a tennis player, runner, and rock climber, I have a difficult time understanding the dynamics of team sports: I usually try and follow the ball and hope for the best. The more players there are on a team, the more complicated your plays are going to be. It’s just like a math equation: the more variables you have in a function, the greater the potential for the output to change. You can’t really forget about anyone on the field or court because everyone that’s playing is part of some sort of grand vision to win the game. And when it works out, it’s pretty amazing.
It’s the same with stories too—the more characters you have, the harder you have to work. You can’t introduce a character and ignore them for the rest of the plot with no explanation. You have to do your due diligence in justifying their presence in your story. Each of their plot lines has to be consistent with those of the other characters—you have to make it make sense.
the shape of writer
So we have the lines, the arcs, the zig zags of the plot. But what about the characters? What about the relationships?
If you saw last week’s post, you know I enjoyed Challengers. I’m a fan of love triangles in general, and instead of explaining why, I’ll let the film’s writer Justin Kuritzkes explain:
” ‘It’s an inherently unstable shape’, [Kuritzkes] reflects. ‘Even a totally equilateral triangle is a menacing shape-it’s a spear, it cuts you.’ Throughout the last few months, Kuritzkes has explained that Guadagnino’s guiding principle was for ‘all corners of the triangle to touch’ at all times. ‘I’m drawn to the love triangle in Challengers because if you change the relationship between any two points in the triangle, the other one has to move, too. The distance between two of them shrinks,’ Kuritzkes continues. ‘There’s so much drama in that-it’s an inherently dynamic thing.’ “
Justin Kuritzkes, writer of Challengers and husband of Celine Song [letterboxd]
Just like consistency is key for the plot, it is also important that the characters’ relationships make sense within the context of the universe that you created. How does a changing relationship with one parent affect a child’s relationship with the other? With their siblings? Or how would the workplace dynamics change if someone was to be fired that day, or if someone went rogue and planned an un-sanctioned fire safety drill?
It’s hard. Characters are born and die and are re-worked to fit the shape of the story—the shape of a story that’s continuously being created. Sometimes, the shape of a story changes because it no longer makes sense for a character or relationship to exist as written.
The point is, sometimes, abstracting a narrative or relationship—whether fictional or not—into a shape can help us make sense of what we’re creating.
