How to write an essay or memoir: Eastern storytelling structure

The 4-act Eastern narrative structure and the TWIST: Part 3 of 3

A stranger (presumably my dad’s friend), my mom, my dad, and another stranger (presumably my dad’s friend’s wife). My mom’s friends are all prim and proper Korean versions of Sloane Rangers so these have got to be my dad’s friends.

There is more than one right way…

I spent an entire semester teaching book structure to grad students, and I had a lot of fun discussing book structure, frameworks, and myriad ways to order scenes and make meaning for readers. I’ve named a few in a prior post discussing curation in Part 1 of this series—you can write a novel without a plot. You can write a novel without a timeline. You can even write a novel without conflict if you have a working structure. In fact, I’ve still got to look into African storytelling structures and Native storytelling structures. But for this post, (I addressed Western and its focus on conflict previously), I will focus on Eastern storytelling structure to show you the impact structure has on meaning and the narrative arc.

How to write a story without conflict

To that end, here’s a super quick overview of Eastern storytelling structure, otherwise known as gi seung jeon gyeol in Korean, otherwise known as kishōtenketsu, a 4-act narrative structure. Of all my research sources, Henry Lien provides a master lesson on the Eastern 4-act structure in his book Spring, Summer, Asteroid, Bird: The Art of Eastern Storytelling. I can’t recommend it enough.

The 4-act structure originated from Chinese four-line poetry in the Tang Dynasty (800AD - 1100 AD), which then spread to Korea (where it is called 기승전결 gi seung jeon gyeol) and then ultimately to Japan, where it was named kishōtenketsu. Today, this 4-act structure is very much alive in novels, film, videogames, and manga.

Ancient four-line Chinese poetry (qǐ chéng zhuǎn hé) followed this format:

• Qǐ: “bringing into being”

• Chéng: “understanding”

• Zhuǎn: “changing”

• Hé: “drawing together”

Notice the downplay of conflict and the increase in character development and reflection? Note the absence of a climax?

It was then applied to prose; Korea and Japan adopted this structure, which is very much on display in both Korean and Japanese classical literature. Recent Nobel Prize winner Han Kang’s novels largely follow this 4-act structure as well.

(Nonsequitur! Check out this breakdown of the four-stage narrative as it pertains to BTS).

The 4-act structure begins in a way that many of us in the West might anticipate: major elements are introduced, and each element is developed. However, in act three of Eastern structure, we encounter a twist (this is when the climax occurs in Western structure). This “twist” might be so dramatic it can change the piece's genre.

For instance, in the movie Parasite, the twist is the second family living under the house. What appears to be a straightforward drama about social hierarchy suddenly turns into near-horror. In Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, the twist occurs when Toru Okada climbs into a well and enters a new world dimension. Both of these twists change the tone and context of the story.

While the 4-act structure goes by many names depending on culture and language, I will call what is in Korean, gi seung jeon gyeol, its Japanese name, kishōtenketsu, if only because the Japanese moniker is more widely known.

To aid you, here’s my diagram of gi seung jeon gyeol / kishōtenketsu, or the 4-Act Eastern Storytelling Structure:

1. Ki: Introduction of the main elements — introduction of characters, setting, and all the important parts of the story

2. Shō: Development of the main elements — the story moves forward, events unfold, etc

3. Ten: Pivotal twist/ new element — something new occurs to change the entire tone of the story. Western readers will expect a climactic event at this point, but in the Eastern format, a twist changes the entire direction of the story to the point where it may even cause a genre shift. This twist can also be very circular in its telling.

4. Ketsu: The harmonizing of all elements/conclusion — all the elements make sense again, and the new directions are tied together.

For memoir and personal essay writers, this 4-stage structure might be more helpful than the 5-act structure. Mainly because our experiences usually don’t include a dramatic climax. On the other hand, our experiences and lives usually DO include a twist. Examples of such twists include illness, death, tragedy, accidents, sudden success, sudden failure, all of which have “thrown us off” a previous path. Memoirs often focus on wisdom found from these twists, also known as “harmonizing elements.”

Let’s move on to a living example of how to use this structure, using the same scenes I used to use the 5-Act Western Storytelling Structure. Here is the list of possible scenes (ones that I curated and thought might be relevant to the theme about my father’s mythology) for an essay:

1. My father is dead. My last parent is gone. And I have to take inventory of what must happen to their house and everything within it.

2. My father used to talk to me about philosophy. The first time he tried to teach me about existentialism, he introduced me to “When a tree falls in a forest…” as an example. It did not make sense to me. Over time, I began to understand “When a tree falls in a forest” as a guise for narcissism and the philosophy he relied upon to navigate the aftermath of the Korean War was really a psychic shift toward narcissism and thus his survival.

3. In Teju Cole’s Open City, the narrator, Julius, says, “Each person must, on some level, take himself as the calibration point for normalcy, must assume that the room of his own mind is not, cannot be, entirely opaque to him. Perhaps this is what we mean by sanity: that, whatever our self-admitted eccentricities might be, we are not the villains of our own stories.” Imagine feeling so normal that you think you can calibrate the world to yourself.

4. Beekeeping on the day my father died. Beekeeping is my therapy. A friend was supposed to come over to visit my apiary on the day my father died. She asked if we should cancel. But I told her of all the things I needed to do that day, I needed to visit the bees.

5. I’ve learned a lot from bees, one of which is that they see the world differently. They see the world via UV light; they can literally see UV light. Thus, blue and green can be seen but not red. The UV patterns on petals lead them to nectar, for example. Which led me to wonder about everything. That I have been calibrating everything to human sight. But there is more than one way to perceive. And one perception is not more accurate than the others. “The tree falls in a forest” took on a different meaning for me. It isn’t even about hearing or seeing. Even if you were there, it might not have fallen. Because the tree doesn’t see itself as falling; falling is a concept foreign to the tree.

6. I found a gun in the house while taking inventory of my parents’ home. It was a mythical gun. And it was now real. It was the thing that we were told would always come out if we didn’t behave. It was the threat that loomed large when my father got drunk and angry. We weren’t sure it existed. But we were scared of it.

I may pare them down more. And I may change them. Or add scenes to support the ones I choose to use. But these are what I’ve decided to work with.

Let’s try out my “essay” with the Eastern story structure

As with the last exercise, this is a rough expansion of scenes to check out the “vibe” and narrative arc of the essay within this structure. A try-out of sorts…

INTRODUCTION

I lost my entire family within one year—my mother and then my father. (My brother is a haunted ghost, lost again to his lifelong demons). They’re all gone.

As I think about how my parents no longer exist on this planet, I think about my father teaching me about existentialism.

My father introduced existentialism to me when I was eleven years old. He said, “When a tree falls in a forest, and you aren’t there to hear it, then it didn’t fall. That is existentialism.”

And then he handed me The Plague by Camus. Which I liked very much (even as an eleven-year-old, I had a dark streak). Over several conversations, I came to see the connection between suffering caused by a disease outbreak and trees. Later, I would understand the connection between Camus, trees, and my father.

In the way fathers and sons use sports as a proxy for conflict and relationship building, my father and I used literature similarly.

When he handed me a book, it was his way of telling me who he was and what he wanted me to understand. Because of that, I made sure never to say I hated a book, but rather to ask questions that furthered my understanding.

This sudden turn towards existentialist literature began with Camus and continued with Dostoevsky, as I read them alongside my school assignments like The Chronicles of Narnia.

“I learned existentialism after the Korean War,” he told me, “and it helped me survive. I survived because of me, because of Dasein. Nothing else exists. Just me. Anything that exists is a reflection of me.”

In a way, he was telling me a story about his life. It was in first person, implicitly biased. But as a child, I did not know the harmful extent of biased storytelling; I interpreted his legend as history. As fact.