Pattern and Disruption: A Cross-Genre Writing Workshop

Welcome to today's workshop! Last time we met, we explored the WOARO structure and try/fail cycles as foundational elements of scene development.

Today, we'll build on those concepts by examining pattern and disruption frameworks that can strengthen writing across multiple genres from short fiction to poetry, memoir, and flash fiction.

I've also been developing material on AI tools for writers. If there's interest, we can discuss that topic in a future session or briefly touch on it today.

Table of Contents

1. Previous Concepts Reference
2. My Journey with Pattern/Disruption (15 min)
3. The Pattern and Disruption Framework (20 min)
4. Keith Johnstone's Insights on Storytelling (20-25 min)
5. The Neuroscience of Pattern and Disruption (15 min)
6. Multi-Genre Applications (20 min)
7. Craft Applications Beyond Plot (15-20 min)
8. Open Discussion (20-30 min)
9. Applying Pattern/Disruption to Specific Writing Elements
10. Discussion Questions
11. Additional Resources

Previous Concepts Reference

WOARO Structure

• Want: What the character desires
• Obstacle: What stands in their way
• Action: What they do about it
• Response: How the world/others react
• Outcome: The result of their actions

Try/Fail Cycles

Characters encounter try/fail cycles that build tension:

• The Problem: Character faces a dramatic conflict they must resolve
• Try/Fail Cycles: Character attempts different actions but continually fails:
  • Yes/But - Yes, their action succeeds, but a new problem emerges
  • No/And - No, their action doesn't succeed, and a further complication occurs
• Try/Success Cycle (Resolution): Eventually, the character succeeds:
  • Yes/And - Yes, their action succeeds, and an additional positive thing happens
  • No/But - No, they don't completely succeed, but something occurs to move forward

Example:

1. Character investigates a murder
2. But falls into a hole (fail)
3. Doesn't get out of the hole and now a tornado approaches (fail)
4. Survives the tornado (success)
5. And gets out of the hole (success)
6. Doesn't solve the murder but finds a crucial clue (success)

1. My Journey with Pattern/Disruption (15 mins)

• Starting point: Observing students rushing to conflict without establishing characters
• Personal discovery: My own struggles with writing beginnings vs. enjoying disruptions
• Collaborative insight: Working with Angie - her strength in establishing patterns, my strength in disruption
• Return to theory: Revisiting Johnstone's ideas about patterns and routines

2. The Pattern and Disruption Framework (20 min)

Definition

Pattern and disruption is a fundamental storytelling mechanism where established rhythms, expectations, or states are strategically broken to create narrative energy and meaning.

At its core, it's about creating a recognizable pattern for your audience, then deliberately disrupting that pattern to generate interest, tension, or insight.

The Elements of the Framework

Pattern: The established rhythm or state that creates audience expectations

• Establishes the baseline against which change becomes meaningful
• Can be the "ordinary world" like in scriptwriting - showing a character's normal life
• Often serves as the "calm before the storm" or a moment of respite (the campfire scene before battle)
• Not limited to tranquility - can be a consistent state of chaos, tension, or action
• Functions at multiple levels: character behavior, narrative structure, sentence rhythm, imagery systems
• Requires enough time to be recognized (could be a paragraph or several chapters depending on scope)

The Relativity of Patterns

Importantly, what constitutes a "pattern" or "normal state" varies dramatically between characters and contexts:

• A seasoned ER doctor's "normal" involves constant emergencies (what would be disruption for others)
• A pediatrician's "normal" involves routine visits and minor concerns
• When the pediatrician experiences what the ER doctor considers routine, it might be disruptive
• When the ER doctor experiences what the pediatrician considers challenging, it might feel manageable

This relativity creates opportunities for character development, tension between characters, and complex narrative dynamics.

Disruption: The meaningful break in established pattern that drives story forward

• Interrupts the expected flow, forcing characters and readers to recalibrate
• Can be subtle (a shift in tone) or dramatic (a major plot event)
• Might introduce calm into chaos or chaos into calm - works both ways
• Creates the "turn" that makes audiences lean in
• Most powerful when it occurs after pattern is firmly established
• Generates emotional response in readers (surprise, tension, curiosity, concern)

The Cycle of Opening and Closing

The relationship between pattern and disruption creates a fundamental rhythm in storytelling:

Disruption Opens Story

• Creates possibilities and introduces uncertainty
• Generates energy and forward momentum
• Raises questions and creates tension
• Demands a response from characters
• Invites readers to lean in and engage

Pattern Closes Story

• Provides stability and creates rhythm
• Offers moments of rest and reflection
• Establishes new baseline after disruption
• Creates familiar territory for characters and readers
• Allows cognitive and emotional processing

The Ongoing Cycle
After a disruption, characters seek to find their bearings and establish a new baseline. This new baseline becomes its own pattern, which may eventually need disruption to maintain narrative energy.

This process repeats throughout a story, creating a rhythm of opening and closing that propels the narrative forward while allowing moments of stability.

Genre Considerations

The frequency, magnitude, and nature of the pattern/disruption cycle varies significantly by genre:

• Commercial Fiction: Frequent, clear disruptions with relatively quick pattern re-establishment (creates page-turning quality)
• Literary Fiction: More subtle disruptions, often internal, with complex pattern evolution
• Poetry: Disruptions at the level of language, image, or expectation, often within compressed space
• Memoir: Disruptions to the narrator's understanding of self or world, with reflection forming new patterns
• Flash Fiction: Often centers on a single crucial disruption with minimal pattern establishment

Writers can adjust this cycle to suit their specific genre and intentions, creating the appropriate rhythm for their work.

Why This Matters to Writers

The pattern/disruption framework helps writers:

1. Create genuine engagement - Readers recognize patterns and develop expectations, which creates the opportunity for meaningful disruption
2. Build satisfying character arcs - Characters reveal themselves through how they establish patterns and respond to disruptions
3. Manage pacing effectively - The rhythm between pattern and disruption directly controls narrative energy
4. Develop multi-layered work - This framework applies at every level from sentence structure to overall narrative

While Keith Johnstone developed these ideas for improvisation, this framework expands them into a comprehensive approach to writing that works across all genres.

3. Keith Johnstone's Insights on Storytelling (20-25 mins)

Context and Background

Keith Johnstone developed his storytelling framework primarily for improvisational theater, but his insights apply powerfully to all narrative creation, including writing. His work centers on freeing creativity through specific techniques that help storytellers bypass their internal censors and generate compelling narratives spontaneously.

Core Storytelling Principles

"Playwriting—interruption"
Johnstone's fundamental insight is that storytelling isn't about inventing stories from nothing, but about establishing patterns (routines) and then strategically breaking them.

Key quotes to reference:

• "He shouldn't really think of making stories, but of interrupting routines"
• "Describe a routine and then interrupt it"
• "As a story progresses it begins to establish other routines and these in their turn have to be broken"
• "It doesn't matter how stupidly you interrupt a routine, you will be automatically creating a narrative, and people will listen"

The Backwards-Walking Storyteller
Johnstone describes "the improviser has to be a man walking backwards. He sees where he has been, but he pays no attention to the future."

This metaphor captures his belief that creators should focus on what they've already established rather than planning too far ahead. This seemingly counterintuitive approach actually helps storytellers create more organic, surprising narratives.

Reincorporation
Perhaps Johnstone's most practical technique is reincorporation - deliberately calling back to earlier elements that appeared in the story:

"What matters to me is the ease with which I 'free-associate' and the skill with which I reincorporate."

Reincorporation creates connections that weren't initially planned, turning accidental elements into intentional patterns. This technique transforms random creative choices into coherent stories.

Practical Rules for Storytellers

Johnstone offers three simple but powerful rules:

1. Interrupt the routine — Find the pattern and break it in an interesting way
2. Keep the action on stage — Don't get diverted into discussing events that happened elsewhere or at some other time
3. Don't cancel the story — Avoid undermining your own creative choices or sabotaging your narrative potential

Distraction Techniques

Johnstone developed specific methods for bypassing the internal censor:

• Lists and automatic writing
• Character creation exercises
• Focusing on the ordinary rather than trying to be "original"
• Embracing rather than rejecting the first idea that comes to mind

Breaking Story Routines

Johnstone extends his concept beyond characters' routines to the storytelling conventions themselves. He notes that stories can become predictable routines that need disruption:

"Sometimes stories themselves become so predictable that they become routines."

When a story form becomes too familiar (like "princess kisses frog"), the most engaging choice is to disrupt that larger pattern ("killing the virgin and deflowering the dragon is more likely to hold the audience's attention").

Example: Routine and Interruption

A clear example from Johnstone:
Two sailors transporting a prisoner across America (the routine) decide to give him a good time (the interruption). This leads to a compelling narrative because the established pattern has been broken in an interesting way.

Workshop Application

Consider how Johnstone's techniques can be applied in your writing across genres:

• Identify routines in your character's lives
• Look for opportunities to interrupt those routines in surprising ways
• Practice reincorporating elements from earlier in your work
• Notice when you're canceling your own creative choices and resist the urge

4. The Neuroscience of Pattern and Disruption (15 mins)

The pattern and disruption framework isn't merely a literary device—it's deeply rooted in how our brains are wired to perceive and process the world. Understanding this neurological basis helps explain why this framework is so universally effective across all storytelling forms.

The Brain as a Control System

At its most fundamental level, the human brain evolved for one primary purpose: control. As storytelling researcher Will Storr explains, "Ultimately, the mission of the brain is this: control. Brains have to perceive the physical environment and the people that surround it in order to control them."

This neurological drive for control explains why patterns are so essential to both our real lives and our storytelling. Patterns represent:

• Predictability
• Safety
• Understanding
• Mastery of environment

Establishing patterns in storytelling creates a sense of stability that mirrors how our brains constantly seek to establish control over our environment.

Why Disruption Seizes Attention

Our brains evolved as remarkably sensitive detection systems for unexpected change. As Storr notes, "Unexpected change is a portal through which danger arrives." This explains why:

• Our attention immediately locks onto anything that breaks an established pattern
• Our faces themselves are "machines formed by millions of years of evolution for the detection of change"
• We instinctively ask "What's happening?" when confronted with disruption

When storytellers create disruptions in established patterns, they're leveraging this fundamental neural mechanism. We're literally built to pay attention to disruption.

The Opening of Possibility

Disruption in storytelling works because it mirrors how we process unexpected change in real life:

1. Pattern disruption triggers immediate alertness
2. The brain begins rapidly generating questions and possibilities
3. We feel compelled to seek resolution and understanding

This neural process explains why effective story openings often present immediate disruptions. Examples like "That Spot! He hasn't eaten his supper. Where can he be?" (Eric Hill) or "When I wake up, the other side of the bed is cold" (Suzanne Collins) work because they immediately signal pattern disruption that demands attention.

Character Flaws as Control System Errors

Understanding storytelling through neuroscience also illuminates why character development is often centered around flawed understanding:

• Characters begin with distorted models of reality (their established pattern)
• These flawed models create conflict when they collide with reality
• Growth occurs when disruptions force recalibration of these models

As Storr explains, "Our flaws—especially the mistakes we make about the human world and how to live successfully within it—are not simply ideas... they're embedded in the physical structure of our brains."

This perspective reveals why the pattern/disruption cycle in storytelling often correlates with character growth—each disruption challenges a character's flawed model of reality, potentially leading to new, more adaptive patterns.

Practical Application

This neurological understanding offers several practical insights for writers:

1. Attention Capture: The faster you disrupt an established pattern, the more quickly you'll seize reader attention
2. Character Development: Create characters with specific flaws in how they understand and attempt to control their world
3. Emotional Investment: Readers invest emotionally when they recognize a character struggling with control systems similar to their own
4. Resolution Satisfaction: The satisfaction of story resolution comes from the neurological relief of establishing new, more functional patterns of control

By understanding the neuroscience behind pattern and disruption, writers can craft stories that work with—rather than against—the fundamental mechanisms of human cognition.

5. Multi-Genre Applications (20 mins)

• Commercial fiction: Frequent pattern establishment and disruption
  • Quick cycles maintain reader engagement
  • Balance between pattern and disruption creates rhythm
• Literary fiction: Often plays with pattern expectations
  • Example: Infinite Jest - intentionally avoiding expected disruptions
  • Creating tension through delayed payoffs
• Humor & Comedy: Rule of three (setup, pattern establishment, pattern break)
• Poetry: Rhythm (pattern) and dissonance (disruption)
• Film example: Anora - establishing her world → disruption with new client → pattern with client → marriage disruption → pattern in marriage → disruption by goons
• Fantasy: Book of Doors - establishing a life with magical book, then disruption
• Music: Creating rhythm patterns and breaking them with variations

6. Craft Applications Beyond Plot (15-20 mins)

• Paragraph structure: Pattern/disruption at sentence level
• Sentence variety:
  • Editor Heather's insights on sentence structure variation
  • Too much repetition becomes monotonous
  • Intentional pattern breaks create emphasis
• Language patterns:
  • Micro level: Word choice, sentence length
  • Macro level: Scene structure, chapter organization
• Tension management:
  • "How far can you stretch a pattern before breaking it?"
  • Every reader has different tolerance for pattern duration
  • Trust your instincts on pattern/disruption timing

7. Open Discussion (20-30 mins)

• How participants see patterns and disruptions in their own genres
• Challenges in establishing meaningful patterns before disruption
• Sharing examples across different forms (poetry, fiction, memoir)

Applying Pattern/Disruption to Specific Writing Elements

Scene Development

Pattern/Disruption Cycle in scenes:

• Character establishes or maintains balance/order (pattern)
• Character encounters challenges to that order (disruption)
• Disruptions can be personal, self-inflicted, internal,

2. Freewriting and Reintegration ("Open story, close story")

Johnstone's approach to creating organic structure:

• Open phase:
  • Write freely without planning
  • Allow unexpected elements to emerge
  • Don't worry about connections or coherence
  • Opening your writing continues to create dissonance, disruption
• Close phase:
  • Identify emerging patterns retrospectively
  • Reintegration: Deliberately call back to earlier elements
  • Create connections that were not initially planned
  • Find "gifts" in the early writing that can be developed
  • Turn accidents into intentional patterns
  • Close phase releases tension, returns to baseline.

Workshop Exercise:

1. Write a short piece (1 page) without planning, allowing unexpected elements
2. Identify 3 "gifts" or interesting elements that emerged unplanned
3. Write a closing that deliberately reintegrates these elements

Literary Devices

Many literary devices function through pattern/disruption:

• Repetition devices create patterns:
  • Anaphora (repeated beginning phrases)
  • Motifs and recurring images
  • Refrains in poetry
• Disruption devices break patterns:
  • Irony
  • Juxtaposition
  • Subversion of expectations
  • Sudden shifts in tone

Workshop Exercise: Select a literary device that creates pattern and one that creates disruption. Apply both to a paragraph of your writing.

Pacing

Pacing is fundamentally about the rhythm between pattern and disruption:

• Fast pace: Frequent disruptions to established patterns
• Slow pace: Extended patterns with delayed disruptions
• Tension building: Stretching a pattern to increase anticipation of disruption
• Release: Major disruption followed by establishing new pattern

Workshop Exercise: Identify a scene where pacing feels off. Analyze whether you need to:

1. Establish the pattern more clearly
2. Introduce disruption sooner/later
3. Adjust the magnitude of the disruption

Discussion Questions

1. How long should a pattern be established before disrupting it?
2. Can you overuse pattern/disruption, making it feel formulaic?
3. How does this framework apply specifically to poetry/flash fiction?
4. What's the difference between a disruption and simply adding conflict?
5. Can you give examples of contemporary works that use pattern/disruption effectively?
6. How do you balance between too many disruptions and too few?
7. How does this relate to the WOARO structure mentioned previously?
8. Can you discuss pattern/disruption at the line level for poetry and prose?
9. How do you identify unintentional patterns in your own writing that might benefit from disruption?
10. Are there genres where pattern/disruption is particularly effective or less effective?
11. How can this framework help when we're stuck in our writing?
12. What's the difference between a meaningful disruption and just being random?

Additional Resources

• Keith Johnstone, Impro
• Mary Robinette Kowal talk - https://youtu.be/blehVIDyuXk
• Jerry Cleaver, Immediate Fiction
• Will Storr, The Science of Storytelling

Feel free to reach out with questions or for further discussion: me@davidgane.com