The Spiral Story: Writing Toward the Center
Uh Oh, She's Spiraling--Better Call Fibonacci
6/2/2026
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(This is part 3 in Nina’s Story Structure series)
The Spiral Story: Writing Toward the Center
First I wrote about funnel stories, narratives that narrow toward a single event horizon because I felt like I was headed toward a black hole that week. Then I wrote about field stories, narratives that expand outward into systems, communities, and ecosystems of meaning because I’d been thinking about the politics on my little island.
This time I’m spiraling. Just thinking about one thing over and over. I’m in a Fibonacci Sequence.
Any of you who are into visual art or math, know about Fibonacci’s golden ratio. Any of you who have obsessed over something have felt the golden ratio. Any of you who have been in nature, have seen the golden ratio.
The rule is simple: to get the next number in the line, you add the last two numbers together. 0 + 1 = 1, 1 + 1 = 2, 1 + 2 = 3, 2 + 3 = 5, 3 + 5 = 8 … and so on, forming the shape of a nautilus shell.
When I am mentally spiraling, I call it doing the stations of the cross or I say, “I’m going around the horn again.”
Spiral stories return to the same focus, fear, memory, or question repeatedly, with each pass bringing the reader closer to something difficult to name directly.
Spiral stories move inward (or outward, but that’s another craft essay)
Repetition alone only creates circles. A spiral creates increasing compression. Each recurrence changes the emotional charge of what came before.
The reader feels pulled inward toward a center.
Here, I’m going to try to write a thirteen part story using the Fibonacci sequence. 13, 8, 5, 3, 2, 1, 0 where I return to the central image at those intervals.
At dawn, I marked the day on the wall and looked out our small window. Some new shape on the horizon.
I chased mirages so often. If a bird flew by, I believed it was a secret message
But, what if it wasn’t?
Silly fool to dream.
Almar slept.
At noon, I pulled out the binoculars from under my bedroll. People. They walked like men. Soldiers.
I whispered to Almar. I gave her my eyes.
We ate our daily meal in silence.
At dusk there was one man closer than all the rest. Crawling on his belly like a snake. One snake with many behind him.
Almar tried to take the lenses. No. I wrenched them back.
And, I saw his eyes in the darkness. Eyes like mine, but instead of the shallow flicker of despair, there was a steady glow of victory.
So stunning was this flash, I held my breath until I heard his hissing whisper beneath my window.
“Sister, I have come.”
My goodness that was fun. You should totally try it. Start at 21 or 34. It’s actually a gorgeous way to build a story—where the structure dictates exactly what goes where.
So What Is the Center?
The center of a spiral story is often not plot.
It is usually something psychological:
a wound
an obsession
a fragmented identity
a contradiction
an unbearable truth
a self the character cannot fully integrate
In my little story it was hope for being rescued mixed with fear of it all being her imagination.
This is where I keep finding myself thinking about structural dissociation.
In my earlier essay, “I’m Totally Normal and Fully Integrated,” I discussed how trauma can create fractured or compartmentalized selves. Different emotional states, memories, desires, and identities become separated in order to survive.
What fascinates me is how often literature formally mirrors this exact structure.
Certain narratives cannot function linearly because the self is not functioning linearly.
Instead the story circles.
The narrative approaches the central fracture indirectly, repeatedly, recursively.
The character cannot walk directly toward the truth because psychologically, that would be annihilating.
So the story spirals toward it instead.
Murakami and the Spiral of Identity
This is one reason Haruki Murakami’s work feels so hypnotic to me.
Murakami’s novels often appear dreamlike or meandering on first read, but structurally they are incredibly disciplined spirals.
His narrators repeatedly circle:
missing women
alternate selves
wells
shadow worlds
memory gaps
doubled realities
invisible psychic partitions
In Kafka on the Shore, identity refracts and repeats with symbolic doubles. In The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, the protagonist spirals through increasingly surreal recursions around absence, violence, and psychic fragmentation. In The City and Its Uncertain Walls, the entire architecture of the novel feels organized around partitioned selves and inaccessible emotional centers.
They circle the impossibility of stable identity itself.
Each lap around deepens the fracture forcing the reader to recognize that there is no “solution.”
Ruth Ozeki and Recursive Selves
I see a similar movement in Ruth Ozeki, though her spirals tend to feel more connective and compassionate.
In A Tale for the Time Being, the narrative repeatedly circles questions of time, authorship, consciousness, suicide, memory, and interconnection.
The novel loops across diaries, timelines, quantum possibility, and narrative selves.
But beneath all of this is a central question:
How does a person remain a coherent self while containing incompatible realities?
Again, the story doesn’t answer the question directly.
It circles it.
Spiral Stories in Flash Fiction
Flash fiction is uniquely suited to spiral structures because flash depends less on exhaustive explanation and more on resonance.
A spiral flash piece often introduces an image, returns to it, then returns again with altered emotional meaning like I did in my little example above.
The story grows denser rather than larger.
This is why certain flash stories feel disproportionately massive despite their word count.
The compression creates gravity.
You can see this in works like:
“Girl” by Jamaica Kincaid
“Sticks” by George Saunders
“The Husband Stitch” by Carmen Maria Machado
Each repeatedly circles a central emotional terror:
social identity,
grief,
female bodily autonomy.
They feel inevitable because the spiral has been tightening the entire time.
How Do Writers Identify the Center?
Ask yourself:
What keeps returning?
What echoes compulsively?
And perhaps more importantly:
What can the narrator not look at directly?
That is often the center.
The spiral story is built from recursive avoidance.
The narrative circles the thing/concept/memory because approaching it head-on would destroy the illusion of coherence we work so hard to maintain.
The Spiral and the Self
I increasingly suspect that spiral stories resonate so deeply because consciousness itself may be spiral-shaped.
LOL. I just said that. Even though I’m not a scientist, or as a philosopher, or a psychiatrist, or a Buddhist.
I’m just a reader and a writer.
But I see that we revisit our old selves repeatedly:
as parents,
as lovers,
as aging bodies,
as children,
as strangers to ourselves.
We do not heal linearly.
We do not remember linearly.
We do not become ourselves linearly.
We spiral toward integration.
Or toward collapse.
Sometimes we can’t tell the difference until the final page.
Ciao my lovely readers. I adore you. -n
What are your thoughts?
Okay, the fun part…
Writing Prompt: Go all Fibonacci.
Pick a character
Give them a problem they don’t want to deal with.
Let that problem/hope surface mirroring the Fibonacci sequence like I did up there ^^ on lines 34, 21, 23, 8, 5, 3, 2, 1, 0
On any line or grouping that isn’t your central image, make them actively avoid or deny or look away from what appears on the Fibonacci lines.
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