I use rhythm, which produces a kind of pattern. I also use mirroring (I don't know if that's the correct term, or if there is a term) where I reproduce an earlier scene with slight differences. Even different characters or setting, but the same thing happening, dressed different. For example, in the book I'm currently writing is a scene with the protagonist at the psychiatrist. Later in the story, the protagonist visits a Clairvoyant and the scene is mirrored with the psychiatrist scene. Very similar things are said.
I also use repeated words, sentences, situations, etc. All these things make a pattern of the overall piece. I m not sure if readers notice it, or if it works subliminal.
I sometimes write a whole scene so that the first letter of every sentence, when written out, spells a spell, some mystic intention. But I doubt anyone notices.
Have you read George Saunders on Chekhov’s story ‘The Darling’? It’s one of the chapters in A Swim in the Pond in the Rain. Saunders says ‘The Darling’ is a perfect example of a pattern story, in other words, a story where certain elements repeat but never in exactly the same way. He makes a chart. It’s very interesting.
E. M Forster also talks about pattern in Aspects of the Novel. He says if the formal pattern is too tight it suffocates the work, but he is in favour of rhythm, which he describes as ‘repetition with variation’.
I thought hard about this, trying to negate the more obvious <pattern vs. structure> comparisons found in narrative (and even software programming).
For example, Mitchell's 'Cloud Atlas' has a bold Russian doll structure which helps draw together common threads for its themes and characters. But I think you're aiming here at more of a textual tactile sensation - what a wall feels like when you brush your fingertips over it, rather than examining how it contributes to a building.
So an example might be Evaristo’s punctuation in 'Girl, Woman, Other', where she demarcates sentences with line-breaks without full stops or capitalisation. This layout happens most often when closing a character's scene or chapter. I was initially irritated by it - why so pretentious? - but later realised it helps the reader to receive the story in a more emotional way.
Another aspect I thought of which perhaps deserves equal importance is the spaces between texts. Your stripes only exist because of these intervening blanks. When viewed like a photographic negative, their presence on a page and the resultant patterns they create, by shifting unruly texts into better order, like drill sergeants in a regimental parade, can't be so easily discounted.
Rebecca Watson's novel Little Scratch (its proper title is little scratch without initial caps) uses unusual page layouts to disrupt or otherwise shape the reading experience. Sometimes these are columns of single words, vertical stripes. At other times she separates parts of sentences, making wider columns or other patterns.
I think little scratch is a very good novel though quite a tough read. It deals with trauma. The break up of sentences is effective - made me feel unsettled. Sometimes I wasn't sure whether to read down one column first, as with a newspaper, and then move up to the start of the next, or to leap from the first line of one column to the first line of the neighbouring text.
Considering pattern in story writing, I thought of the Morai, weaving the fates of humans. If their weaving is like that of mortal weavers there will be a warp and a weft, the former held still while the later winds around it. The pattern of the new directions snaking around about and in and out of the solidly established. We might think of the fixed routine of days and seasons contrasted with happenstance and whim.
I also thought of "Use of Weapons" by Iain M. Banks where he has two streams of time, one looking further back in the memory of events and the other progressing the narrative on and onward to the conclusion. The two streams are interwoven so we get a chapter of the forward moving story followed by a chapter of the backward stepping series of memories. A step forward, a step backward, forward, then backward again until we arrive, not only at the end but also at the beginning, at last with all the necessary information to understand what must have happened.
Patterns can be very effective in a text, and typographically useful. As you say, poetry is an obvious example, but I like also to think about patterns in plot and storyline. In essence, most stories and plots consist of pattern: books can be tapestries where threads appear and then sink under the surface to re-emerge at a later time. Also, patchworks can be created. My favourite example of this occurs in Sebastian Faulks's *A Fool's Alphabet*. The novel consists of 26 chapters, where each chapter is a letter of the alphabet. Each letter is also the initial letter of a place significant to the main character: so, A is for Anzio; I is for Ibiza; J is for Jerusalem. The consequence of this pattern, of course, is that the narrative unfolds, not chronologically, but at random, darting around the quilt from square to square. This is confusing at first, but ultimately rewarding as a picture emerges of the main character that feels somehow more authentic, as if the memory of him is being churned up within the structure of the book. And the ending...oh, the ending is simply sublime. I'm amazed it doesn't get talked about more.
Within my own work-in-progress (that novel-in-verse, again) the fact that the book is constructed in tight stanzas - the Onegin Stanza - means that other patterning is possible. In one scene, two characters meet in a well-known Bristol pub on the day of the 2019 general election. Something is going to happen: a rhyme that has significance to both characters, but which won't picked up by the reader until the circle is closed. A church clock is beginning to chime on the tenth line of this stanza, and then, a word appears which only occurs once more, much later on in the book. (The word is "Drambuie" - an ordinary trade name, but unusual enough to stand out, as well as being a demanding feminine rhyme). It's the twelfth hour of the twelfth day of the twelfth month. Yet not only that, but the Drambuie arrives on their table at the close of the twelfth line of the twelfth stanza of the twelfth canto. The next time 12 o'clock strikes for these characters, it will be in another city entirely, when their circumstances are utterly changed and something strange and miraculous is about to occur (it's the twenty-fourth stanza of the twenty-fourth canto, btw). But the Drambuie will be late, delayed, held up in the flow of the narrative as "time spaghettis" through a traffic accident.
I use rhythm, which produces a kind of pattern. I also use mirroring (I don't know if that's the correct term, or if there is a term) where I reproduce an earlier scene with slight differences. Even different characters or setting, but the same thing happening, dressed different. For example, in the book I'm currently writing is a scene with the protagonist at the psychiatrist. Later in the story, the protagonist visits a Clairvoyant and the scene is mirrored with the psychiatrist scene. Very similar things are said.
I also use repeated words, sentences, situations, etc. All these things make a pattern of the overall piece. I m not sure if readers notice it, or if it works subliminal.
I sometimes write a whole scene so that the first letter of every sentence, when written out, spells a spell, some mystic intention. But I doubt anyone notices.
Have you read George Saunders on Chekhov’s story ‘The Darling’? It’s one of the chapters in A Swim in the Pond in the Rain. Saunders says ‘The Darling’ is a perfect example of a pattern story, in other words, a story where certain elements repeat but never in exactly the same way. He makes a chart. It’s very interesting.
Ali Smith's novel(s?) How to be Both might qualify as an exercise in pattern, with two narratives reflecting and highlighting each other.
E. M Forster also talks about pattern in Aspects of the Novel. He says if the formal pattern is too tight it suffocates the work, but he is in favour of rhythm, which he describes as ‘repetition with variation’.
I thought hard about this, trying to negate the more obvious <pattern vs. structure> comparisons found in narrative (and even software programming).
For example, Mitchell's 'Cloud Atlas' has a bold Russian doll structure which helps draw together common threads for its themes and characters. But I think you're aiming here at more of a textual tactile sensation - what a wall feels like when you brush your fingertips over it, rather than examining how it contributes to a building.
So an example might be Evaristo’s punctuation in 'Girl, Woman, Other', where she demarcates sentences with line-breaks without full stops or capitalisation. This layout happens most often when closing a character's scene or chapter. I was initially irritated by it - why so pretentious? - but later realised it helps the reader to receive the story in a more emotional way.
Another aspect I thought of which perhaps deserves equal importance is the spaces between texts. Your stripes only exist because of these intervening blanks. When viewed like a photographic negative, their presence on a page and the resultant patterns they create, by shifting unruly texts into better order, like drill sergeants in a regimental parade, can't be so easily discounted.
Rebecca Watson's novel Little Scratch (its proper title is little scratch without initial caps) uses unusual page layouts to disrupt or otherwise shape the reading experience. Sometimes these are columns of single words, vertical stripes. At other times she separates parts of sentences, making wider columns or other patterns.
I think little scratch is a very good novel though quite a tough read. It deals with trauma. The break up of sentences is effective - made me feel unsettled. Sometimes I wasn't sure whether to read down one column first, as with a newspaper, and then move up to the start of the next, or to leap from the first line of one column to the first line of the neighbouring text.
Considering pattern in story writing, I thought of the Morai, weaving the fates of humans. If their weaving is like that of mortal weavers there will be a warp and a weft, the former held still while the later winds around it. The pattern of the new directions snaking around about and in and out of the solidly established. We might think of the fixed routine of days and seasons contrasted with happenstance and whim.
I also thought of "Use of Weapons" by Iain M. Banks where he has two streams of time, one looking further back in the memory of events and the other progressing the narrative on and onward to the conclusion. The two streams are interwoven so we get a chapter of the forward moving story followed by a chapter of the backward stepping series of memories. A step forward, a step backward, forward, then backward again until we arrive, not only at the end but also at the beginning, at last with all the necessary information to understand what must have happened.
Patterns can be very effective in a text, and typographically useful. As you say, poetry is an obvious example, but I like also to think about patterns in plot and storyline. In essence, most stories and plots consist of pattern: books can be tapestries where threads appear and then sink under the surface to re-emerge at a later time. Also, patchworks can be created. My favourite example of this occurs in Sebastian Faulks's *A Fool's Alphabet*. The novel consists of 26 chapters, where each chapter is a letter of the alphabet. Each letter is also the initial letter of a place significant to the main character: so, A is for Anzio; I is for Ibiza; J is for Jerusalem. The consequence of this pattern, of course, is that the narrative unfolds, not chronologically, but at random, darting around the quilt from square to square. This is confusing at first, but ultimately rewarding as a picture emerges of the main character that feels somehow more authentic, as if the memory of him is being churned up within the structure of the book. And the ending...oh, the ending is simply sublime. I'm amazed it doesn't get talked about more.
Within my own work-in-progress (that novel-in-verse, again) the fact that the book is constructed in tight stanzas - the Onegin Stanza - means that other patterning is possible. In one scene, two characters meet in a well-known Bristol pub on the day of the 2019 general election. Something is going to happen: a rhyme that has significance to both characters, but which won't picked up by the reader until the circle is closed. A church clock is beginning to chime on the tenth line of this stanza, and then, a word appears which only occurs once more, much later on in the book. (The word is "Drambuie" - an ordinary trade name, but unusual enough to stand out, as well as being a demanding feminine rhyme). It's the twelfth hour of the twelfth day of the twelfth month. Yet not only that, but the Drambuie arrives on their table at the close of the twelfth line of the twelfth stanza of the twelfth canto. The next time 12 o'clock strikes for these characters, it will be in another city entirely, when their circumstances are utterly changed and something strange and miraculous is about to occur (it's the twenty-fourth stanza of the twenty-fourth canto, btw). But the Drambuie will be late, delayed, held up in the flow of the narrative as "time spaghettis" through a traffic accident.