Research on Western and Japanese story grammars

 In this post, I want to share with you my research that I made to understand how to write a horror book right. As it is my first experience in creative writing I decided first of all to look at the structure that I have to follow in my piece of writing. To do this I want to compare Western and Japanese story grammars.

Firstly, I want to look at the Western model of storytelling. This model was invented by Thorndyke in 1977 and shows and separated into 4 different categories, which you can see below. This scheme is quite simple and fits the style of Western and European writers. The fact is that one of the distinctive features of their writing is the directness of the writing, which can be seen in the scheme below.  The whole plot is built on direct movement to the goal without any large number of sub-items. On the way to the target, the protagonist encounters a number of obstacles that help the reader determine the end result. In the Western structure, there is no such point as the reaction of the hero to any action test, everything is determined by the end result.  What I don’t like about this narrative structure is that little time is given to the character. It also affects other characters because they cannot be fully revealed. Using this structure is difficult to achieve games with emotions because the whole story goes directly.  

Western structure of storytelling

As most of all, I enjoy Japanese horror fiction, I also looked at their structure of writing. I like this structure much more because I think it’s more complete and structured. There are more details in this diagram, so it’s easier to write with all the factors below. A distinctive feature of Japanese story grammar is the small number of goals that need to be achieved in order to arrive at the final result. There are these goals, but on the pedestal is not the solution of problems, but the reaction of heroes to them. The driving force behind this type of narrative is causality, not conflict. What also distinguishes the Japanese from the Western structure is the causality of the end result. In Japanese works, the circumstances surrounding the character, rather than the choices he makes, often play a huge role. 

"Unlike the West, however, it isn’t the protagonist’s goals that drive the story it is the antagonist’s. In these stories, a “bad” character has a goal path that comes into direct conflict with the protagonist, setting events into motion that lead to an ending."(Francisco, 2014) 

Japanese Horror Fiction

By analyzing and comparing these two grammatical structures of the text, I came to the conclusion that I am closer to the Japanese structure. The reason for this is that it is more subdivided, and it can also reveal the character in terms of what decisions he makes. In my book, I want to focus on how to react, point out, and show causality. 

References:

https://www.tofugu.com/japan/japanese-horror-structure/

https://www.jstor.org/stable/20198301?seq=2

https://gocwpub.com/east-vs-west/#:~:text=Plots%20of%20Stories,characters%20that%20depend%20upon%20teamwork.

https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Cognitive-structures-in-comprehension-and-memory-of-Thorndyke/c95133416d1bf9e05d99c8ab52287b9a3353cb48