In this episode, I chat with author Henry Lien about his new book, Spring, Summer, Asteroid, Bird, which is all about 4 Act Eastern storytelling, the Japanese term for which is Kishōtenketsu. We discuss the book, East vs. West storytelling, and especially how Eastern storytelling can be a vital tool for solarpunk stories.
Text Transcript:
Susan Kaye Quinn
Hello friends! Welcome to Bright Green Futures, Episode 36: Solarpunk and 4 Act Eastern Storytelling with Author Henry Lien.
I’m your host, Susan Kaye Quinn, and we’re here to lift up stories about a more sustainable and just world and talk about the struggle to get there.
Today, we have Henry Lien as our guest to talk about 4 Act Eastern Storytelling, which is the subject of his new book, Spring, Summer, Asteroid, Bird.
Henry Lien is a Nebula-nominated speculative fiction author who writes both fiction and nonfiction, middle grade, short stories, and even songs. He’s also a teacher of writing at places like UCLA and Clarion West. He’s also worked as an attorney and a fine art dealer. He was born in Taiwan, but now resides in Hollywood. It’s hard to do a proper job with Henry’s wide-ranging resume, but I am super excited to have him here on the pod. Henry, welcome to the show!
Henry Lien
Thank you so much. I’m so glad to be here and I am so glad you are doing this work to uplift these incredibly relevant, important stories. Thank you for existing.
Susan Kaye Quinn
Thank you! And thank you for, you know, helping me do this work, which we’re going to dive into in the podcast about how super relevant this structure of storytelling is to solarpunk, hopeful climate fiction, the kind of work that we’re always talking about here on the pod. But let’s start with the song. You wrote a song for the book, which is super fun. And the song itself explains the title, which I’m sure people are like Spring, Summer, Asteroid, Bird, what in the world is that? It is the perfect title, which you will find only when you read the book. But you created a story for the book and that is represented in the song. So we’ll get to the structure of 4-Act storytelling in a minute, but I would love to hear what inspired you to put this example of a 4-Act story to music.
Henry Lien
Well, I mean, frankly, this is one of my things. I’m a weirdo. I fly my freak flag high and proud. And I always write a song, at least one song for every one of my books, including my nonfiction craft book about story structure. There’s always going to be a song. Let’s face it, that’s me. But I saw in it an opportunity to do something that was recursive. So I don’t want to cannibalize the lecture—not the lecture, the discussion—too much, but the book is about structure from non-Western storytelling, specifically the four act structure, and also nonlinear and circular structures. And I thought, well, how about doing rather than telling?
How about writing a book about this subject that also has a story contained within it that demonstrates both of those structures, both the four act structure and the circular and nested structure. And then how about encapsulating that story into a song that works in the four act structure. It was an attempt to demonstrate exactly what I’m talking about. Each of those things…. the book itself is told in these structures. The story is told in these structures. The song is told in these structures and becomes recursive. It’s nested dolls. It’s fractal in nature. And I think my intent was to show how these ideas can be implemented in the world around us, in every possible pore of the world. They can come out. That’s what I wanted to do by going from a nonfiction craft book, an academic book, you know, published by WW Norton, the creator of that brick that we call the Norton anthology of English literature. This is a textbook. How can we have a really weird, fun short story about dinosaurs in this textbook and how can we make a song about it? By spanning these three mediums, I’m hoping to support the idea that these structures are everywhere if we choose to look for them.
And this is so much longer than you asked for. I am guilty for that. Please, next question.
Susan Kaye Quinn
No, it is perfect and brilliant, because it is actually a little preview, a little encapsulation of what I hope we will talk about all hour—about how nesting and recursive storytelling come back at it again and again in different forms and different viewpoints—is really one of the more powerful parts of the book.
So, just for the audience, you need to stick around to the end because we will be playing Henry’s song at the end of the show (if you’re reading the transcript, you can find the song here on Henry’s website). So look for that when we wrap up.
But what Henry just described, it gives you an idea of the flavor of the book. Yeah, this is not a dry tome. It is funny. It is brief. It is a thin little book, but it’s powerfully packed with all kinds of stuff that just is super… like I highlighted the heck out of this thing. But you do that same thing in the book, where you keep coming back with different examples in different ways and different viewpoints. And so it is very much an embodiment of the concept.
And because you do that, because you are a wonderful teacher, that is the way that people can very deeply grasp, I think, this concept… and then go out and do something with it, which is what I did, actually. I went out immediately and wrote a short story with it—
Henry Lien
Yay!
Susan Kaye Quinn
—and now I’m working on it with my novel—
Henry Lien
Yay!
Susan Kaye Quinn
—and it’s been fantastic, fantastic just at the right time.
I have some very like nerdy questions for you, as we do in this show, we go deep in this show, because we are all writers or fans or people who want to understand this new thing that we’re trying to do and we have to go deep to really get into it.
But let’s start at the top level with the book, the four act Eastern storytelling structure. Can you give us an idea of like, what is that? How does it work? And I think you said you wanted to give an example of it, which is very much in keeping with what we’re doing here.
Henry Lien
Yes. Okay. So hold on to something. I’m going to go fairly quickly or… these ideas are so fundamentally different, like on a molecular level. This is going to seem like it’s going quickly because it’s a new idea, but I will try to be as clear as I can. Because I am speaking to writers, I’m assuming most people will know about the three act structure, the Western Three Act structure. There is an entirely different storytelling structure that arises from East Asia, and it just violates so many of the core tenets of the Three Act structure in a way that seems like it’s impossible to make a satisfying story from.
So let’s unpack that with an example. Let’s go step by step, act by act. In the four act structure, which is often known in the West by its Japanese name, Kishōtenketsu, there are four acts.
In the first act, you introduce the main elements or at least what seemed to be the main elements. Okay, so right now we are still running on a parallel track with the three act structure. You are supposed to introduce what you promise to be the main elements, what you promise the story is going to be about, in the first act. Okay, so we start off in the same place.
In the East Asian 4-Act structure, the second act you just develop those same elements, no rush, no escalation necessarily. You don’t have to have rising tension and conflict and complications. So that second act is just using the same elements as the first act, but no particular hurry to make this more involved, more complicated, more tense, more suspenseful.
So we have already diverged. We have already hit the fork in the road. Meanwhile, your buddies on the three act train, they’re going up that roller coaster ramp because they have to ramp up towards a climax. No, we’re still on the ground. We’re just going by looking at the same elements. Oh, there’s the cow, there’s the pasture. It’s the same elements. No particularly high ramp.
Okay, so we say goodbye at this point to the three Act structure we are completely disaligned now.
In the four act structure, the third act introduces an entirely new element. Okay, we’re dropping an entirely new main element into the story. I’m talking like a new main character, a new genre, a new main problem in the third act after the halfway point of the story.
And then the fourth act is what I call harmonizing. And by harmonizing, I don’t necessarily mean a peaceful resolution of whatever conflict might exist in the story. By harmonizing, I mean a mapping out of the previously unseen, invisible relationships among all the elements, including the surprise element that came so late in the story. What do they have to do with each other?
And that on paper in the abstract might sound like a recipe for a terrible story or not even a story.
Let me give you an elegant example of this. This is a four line poem by the Edo period poet San'yō Rai and each of the four lines of the poem correspond perfectly with each of the four acts of the four act structure.
This poem is called The Daughters of Itoya.
Line One, Act One
The daughters of Itoya, in the Honmachi of Osaka.
Okay, so we are laying out the elements there. The multiple daughters, we don’t know how many yet, but more than one daughter, and they are in Osaka. So we get information, bare information about who this is and where this is taking place. We also understand to some extent what genre this is. Since we’re focusing on the daughters, it’s going to be a domestic family story, a sibling story, and for modern readers, a historical story, perhaps.
Second Line, Second Act
The elder daughter is sixteen and the younger one is fourteen.
Okay, once again, same elements, two daughters, domestic story, quiet. We are getting a little bit more relational information, based on their age and no mention of parents. So we can deduce that they are probably orphans. And that means that the elder daughter is adopting a parental role, especially because in this historical period, 16 years old is probably adulthood, but her younger sister is only two years apart. So that means that they probably grew up playing together. Or even though one daughter is the parent in this relationship, they have a close relationship as peers, as sisters, as well as parental figure and child. Okay, so we’re getting more information about the same elements, but it’s still such a gradual development. And we are still comfortably, recognizably in the genre of quiet domestic sibling story.
Third Line, Third Act
Throughout history, daimyō killed the enemy with bows and arrows.
(Daimyō are like warlords)
Where is this coming from? What does this have to do with anything? But we’re injecting into the story, these new elements of warlords killing enemies, bows, arrows, which seems to have nothing to do with the daughters of Itoya.
And then line four, act four is the harmonizing, showing the relationships.
Line Four, Act Four
The daughters of Itoya kill with their eyes.
Susan Kaye Quinn
So good.
Henry Lien
Yeah, and it’s showing that, the daughters of Itoya, the elements that came originally in the story do have a relationship with this new element of war and killing and enemies and bows and arrows that arrived so late in the story. And the relationship is that the daughters of Itoya are able to meet or defeat this new unwelcome surprise element. There is a relationship there. So this is an example of the four act story and I could go on for hours about other features of it.
It’s radically different, but there are some great upsides to it.
Susan Kaye Quinn
I love that. Yes, you could go on, you could even write a book about this, perhaps!
Henry Lien
Hahaha
Susan Kaye Quinn
Which you did, and everyone needs to absolutely run out and get and read. But the thing I love about that poem as an example is you know immediately, as soon as the third act comes in, that those two, those things are related somehow, but you still are in suspense as to like what, but how. And then when you get to the harmonization, you still have, and this is something you talk about in the book as well, this open-endedness of like, but do they literally kill with their eyes? Or is it like, is this a metaphor or what are we working with here? And it leaves it hanging and it engages the reader in a way that you would be very difficult to do otherwise with a different, know, for example, like you were saying, the Western storytelling structure.
If you kept trying to do this story, and you have examples about this in the book of like comparing East and West, trying to tell that story in a way that is as compelling, as surprising and as hanging, leaving hanging would be difficult. Not impossible, but it the structure helps you to do that kind of story really well.
Henry Lien
I could go on about some beautiful things you brought up there, but let’s see if I can work them in organically instead of digging down a rabbit hole.
Susan Kaye Quinn
Well, we are going to be nested and in the rabbit hole for sure. So we’re going to just keep doing that and we will do what we can here.
But let me let me dive into my first question, because it does kind of get into that piece. So you’ve given us the idea of how the third act is the big twist, the big surprise, and that changes what you can do with the story.
So for me, with my storytelling so far, I mentioned that I experimented with using it in a short story, which I think worked really well for what I was trying to do. And now I’m trying to incorporate it into my novel, which is a solarpunk novel. And I hope we can get into it a little bit later about why this form is so good for solarpunk storytelling. But what I found, as I started to write those stories, I found that I really started with that third act. I was like, okay, I need to figure out the big twist before I can write the things that lead up to it and the harmonization that comes after it. And that just sort of like made sense in my brain as to how to write this kind of story. Whereas with Western storytelling, which is more—I wouldn’t say that’s all of what I’ve done, but most of what I’ve done—is more linear. And so I would start out with an idea of what the story is and who the characters are. And then I would like work on climbing up that hill. And just as a writer, as an approach, it was a more linear type of style.
So I think this Kishōtenketsu structure is more like a “write from the middle” approach for me, more a story that has a big hinge point at the middle. You might start with defining that and then back into it.
So my question is like, how do you use this when in your writing? Do you come up with a third act first or do you have a different approach?
Henry Lien
I am actually not a good person to ask this question of because I am a sucker for a good twist. I’m 55 years old, so I’ve read a fair number of stories. And on top of that, I’m a writing instructor. So I read hundreds of stories every year. And that means I am very hard to surprise. And that means when somebody is able to surprise me, it’s a gift from heaven.
For that reason, I myself am just stupid in love with surprises in stories.
The other reason is I think that surprises in stories show, reveal something about yourself, reveal something about the characters. How we respond to the unexpected can be illuminating. And for those reasons, the surprise, the hinge point, the reveal are always going to be where I start a story. Almost all of my books have at least one twist. I work very hard on that because my life has been defined by the whiplash left turns and U-turns that it has taken and how I respond to them with grace or with messiness has been really important to me. So for that reason, I always approach my experiments in the four act structure with the third act twist.
I also think that for any writers who are inculcated in the three act structure and want to do a remodel or foundational conversion to the four act structure, the easiest way is to do exactly what we’re talking about. Okay, you’ve got your three act structure, you lay out your main elements in act one: protagonist, antagonist, main problem or issue, etcetera, the easiest way to do the conversion to a four act structure is to just hold one of them back and treat its introduction as a twist. So we arrive exactly at the same place that I normally deliberately start.
So the answer to your question is yes, I always start with the third act new element, the hinge, the fulcrum on which everything falls into two categories: the before-times and the after-times, which I think is actually relevant to the focus of this particular podcast of solarpunk and how we respond to the threat of great crises.
Susan Kaye Quinn
Well, we constantly have plot twists. Like I just opened up the morning news and there’s a plot twist of like, I guess we’re doing this now.
I love that insight that that’s where you start is the before-times and the after-times. Because that’s a concept that resonates with a lot of people and they might pinpoint that to a different time—it’s the pandemic or it’s some political event or whatever—that was their personal before time. But that’s a feeling that… not only do we have that, but we still haven’t adjusted to the after-times, right?
Henry Lien
Yeah, I still haven’t wrapped my mind around 9/11, 24 years later. I mean, there are these great events that arrive in our story. And I hate to break it to you, listeners, but the universe is going to throw an asteroid in your plans, and how you respond to it, whether it breaks you or whether you respond to with grace and observation and wisdom, that’s the real story of your life.
So I think that that’s why… these great cataclysmic events that happened to our planet, our country, our society. They are the most interesting story that we can look at, on a macro scale and a micro scale, how we respond to the unexpected surprise. I will be unpacking that theme for the rest of my life.
Susan Kaye Quinn
Absolutely, and I think we all need more stories about that because the common refrain I hear a lot from people—not just solarpunk writers, but people in general—is like, what do I even do with this? How do I respond? We don’t have stories, we don’t have models of like… well, this character in that story did this thing and that’s my mental model or my inspiration of like what I would like to be. We do reach for that, but a lot of times the stories… we have stories certainly about people dealing with big crises, but we don’t always have an answer that feels relevant to our times.
Henry Lien
Yeah. Yes.
Susan Kaye Quinn
And that’s part of what the podcast is about. We need to make more stories that are very obviously about the climate and dealing with survival and/or adaptation and/or finding solutions. Like what does a future that’s not terrible look like? Or at least half not terrible, like we’re actually heading in the right direction. Like what are the obstacles and how do we overcome them? Which is a little bit more of Western storytelling structure into itself, just like as I pose that question out loud.
The thing about the four act structure that is a gift is it says, No, we are just gonna blindside you with something. And now in the aftermath of that, you need to reconcile that and find these illuminated hidden connections. Which is again a huge idea in the climate: like I go drive my car and tailpipe emissions come out, how is that connected to the icebergs melting?
Henry Lien
Yeah.
Susan Kaye Quinn
Also, how is that connected to the climate disaster? These hidden connections are there. But also just like, how do I feel about that? And what do I do now? It gives space to grapple with these discontinuities. And it’s okay to have it be open too and have this like sense of weird fiction dissonance of like… well, I don’t really know. It’s not really clear. And so I have to do my own work to figure out what is the answer here, or at least the answer for me.
So I feel like the structure, this is getting ahead a little bit, but I feel like the structure really does speak to the times for us. Sort of a gift from Eastern to Western audiences that don’t know how to… we’re just not trained to think this way by our stories. And I think some more story diversity will help us.
That’s like another big theme, like this climate is not just about America, right? The climate crisis is not just happening in America, it’s happening in the entire world, to the entire world, the whole world is affected. We need to get out of our own heads and really look at those hidden connections and see how other people are dealing with stuff and what their challenges are and like, how do we all do this together? Which is a huge concept, right? We’re all just sort of figuring out how to get through the day.
I am way off topic now, sorry.
Henry Lien
No, you’re not. And one thing I wanted to point out, one thing that I think is nutritious regarding the 4-Act structure—which is only one half of the book by the way, we haven’t even gotten to nested and circular structures….
Susan Kaye Quinn
Yes, and we need to.
Henry Lien
No, no, but I don’t want to rush past this. One of the things that the 4-Act structure forces writers to do is be more creative. It’s like saying be a better writer. It’s not very helpful. But what it does, is this hard focus at the end of the 4-Act structure, in looking at the invisible relationships. This is directly related to the climate crisis and to what your listeners and writers of solarpunk care about very much. What are the unintended consequences? It’s very, very hard to do that.
Let me okay, on the fly, I’m gonna come up with two four-line flash fiction solarpunk 4-Act East Asian structure stories.
Okay, line one.
Transportation in our cities is so dirty because you can’t make the horses not poop where they poop.
Line two.
As the cities get bigger and bigger, they get dirtier and dirtier.
Line three.
A form of transportation is invented that is clean because it is made of machines and it does not generate poop.
Line four.
This clean transportation ends up being dirtier than any transportation ever imagined before and ends up threatening the planet.
Okay, who would have ever seen back in 1915 that this clean transportation would be the dirtiest possible transportation and that it’s not just a matter of hygiene or aesthetics or comfort. It’s a matter of survival. Who would ever have seen that?
Susan Kaye Quinn
Right.
Henry Lien
And that’s really hard to predict. But that’s, of course, where speculative fiction authors are making their contribution. Are you able to see X leads to Y leads to Z leads to A? And now let’s look at that: X to Y to A.
Okay, so here’s another impromptu four-line story, hopefully more hopeful.
Villagers in this community in Africa have to suffer the climate consequences of the choices of developed countries.
Villagers in this community have to deal with the plastic waste from plastic bottles and the fact that their average temperature is five degrees Fahrenheit warmer than it was when the elders were children.
Somebody realizes that if you cut off the tops of these plastic bottles, they form a funnel and they will lower the temperature by five degrees. If you embed the walls of your earthen structure with the tops of these plastic bottles.
The villagers implement this and they are able to repurpose some of the plastic waste in their community. And they are able to lower the temperature in their homes by five degrees with no electricity or other power source. And they are able to allow beautiful colored light into their homes.
A more hopeful example of the four act structure.
That’s a real story, by the way, this ingenious person realized that this would happen. Listeners, open your mouth right now and then blow on your hand on the palm of your hand. Hot, right? Now pucker your lips and blow on your hand. Cold, right? Same concept. This guy figured out that the tops of those plastic bottles were doing exactly what your mouth just did right now. It cools the temperature. And I don’t remember the physics reason why. And so he taught these villagers to embed them in… they built structures with earth. Just embed them in your homes. And I mean, this is the kind of brilliant thinking that we need to see more of. It gives me great hope. Here’s somebody who is solving a problem created by fossil materials. He’s using plastic to solve the problem created by plastic. This is the kind of creativity that we need to see and that the East Asian four act structure is sort of demanding that you see.
It’s hard, but this is what we as writers and we as citizens of this earth need to be doing. We need to be thinking about the invisible relationships. We need to be more creative than we have ever been before.
Susan Kaye Quinn
Yeah, absolutely. Your idea that we have to work a little harder as writers to do this, that actually is something I find stops people from considering writing hopeful climate fiction because they’re like, well, I’m not a climate scientist. I don’t know all the technology. It’s such a huge problem, which it is. How can I have anything to say about that? And how can I write a story about that?
Even if I come up with, you know, like a technology fix, perhaps, but a lot of what solarpunk storytelling is about is actually not the technology per se, although your example is great because it’s very DIY, it’s very in-situ, we’re using the materials at hand to adapt and survive. So that’s brilliant.
But people get stopped by the challenge.
And I think, yes, the 4-Act structure is a little challenging in the sense that you need to reframe your thinking about storytelling. However, it also feels to me like an unlocked door, like a door that just opened and gave you another option or another tool, to use a different metaphor, in your toolkit for how to tell stories about this really difficult problem that we don’t have lot of examples of.
We get super trained on dystopias or cyberpunk or a whole bunch of other genres that can tell us all these many ways of telling story that we’ve been accustomed to. But if we’re going to come up with something about how we actually survive, it stops people cold. And so I encourage people to look at this book as a possible tool that will help you to figure out how to do this, even though the tool itself is a little challenging to figure out how to learn. You know, like start on a short story like I did and, you know, learn how to use the tool. Henry’s book is a gift because it’s telling you what the tool is, which is a whole education, first of all.
Which, by the way, okay, sidebar, are you going to teach classes on this because that would be amazing.
Henry Lien
I have been. I’m teaching one at UCLA, a UCLA writers program, which is open enrollment. It’s a lecture style class. Anybody can enroll in that. I also taught an instance of this for the Writing the Other workshop over the summer. And I’m going to be teaching a couple of classes at Odyssey Workshop.
Susan Kaye Quinn
Nice.
Henry Lien
I’m constantly teaching about this actually so if you would like to if you would like to learn more you can just look at my website all my classes and appearances are there.
Susan Kaye Quinn
Excellent. We will definitely have a link for people to be able to find your website, obviously, but you can just Google Henry Lein and find it.
Henry Lien
Just Google my name, Henry Lien, L-I-E-N.
Susan Kaye Quinn
It’s easy enough to find you.
One of the things I’ve been looking at doing is teaching some solarpunk classes about specifically this genre that is so new. People get really challenged by how to do this.
I haven’t quite gotten it together yet to get that going, but I will, I will eventually. (Click here to sign up to be notified when Sue has online solarpunk writing classes available.)
But the thing… one thing that’s a challenge is the writing. As a writer, you come into this, you’re very intimidated. You don’t really know how to do this. People are intimidated out of just thinking about it.
Denial is our number one response to the climate crisis.
Henry Lien
Yeah.
Susan Kaye Quinn
It’s like, nope, just gonna nope right out of that because like I do my recycling and maybe I got an EV but like, nope, can’t do anything else. And that is obviously not the answer but it is a very common response to being overwhelmed, right?
So as writers, same response. So we’ve got some emotional work, we’ve got to break through there. But at the same time, just to make it extra hard, the audiences are not really there for us either. And part of it is because they are trained on these Western storytelling structures. So one thing I noticed when I was reading—you were doing these comparisons in the book between Eastern and Western approaches to storytelling—and one thing I noticed was that the Western thing as you properly describe it is giving the “promise of the premise” to the reader. They start out, they know what story it’s going to be, they know what genre it’s going to be, and Bob’s your uncle, off you go. For the Eastern audiences who understand this storytelling structure, it’s a “promise of surprise.” Like, they know the surprise is coming. Like, that’s just a common thing that stories do. And so they’re cool with that. They’re like, we can wait for the surprise, and I fully expect to have this thing just twist up and do something crazy in the third act, and then it’ll be this mind blowing thing. So that’s what they’re there for. But the Western audience is like, what is even happening? This is a boring story. Why should I even stick around? And then they’re like, what the hell just happened? Why are we now… we were in this pastoral area and now suddenly we’re in a war torn zone. What is even happening here?
Henry Lien
Yeah.
Susan Kaye Quinn
So part of the problem is the audience… and same with climate storytelling. If you tell someone I’m going to tell you a climate story they’re like God I don’t want to know about that and you’re like how about a hopeful one and they’re like just out of the gate I don’t even think that’s possible. So like you’re already fighting this hesitancy from the audience. So I don’t even know where my question is going here except that this is a problem. What are your thoughts about helping Western audiences understand this structure or is it just we need a lot more stories like this so that they get more used to it? Is there something you can do magic in the first two acts to help those little Western readers along until you get to that third act or what are your thoughts on that?
Henry Lien
Luckily, I’m an optimistic guy. And I think that there actually is a magic trick to this. First of all, with regard to this structure… this is a structure that might seem on paper to be so avant-garde that Western audiences would just choke and spit it back out. However, has anyone seen the film Parasite?
Susan Kaye Quinn
It was brilliant.
Henry Lien
Four Act Structure.
Susan Kaye Quinn
Yes.
Henry Lien
Has anyone played a Nintendo Mario game? So many of them are structured in the four act structure. So many people in the West have already been exposed to, been infected by, the four act structure, but they are non-symptomatic carriers. They don’t know that they’ve already been infected and that they love this structure.
Susan Kaye Quinn
Right?
Henry Lien
So that’s one thing. But with regard to specifically any resistance to solarpunk stories, it might seem like, okay, well, I’m having a tough enough time trying to sell this to people. And on top of that, if I’m mapping this weird structure onto it, it just seem it sounds like a recipe for not being able to find an audience for this. Well, I’ve got a number of tricks that I teach my students regarding the four act structure.
But before I get to that, I want to talk about one of the main advantages of working in this structure. Yes, it forces you to be creative. Yes, you can have different emotional effects, but one of them is a heightened sense of empathy. When the reader gets no foreshadowing, gets no seeding in of details that something is coming, that there is an asteroid hurtling towards them. And we get that with the Daughters of Itoya. You know, the daughters of Itoya don’t know that they are in an East Asian four act story. And they don’t know that their quiet life is about to be invaded by war. And as a result, we the reader get more of the impact and the surprise than the daughters of Itoya themselves get when war arrives in their quiet lives.
This is an exercise in empathy, which all literature is, this heightens the impact of empathy when we don’t know that this is coming. I mean, just imagine if we had seeded in early on the scene of thousands of soldiers amassing in Tokyo and we see their glimmering swords and we see their shining armor and we hear their cries as they chant and they turn towards Osaka… completely ruins the ability to feel the shock of the daughters of Itoya.
So this is one major reason why we would consider working in a four-act structure for a solarpunk story. If you’re able to come up with something as brilliant as that bottle top solution and you don’t foreshadow it, your readers are going to feel the same joy that those villagers actually felt… because it was not foreshadowed.
Okay, so that is the reason why somebody working in solarpunk would attempt this, but how do you make it, how do you sell it? How do you make it palatable when you’re already receiving resistance because people are emotionally shutting down to something that feels bleak and hopeless?
Here’s the trick. You map an organizing principle onto the first two acts of the story. the first half of the story and you make it modest. You emphasize the personal over the political.
Okay, I’m going free form here. You’re seeing me doing improv.
Let’s say you’ve got a character, let’s say she’s a teenage girl, let’s say she lives in this village, okay? The village where they did this wonderful plastic bottle top experiment. Well, just ask yourself, to keep the first two acts from being too bleak, from being too inert, because the real story hasn’t started yet, because you’re holding the main element back, just focus on something that this girl wants, you know, maybe she’s got a sick grandmother who can’t who can’t tolerate the rise in temperatures. Maybe she’s got a skin condition that makes the really elevated temperatures really hard on her. Maybe she rescued a bird, an injured bird or a bird that fell out of the nest. And these heightened temperatures will kill the bird. Make it small, make it personal, make it something she wants. And then you just, after you’ve identified this small thing that she wants, cut up this mission into three or four steps. And they don’t necessarily have to end in success. Maybe she goes around and she tries to, I don’t know, lobby officials to get electricity to their village. Maybe she tries to convince people to irrigate their their village. Because it’ll be easier for people to collect water that they need, but also it’ll maybe slightly lower the temperature so this bird doesn’t overheat as much, or at least she can keep bringing the bird water instead of having to trek a mile to get the water. Maybe that’s one of the things. And they don’t have to end in success. Maybe she goes to the junkyard where the city is dumping their refuse and she tries to look for, I don’t know, parts from which she could build some kind of foot powered fan. Maybe she’s trying to convert, maybe she’s learning about STEM and she’s trying to convert the remnants of a fan to hand power so she can keep this bird cool.
Identify something she wants and then break it into multiple steps. And those steps don’t have to succeed.
But now suddenly we are gripped. This is a life or death story about this beautiful little bird and this beautiful girl who is trying to save this bird with every ounce of resourcefulness and courage she has. We are right there. Suddenly we are reading a solarpunk story in a four act structure, even though we thought we didn’t want to. Now this is the story that we have to know the ending of.
And then when we arrive at the third act, this brilliant solution of using that plastic waste to solve the problem created by plastic because we’d never foreshadowed it. You know, we didn’t have some, we didn’t start off in Oxford with some professor, some associate professor giving some lecture about DIY efforts. No, no foreshadowing. When it arrives and it changes their lives, it’s going to come to the reader, with the full punch in the chest of pure joy and hope in a way that it could not have if we had foreshadowed it and in a way that it could not have if we were broadcasting climate crisis, climate crisis all along. No, for the first two acts, it’s about one girl and one tiny little bird. We start there and then that’s the thin edge of the wedge. That is so, this is not the only approach, but it’s one that I think is effective.
Susan Kaye Quinn
No, I think that’s super solid. And in fact, kind of what my approach has been in the little bit that I have played with it in that… you just do really solid storytelling in those first two acts so that you’ve got them, you’ve pulled them in with… you want to do justice to those first two acts, because when you bring the third one in, those are two titanic forces that now have to illuminate each other. So the third act tends to have its own drama, just by nature of like suddenness. And so those first acts, you bring the drama by doing that solid storytelling and bringing that investment in the story of the girl and the bird, and then that twist, and then you’re like, oh, okay, but now what? How does that work out? So now you’re just very invested in knowing how that works out, which again, you can leave it hanging or you can bring it to a nice resolution. But I think you’re right.
I like what you said about how the third act coming in as this sort of unknown element has its own sort of intrinsic hopefulness to it, where you’re like, oh wait, there’s something I didn’t even know. There’s something I didn’t consider. And here it is.
Henry Lien
Yeah, lying there in plain view, like literally lying on the ground.
Susan Kaye Quinn
Right. And it’s not like, you know, a bolt from the blue. It’s like a real thing that is in the environment. And it’s just… it’s the hidden connection that you didn’t see before. And it’s intrinsically hopeful because we get so locked down in thinking we know the answer. We think the answer is everything’s just going to like die or be terrible forever, that’s it, the end, with the climate. That is our default position, that’s the denial talking and the thing of where like, there is no solution so I don’t have to think about it.
When that twist structure is there and if you read enough of these kinds of stories, I can see it becoming something that acts at this meta level, where you’re like, well, but of course there’s something else out there that might be… I just don’t know what it is yet, but it could… we have to go looking for it maybe, or, you know, find stories that are helping us to illuminate what those hidden connections are and how then in the fourth act, we can do something different than we ever thought was possible.
So I love all this, but I also, we’re getting… we’re running out of time.
I want to make sure we talk about nested stories and circular storytelling, because I think that’s super important too. We kind of touched on it a bit about how you keep coming at it from different perspectives. It’s like with the book and the story within the book, and then the song about the story within the book, like you are giving us different bites at the apple to understand how this thing works.
Henry Lien
Yes.
Susan Kaye Quinn
So tell me a little bit about how nested storytelling and circular storytelling, just what are those and how does it work with the four acts?
Henry Lien
Okay, I’m so glad that we are building at least a little bit of time for this. So the book does not just talk about the four act structure. Fully half of the book is about nested and circular storytelling structures that are not unique to Asian storytelling, but they do have a long history and they are widely accepted. There are a number of examples in the book.
But the most famous example of nested or circular storytelling is the Thousand and One Nights. And the Thousand and One Nights probably comes from Central Asia. It probably comes from the Muslim world and/or Persia, possibly parts of it from India, possibly parts of it even from China. And it’s the classic case study of a nested story.
So let me, go back, roll back and define circular storytelling versus nested storytelling. They are very similar in that they are non-linear stories. And the only difference, the only reason I break them out into two subcategories is that there is a slight difference… in circular storytelling, it’s the same elements recurring. So the same characters, the same setting, the same situation perhaps. So it’s much tighter. We’re working with far fewer elements and we are deliberately revisiting them again and again. And the classic example is the 1950 Akira Kurosawa film Rashomon.
Nested storytelling is a little bit different. It’s more expansive. It is also nonlinear, but it doesn’t have to necessarily be composed of stories that just revisit the same characters, same situations, same settings. They could be stories within the larger story that star completely different characters in different settings with different situations, but they are united by some things, some something, something, something holds them together. And in the Thousand and One Nights, it’s the frame tale of Shahrazad, also known as Sheherazade, telling these stories to King Shahriyar and ending on a cliffhanger so that he has to let her live another day to continue the story. So all of those component tales in the Thousand and One Nights are about different characters, different situations, but they do absolutely have a family resemblance with each other and they are united by this frame tale. So that’s nested storytelling rather than circular storytelling.
I find them fascinating and relevant to what we’re talking about today because they are very much about the community of stories, the community of elements. What do they have to do with each other? Well, traditional Western three act linear storytelling, it’s about which element is going to defeat the other element. Is Luke Skywalker going to kill Darth Vader? by the end or vice versa.
The circular and nested structures are very much interested in other things. What is the relationship among all of these stories? What is the soul of the community of stories? And I think that’s applicable to solarpunk, to the climate crisis and the responses thereto.
Susan Kaye Quinn
Absolutely. I just want to jump in here and say, like, literally today, I was having a conversation with some fellow solarpunk writers about the challenge of doing storytelling that isn’t the lone hero, that’s about the community or a collective and how do you do that structurally as a storyteller? Because community is what the solutions are going to be. And not only is it the solution, but like it affects everybody.
We have to work together is the sort of cliche, but also like… we are just experiencing it all together.
And so your nested or circular storytelling is hyper relevant. And this is again, why I say it’s another tool, like an open door to help solarpunk writers see a different way to revisit the same climate challenge say, but… first I’ll tell a story about it in New York and then in Laos and then in London… then you’ll see those different perspectives, different people doing the same thing but in totally different places, but we’re all on the same planet. So we’re all experiencing the crisis. Something like that…it’s just a structural tool.
I know that the examples that you had in the book aren’t necessarily climate examples, but I feel like it’s hyper relevant.
There was one metaphor that you had in the book that I really, really liked. And I’m going to mess this up so you can tell me where I got it wrong. But it was something about how it was an architectural thing where houses were not designed, this is somewhere in Asia and I’m like blanking completely on the actual example, but you know what it is—
Henry Lien
Yes, I do.
Susan Kaye Quinn
—where the architecture of each individual house was not what made it beautiful, it was the relationship between them, and where they were placed in relation to one another that made it beautiful. And I thought that’s just… so tell me how did I mess that up?
Henry Lien
Correct. No, you did not mess it up. It was was addressing the complaint, Why does Chinese architecture all look the same? And the reason for that is… just repackaging what you said, the beauty of architecture is not the solitary visionary, unique, singular structure. Architecture is seen as part of a harmonious aesthetic community that includes all the buildings in a compound and the gardens that connect them. So we’re talking about human-made structures plus human-maintained natural features. Plus, you’ve heard of Feng Shui. We were talking about placement within the environment. We’re talking about positional dynamics. We’re talking about… Feng Shui literally means wind and water. So we’re talking about the relationship of the buildings to the natural environment. And when… if we were thinking about that as the aesthetic, it’s the community of elements. It’s all the buildings and how they relate to each other. You’ve got a compound of buildings. What is the relationship among them? What do they see? What angles do they see each other at? What can they see of each other? How is their view of each other framed by, for example, the approach of the walkway to another building, the flora that are planted among them, the path of the water through this community of buildings? All of those things are important, more important than any one building. And this actually militates against solitary unique buildings that are different from everything else. I mean, you don’t want an Eiffel Tower in the middle of the Forbidden City. That’s going to kill the harmony of the community of buildings. So that explains it.
Susan Kaye Quinn
It’s a great metaphor for a built environment, but it’s one half step out from that to ecosystem, from my mind. Now we’re talking, what’s your place in the ecosystem, you and your built environments, but also how does that work with the trout in the river and how does that work with the mountain?
Henry Lien
Yes.
Susan Kaye Quinn
And I just recently got back over the summer from this 9000 mile round trip road trip through the US and Canada. And one of the things—there were many, many amazing things about that trip—but one of the things that was super cool was going through Vancouver and talking to a friend who had grown up there and had worked there at one point on a committee of some kind in the government in Canada that was like making sure to preserve sight lines so that…. Yeah, you can build something, but you can’t make it so everybody around you can’t see the mountain because seeing the mountain is super important to everybody in this community. And I’m like, that’s amazing. I love that idea.
Henry Lien
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
I love that.
Susan Kaye Quinn
I see so much resonance in this book that you’ve put together that is helpful in ways that I… I’m even still unpacking as I write my novel and try to map the 4 Act structure into that, but it’s already working fantastic.
Henry Lien
I’m still unpacking these ideas too.
Susan Kaye Quinn
There’s a lot to unpack!
Henry Lien
Even after, yeah, I’m still discovering things myself. So you’re not alone.
Susan Kaye Quinn
It’s a great vehicle for that. That tells you the robustness of it, that you can just keep coming back to it, right? It’s a nested thing.
Henry Lien
Yeah, it is.
Susan Kaye Quinn
You keep coming back and finding something new.
Oh, my gosh, thank you so much for this discussion.
We are going to have, here at the end, very shortly, we’re going to segue into Henry’s song, which now that you know what the 4-act structure is, you will be able to hear it in this song and I think it will you will find it delightful, as is Henry singing as well.
But is there anything else that you would like to leave us with, any words of wisdom about how to do this kind of storytelling or anything else that you would want to make sure people know before they dive in?
Henry Lien
Yeah.
Susan Kaye Quinn
Sorry, I’m putting you on the spot here.
Henry Lien
No, you’re not. No, I do have an answer and I’m just trying to find the right words for it.
Susan, thank you for allowing me to be part of this community doing this very important work. And I think that with anyone who is doing the heavy lifting in a culture, there’s an emotional toll that can take. There is burnout. There is mental wellness to consider. And towards that end, a sense of optimism is critical to everybody. And that’s the intersection I see between the ideas in my book, Spring, Summer, Asteroid, Bird, and what communities of writers like solarpunk writers need. Reminders that the world is filled with potential and opportunity and surprise and hope. That’s the intersection I see. I thank your listeners and the writers addressing these important things for taking on whatever imposter syndrome you might feel, whatever dread at the monumental task of creating this story and making it find its audience, props to you because the world needs your vision like it needs oxygen and water. Thank you for persevering. I hope that the ideas that we talked about today and that I explore in this book will make your load a little bit lighter and a little bit more joyful. Thank you.
Susan Kaye Quinn
Thank you. I can pretty much guarantee that will be the vibe when folks dive into your book. Thank you again for coming on the pod and I just so appreciate this entire conversation.
Henry Lien
Thank you, Susan.
Susan Kaye Quinn
As promised, here is Henry’s song based on his book.
Between my road trip over the summer and working on my actual job of writing stories, the podcast hasn’t had as many episodes lately. But episodes like this are precisely why I started the pod. To lift up hopeful stories about the climate crisis, which is really a poly crisis we’re all living through, including the rise of fascism in America, and to help writers figure out how to tell those stories of a better world.
As Henry said, we all need these stories. More will definitely be coming on that.
Check out Bright Green Future’s Hopeful Climate Fiction list of recommended novels, short stories, games and films.
LINKS Ep. 36: Solarpunk and 4 Act Eastern Storytelling with Author Henry Lien
Spring, Summer, Asteroid, Bird by Henry Lien (plus the song)
Henry’s website (especially see his page on Spring, Summer, Asteroid, Bird, which has a list of essays and podcasts on the book, and his page on classes/events).
To be notified of future classes Henry’s teaching, sign up for his newsletter.
Link to sign up to be notified when Sue has online solarpunk writing classes available
