Vitalis Nyawaranda & the Structure of a Story

This diagram is the Freytag Pyramid, which has been used in writing classes and discussions to represent the structure of a story. The 19th Century German novelist Gustav Freytag saw common patterns in the plots of stories and developed this type of diagram to analyze them. Of course, over time, there have been variations to the structure, where sometimes a story may start with the climax, then thrashes its way out to incorporate the other stages, and sometimes the conflict will appear towards the end of the story--it is the anticipation of such conflict that may draw the reader to follow along all the way close to the end. But anyway, my point here is not to discuss the structure of stories, but to talk about the writer who first introduced the concept to me, Vitalis Nyawaranda.

I studied Nyawaranda's novel at A-Level and liked it so much that I contacted Nyawaranda, who was teaching at the UZ. We met somewhere in town, and I showed him one of my Shona manuscripts, which he said had potential; then I asked him to come to my school to talk to the Shona class and the creative writing club. He agreed! You can imagine the excitement about the popularity I thought I would gain at school for having actually invited and managed to bring a published writer to the school.

Addressing the creative writers, Nyawaranda drew a modified version of the Freytag Pyramid; his was like an inverted checkmark, which he gave these labels: conflict, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution.
I remember making efforts to always follow this structure when working on a story, but then I switched to poetry for a while.

I continued to work with Nyawaranda at workshops for five more years after the first meeting, but the workshop I remember most was held at the little all-purpose college that was located on the Harare Kopje. Whenever I teach a fiction course, and I have reason to use the story diagram (which is necessary for beginning writers), it's to Nyawaranda's diagram that I return to first.

So here is a recap of my early influences so far. While A C Moyo influenced my decision to become a writer, Vitalis Nyawaranda influenced the way I teach writing, especially fiction.