nature's first green is gold

At some point, everyone who seeks out puzzles and riddles and the like has seen this challenge in one form or another:

Using six toothpicks of equal length, make four triangles whose sides are all exactly one toothpick long. You only have the six toothpicks to work with, and you may not break, burn or otherwise alter the toothpicks.

If you've never tried this one for yourself, go ahead and do so. You don't need to use toothpicks, either--matches, pens, straws, any small straight objects of equal length will do. It's okay, I'll wait while you play with your sticks for a few minutes.

...

Give up yet?

Chances are, your first attempt probably looked a bit like this:


You managed one triangle, had the clever idea to double up your sides for the second...and ended up with one toothpick in reserve and two more triangles to complete. If the side length requirement weren't in place, you could get away with something like this:


But that isn't going to cut it, now is it? This is the point at which most people give up and find some other way to occupy their time. For those who keep working at it, who continue to fiddle with those sticks in the back of their mind while they're sitting in meetings or vacuuming the house, sooner or later they all have the same epiphany: Don't build out, build up.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the tetrahedron:


Count 'em for yourself--four identical triangles, six border lines of equal length. Like most puzzles of this sort, once you know the solution it seems glaringly obvious. But when you're thinking solely in two dimensions, no matter how hard you try an answer that relies on the addition of a third dimension is never going to occur to you.

In the same way that every one of us picked up those toothpicks and tried to make them do what we needed on a 2-D plane, we all tend to approach writing within the same sorts of unconsciously set mental confines. No matter whether our work is creative or technical, realist or surreal, traditional or experimental, it is written out on page after page, which the reader is expected to follow starting at the front cover and then working their linear way through each sentence and paragraph and chapter in sequence until they arrive at the back cover. In this regard, James Joyce and Stephen King and the person who wrote the owner's manual for your television are all exactly alike.

But is this the only way to go about things?

No, not at all. Allow me to introduce you to two creative sorts who discovered ways to write in three dimensions.

Few people have ever heard of B.S. Johnson, who unfortunately took his own life in 1973 at the age of forty, but there are few better places to begin a discussion of strucural innovators. For example, his second novel, Albert Angelo, aside from containing a wildly divergent mixture of narrative styles, is also notable for the holes that are cut in its pages at certain strategic locations, allowing the reader a glimpse of specifically chosen events that have yet to occur in the story.

The novel Johnson is best known for is The Unfortunates, which was published not as a bound book, but as a set of twenty-seven packets of pages enclosed in a box. In fact, The Unfortunates is what you see held in the author's hand in the above photo. One packet is clearly marked to be read first and another packet is clearly marked to be read last, but the other twenty-five sections that comprise the middle of this fascinatingly odd book can be read in whatever order the reader chooses.

Mark Z. Danielewski (shown here next to his sister Anne, who records albums under the name Poe) has written only two books to date, but even so has managed to avoid the obscurity in which Johnson spent his entire career, in large part thanks to the runaway success of his first novel House of Leaves.

And while House of Leaves (or, more properly, House of Leaves) is interestingly experimental in the ways in which it creates a labyrinth out of its footnotes and mimics the content and feel of damaged, incomplete manuscripts in places, for the purposes of this discussion it is his second novel Only Revolutions I would like to focus on.

The name of the game in Only Revolutions is circularity, both in content and in structure. For starters, the book is meant to be read from both sides--you pick up the book, read eight pages in one direction, jam in a bookmark, then flip the book over and read eight pages in the opposite direction. Flip, flip, flip, forcing the reader to constantly turn the book over and over in a circle. The two narratives, each from the point of view of one of the main characters Sam or Hailey, both tell roughly the same story, but with great variance in details (you can read the first page of both narratives here and here). In addition...

1) Both narratives are exactly 360 pages long, meaning that both narratives contain a single page for each degree in a circle.

2) Each half page contains exactly ninety words (excluding the historical notes printed on the book's inner margins), so each complete physical page contains 180 words--and two facing pages present the reader with a full 360 words.

3) Pieces of jewelry referred to as "leftwrist twists" throughout the book are mirrored between page halves. For example, if a "leftwrist twist of ruby" is mentioned in Sam's narrative, if you read Hailey's narrative on that same pysical page you would be sure to find a leftwrist twist made of the same material.

4. The character of the Creep appears on the exact same range of pages in both narratives.

5. The animals named in Sam's narrative and the plants named in Hailey's tend to appear in linked sets. For example, in page 50 of Hailey's narrative, the plants "Bee Balm" and "Woodland Ferns" are seen alive and well, and in the bottom half of the page (Sam's page 311) two animals, "Bullfrogs" and "Northern Racers," are found dead. Flip over to page 50 of Sam's narrative, and you'll find that "Bullfrogs" and "Northern Racers" are seen living and breathing, while on the bottom half of the page (Hailey's 311) "Bee Balm" and "Brackern Ferns" are now dead.

There are more, of course, but that should be enough to give you a general impression. Danielewski isn't afraid to deviate from his own pattern for effect, but by and large he sticks to the tightly wound, circular connective design he has woven throughout the entire text.

Of course, this isn't to say that every writer can or even should try to write in more directions than the stodgily linear one they've been using since grade school, but sometimes it's enough to know that it can be done--and more importantly, that it has been done, and done successfully. After all, once you know to look for the tetrahedron, it's hard to limit your mind to just two dimensions.