Story as Cosmology: Understanding Story as a Framework for Meaning

As storytellers, we spend our lives thinking about story. How does it work? What makes it resonate? What makes certain narratives feel true while others fall flat? We analyze structure, character arc, theme, and meaning, often with the sense that story is something we are shaping from the outside-in. However, story is not just something we create. It is also something we live inside—something that we could perhaps even say creates us. The stories we write, consume, and tell about ourselves all arise from the same underlying impulse to make sense of experience. That recognition is what has led me to a phrase I’ve been using more often lately: story as cosmology.

By “story as cosmology,” I mean this: story is not just narrative form, but a fundamental pattern through which humans understand meaning and purpose.

Basically, it is a recognition that the shape of story—not just “stories” but capital-S archetypal Story—is a pattern that can be recognized far beyond the writing guides. As writers who come to story theory and plot structure in a quest to write “stories that work,” we can sometimes miss the forest for the trees.

Although we may tease apart different structural systems or analyze different approaches, the shape of Story itself—that sometimes ineffable sense of what it is that makes a story a story—is so recognizable as to be, in my estimation, universal.

And little wonder.

Stories are, above all, a reflection of life.

The experience of life, despite all its many variations, follows universally recognizable patterns. We all experience the same annual seasons (more or less), the same life chapters, the same birth and death cycles. More than that, we also experience the same internal cycles, most notably those of psychological and spiritual transformation. When these things happen to us, they happen in reliably consistent ways—which is what character arc and, therefore, plot structure seek to faithfully resonate.

So far, we can see how recognizing the shape of story can help us more accurately reflect the reality of our lives. But a further step from pattern recognition is pattern prediction. If the shape of story is so embedded in our daily lives, then might we not be able to recognize it as not just a report on what is known to us, but a possible map to all that is yet unknown?

For me, my contemplations of story have led to a bit of a chicken-and-egg query. Did humans create story? Is it simply the emergent of millennia of reporting on observed patterns? Or is it possible that our instinctive understanding of and relationship to story is embedded at a deeper level—that life and reality as we know it is a vast and tremendous story, echoing its patterns down to us? Certainly, it’s fair to say story is perhaps our most universal way to understand ourselves and our world.

Are the patterns of storytelling so prevalent in ourselves because our storytellers are faithfully reporting reality? Or do the patterns go deeper? When we write a story—when we instinctively add symbolically important turning points at intuitively timed moments, when we feel in our gut that something in a story is not working because it does not resonate with the larger pattern—might we, in fact, be tapping something deeper?

As someone who has read, watched, lived, written, and studied stories for as long as I can remember—I think so. More than that, I think looking at story through this lens not only offers the opportunity to better integrate its powerful symbolic and subconscious healing power, it also enables us, as writers, to do so with greater humility and integrity. What I am talking about here is how story has functioned, in my own experience, as a pattern of meaning and what it can teach us about the shape of life itself.

Cosmology as Context: How Humans Make Meaning

What is cosmology? Cosmology is a theoretical structure about the nature of existence. It should not, in my opinion, be confused with ideology, although the two often overlap. For each of us, our cosmology is the unifying idea we hold about who we are, where we come from, the nature of the universe, and ultimately where we might be going and why. Cosmology is a framework of meaning, orientation, and context for our lives. Unlike ideology, cosmology does not tell us what to believe; it merely gives us a framework for how to understand our experiences.

In short (and by no coincidence, I think), cosmology is the story we tell ourselves to make sense of reality.

Although this article had been on schedule for quite some time, fortuitous timing allowed me to attend a webinar this past week by teacher Christina Pratt, asking “Do you know your cosmology?” Since I cannot explain it better than she did, I will share how she outlines that a cosmology:

• Is a framework that explains reality.
• Defines what matters.
• Explains how change happens.
• Reveals where meaning comes from.
• Shows how a person orients within chaos.

She clarifies that:

• Cosmology is context, not belief.
• Everyone has one, whether it is conscious or unconscious, cohesive or dissonant.
• When stress-tested, a healthy cosmology proves coherent, relational, and growth-oriented, while a broken cosmology produces fragmentation, dissonance, or collapse.
• Personal cosmologies cannot be borrowed or purchased (i.e., from another culture without embodied experience).
• Cosmology must be able to both hold community accountable and, in turn, be held accountable by community.
• Cosmology must relate honestly to lived reality (i.e., via the conjunction of scientific explanation, lived experience, and trustworthy traditions).

Why Story Has Always Functioned as a Cosmology

Any understanding of life is first and foremost a story. It is a necessarily limited and finite attempt to explain and metaphorize patterns and abstractions that are either unknown or feel unknowable. We know our cosmologies through stories. Our myths and legends tell us stories to contextualize us within social reality. Our personal stories—whether memories or fantasies—tell us who we are. Our cultural stories—film and literature—shape our understanding not just of the world but our own personal identities.

These are little-s stories. Underneath all those stories is Story—the larger shape and pattern that writers and story theorists easily recognize and name.

Although we may use a variety of terms—some highly technical (like the First Plot Point), some highly symbolic (like the Threshold of No Return)—these structural patterns exist in a writer’s nomenclature because they first exist in the patterns underlying everything we know about reality.

We live in a moment in time in which our relationship to cosmology is fraught. Or, more specifically, our relationship to ideology is fraught. We conflate ideology with cosmology and pit ourselves in conflict with others in increasingly high-stakes survival bouts. But what underlies ideology is the much more universal reality of Story.

For all its simplicity, Story is not a simplistic construct. Although it offers the comfort of containment, it is—as every lover of story knows—a portal into something deeper and truer than our conscious minds can understand. As Christina Pratt said:

Mystery makes our hearts happy.

Story has the powerful capacity to engage both hemispheres of the brain. We can understand any story rationally; as storytellers, we can apply that rationale to constructing character arcs and plots. But the best of our stories always showcase the magical ability to bypass the rational brain and mainline into our wild, emotional, chaotic, creative selves. Our truest selves.

Across cultures and eras, story repeats a consistent underlying pattern. It provides the underlying structure required to help us create meaning. It exists before doctrine and can survive the collapse of belief in any particular ideology or paradigm.

Story isn’t shaped by our cosmologies (although our perception of story will inevitably be influenced by our own specific perspectives). Rather, I would argue story is one of the primary foundations for cosmology.

The Archetypal Story and the Underlying Shape of Meaning

Writing Archetypal Character Arcs (affiliate link)

As writers, we often speak of “using archetypes” in our stories or “telling archetypal stories.” But Story itself is archetypal.

[An archetype is an] original model or type after which other similar things are patterned; a prototype.

As such, we can see the archetypal pattern in stories themselves—our novels, films, myths, legends, scriptures, and histories. More than that, once you start looking, the fundamental pieces of story (not least its common four-quartered structure) start popping up everywhere. In his book The Fourth Turning Is Here, generational historian Neil Howe points out:

Cyclical time tended to interpret change in a fourfold pattern corresponding to the seasons… The quarternity reconciled us to what must always be.

The Fourth Turning Is Here by Neil Howe (affiliate link)

Earlier, he noted:

[Cyclical time’s] prehistoric origins are informally rooted in countless rhythms common to virtually all societies: chanting, dancing, sleeping, waking, planting, harvesting, hunting, feasting, gestating, birthing, and dying.

And I would add: storytelling.

Although we may fill in a capital-S Story with any variety of subjective content, the structure of Story itself is nothing more or less than the archetypal  recurring of:

• Crisis
• Choice
• Sacrifice
• Transformation

Story is not subjective content, belief, or mythology. It is a pattern that precedes belief, culture, and ideology.

How Story Creates Meaning Through Transformation

And what is this shape of story? This has always been a question of importance to writers.

Cosmologies may take one of several shapes, most notably linear (or straight), cyclical (or circular), or chaotic.

Chaos, in general, does not work well for stories. If nothing else, chaotic stories cannot be easily accessed through left-brained consciousness and therefore tend to fail as communication. More than that, by my estimation of story as a structure, a chaotic shape is oxymoronic to the idea of story as a coherent cosmological map. (However, via their affinity with the right-brain, chaotic stories do have the capacity to sometimes bypass the conscious brain and speak to a more instinctual, if sometimes inexplicable, part of ourselves.)

The pattern of Story may also be viewed as linear—a set of causal events leading to a specific destination (whether fixed or open-ended). However, the more I study plot structure, and particularly the idea of chiastic or ring structure, the more value I find in viewing story as a circle (or perhaps a spiral) reflecting the larger regenerative cycles of life itself. (You can read more about chiastic structure in my book Next Level Plot Structure.)

Chiastic (or ring) story structure visualizes story as a cyclical pattern of transformation rather than a linear progression. (Illustration by Joanna Marie Art from Next Level Plot Structure by K.M. Weiland.)

Spiral Dynamics by Don Edward Beck and Christopher C. Cowan (affiliate link)

Story offers us the comfortable reliability of a fixed structure. Yet it is, by its very nature, a map of transformation. Together, these two things—the energy of change moving through fixed points—is what allows story to create contextual meaning. The cycles repeat, but they do not repeat in exactly the same way. As in the social theory of Spiral Dynamics, they continue around the circle but at increasingly higher levels—going ’round and ’round and up and up the spiral.

Historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., wrote in The Cycles of American History:

A true cycle …  is self-generating. It cannot be determined, short of catastrophe by external events…. The roots of this self-sufficiency lie deep in the natural life of humanity. There is a cyclical pattern in organic nature—in the tides, in the seasons, in night and day, in the systole and diastole of the human heart.

Story remains trustworthy because it reliably describes how change unfolds and meaning emerges. This is perhaps why writers from radically different cultures often arrive at similar structural insights.

The Cycles of American History by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. (affiliate link)

Why does story matter so deeply to humans?

Because story mirrors the way change actually unfolds in lived experience. It doesn’t tell us what to believe; it shows us how transformation happens through crisis, choice, sacrifice, and renewal.

Where Story Comes From: Lived Experience and the Shape of Life

Story, like any true and rooted cosmology, does not originate in the head. Although we may apply logic to understand it and to critique our understanding, the truth of story comes to us from somewhere deeper and truer than our brains.

As modern storytellers, we are often overly centered in the mental sphere. Even in the excitement of coming to view Story as a cosmological framework, we can tend to over-intellectulize our relationship to it.

When we are hyper-conscious, hyper-conceptual, and hyper-reactive, we risk living our lives—and therefore writing our stories–while operating almost entirely in abstractions. This creates an environment in which stories are less likely to emerge from embodied lived experience and more from stances of detached commentary, anxiety, moral urgency, didactism, and defensiveness. In turn, this can create a milieu in which stories are intellectually coherent but become increasingly emotionally dissonant. They may be morally loud, but—at least to me—they seem existentially thin.

When any intellectual understanding of a cosmology becomes ungrounded from lived reality within the real and natural world, the result is often a drift toward ideology. Indeed, I think we may see this simply in the tendency, as writers, to overemphasize the need for “rules” about plot and character in lieu of tapping into our own deep and personal knowing of story. (Which is to say: in storytelling, there are no rules; there are only patterns. We interact best with those patterns when we feel them deep in our bones.)

As you may know, I have lately been considering the state of modern storytelling and wondering why it often feels less potent than in previous decades. Although many factors contribute to this (including subjectivity), what becomes most obvious to me is that the stories feel less grounded because the authors are less grounded.

As writers, we are best able to reflect the deep and powerful cosmological truths that Story sheds upon our human existence when our stories are rooted in lived, embodied experience rather than abstract thought alone. Any generative understanding of the world must be large enough to include it all—birth, decay, death, renewal. It must be rooted in the real world—in the cycles of our bodies and the earth around us. When we lose contact with those cycles, our contact with Story itself becomes brittle.

Consciousness is a tool. It is not the whole of reality. When writers over-identify with analysis, opinion, reaction, and abstract moral reasoning, we lose access to sensory truth, emotional timing, true cause and effect, and transformation itself. This is the point at which stories begin to feel manufactured. They mirror truth, but they are not true.

Therefore, I don’t think it can be overstated how important it is for writers to conscientiously ground into a deep and embodied lived experience of the Story that is our lives. If we aren’t living the Story, we may struggle to share it in a way that offers regenerative and positive cycles.

What Story as Cosmology Means for Writers

If story functions as a form of cosmology, then writers are not just crafting entertainment or conveying ideas. We are participating in shaping the very frameworks through which meaning is experienced. To work with story conscientiously is to understand how its deep structures orient readers toward change, consequence, and growth—whether we intend that or not. To do this, it’s valuable to revisit the markers of a healthy cosmology and to make note of how Story reflects the same.

1. Story Provides Meaning and Context

Writing Your Story’s Theme (Amazon affiliate link)

Meaning in story doesn’t arise from info dumps or even through thematic intent, but through transformation honestly rendered via character arcs. Change, whether internal or external, is what allows meaning to emerge organically, rather than feeling imposed.

2. Story Provides an Ethical Framework by Demonstrating Consequences

The best stories never have to argue for values. Indeed, they may question them virulently. What stories always do is reveal what is valuable through cause and effect. When choices are allowed to carry real consequences, ethical weight emerges naturally and without moralizing.

3. Story Is Designed for Crisis

If a healthy cosmology proves itself when life falls apart, then story is built for precisely these moments. Crisis is inherent within plot structure as a space in which Truth is tested and revealed.

4. Story Proves Coherence

Healthy cosmologies hold under stress. Instead of collapsing, they provide the container in which our limiting perspectives can themselves collapse and be rebuilt. This is exactly what story does as a container for the collapse of the Lie the Character Believes and the coherent emergence of a stronger thematic Truth.

5. Story Provides Initiation

Stories have always been critical components in the initiations of the life cycle (i.e., entering adulthood, etc.). In modern society, stories are arguably one of our only remaining initiations, even if they are not culturally recognized as such. Like any good cosmology, stories teach us how to mature. They teach us how to live the good life. And they teach us how to die the good death.

Why Story Still Matters in How We Understand Meaning: Returning to Story as a Framework for Meaning

Recognizing story as a cosmology unto itself—indeed the cosmology underlying all cosmologies—is about recognizing a foundation that belongs to all of humanity. It gives us shared meaning without enforced belief or dogma. More than that, it provides the opportunity to recognize how deeply foundational meaning—and therefore hope and purpose—is to the very fabric of life itself.

In the space beyond stories, there is Story.

It is a space that holds deep and comforting answers. It is also a space of unfathomable beauty and mystery. It is a space we all know intimately within the secret places of our souls. It is comfortable in its familiarity, freeing in its limitlessness, and ultimately deeply loving in its promise that, by the very nature and shape of Story itself… the cycle rolls on, the page turns, people grow, and meaning emerges.

For writers, this is particularly an invitation to awareness and responsibility. Story is not something we invent as a vehicle for our own meanings. When we tell stories, we are conduits for something much vaster. Our best chance of channelling this archetypal force is in recognizing our responsibility to become clean and grounded vessels through which can pour a life-generating and -affirming creativity that is so much bigger than us.

Want More?

Next Level Plot Structure (Amazon affiliate link)

If this idea of story as a living pattern that mirrors transformation, meaning, and renewal resonates with you, I go way more into the nitty-gritty of story’s deeply symbolic and archetypal shape and beats in my book Next Level Plot Structure, which includes a detailed exploration of chiastic (or ring) structure.

I wanted to help writers go beyond seeing structure as a mechanical checklist and instead understand it as a symbolic map of change. Turns out plot structure isn’t just about pacing or turning points. It reflects the deeper rhythms of human experience—the same cycles of descent, choice, sacrifice, and return that shape our lives as well as our stories.

In this book, I explore how structure works practically on the page, so you can use it to write stories of tremendous cohesion and resonance. I also talk about why it works most powerfully beneath the surface, so you can apply it with intention, flexibility, and confidence rather than rigidity.

Available in paperback, e-book, and audio.

Wordplayers, tell me your opinions! Have you ever thought about story structure as more than just a technical tool? Do you think it is a deeper pattern of meaning or transformation? Tell me in the comments!

Click the “Play” button to Listen to Audio Version (or subscribe to the Helping Writers Become Authors podcast in Apple Podcast, Amazon Music, or Spotify).

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