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novels, such as A Crack In Space , there is a tendency for quite a few of the male characters to be of a similar type: gloomy, self-doubting, and easily cowed by authorities or by powerful women. One supposes that these might all be images of Phil himself. A book with too many examples of the same kind of character feels airless.
    Monomyth and Emerging Plots
    In this section, I’ll discuss a four-fold range of plot structures.

Complexity
Plot
Predictable
A plot that hews to a standard formula. Monomyths.
Low Gnarl
A plot structure embodying a real-world flow of events. “Life is stranger than fiction.”
High Gnarl
A plot obtained by starting with a real-life story and enhancing it, as in a fairy tale.
Random
Like a shaggy-dog story, possibly based on dreams or collage-like juxtapositions.
     
    At the low end of complexity, we have standardized plots, at the high end, we have no large-scale plot at all, and in between we have the gnarly somewhat unpredictable plots. These can be found in two kinds of ways, either by mimicking reality precisely, or by amplifying reality with incursions of psychically meaningful events.
    It’s often said that there’s only a few basic story patterns. Suppose we use the nice word “monomyth” to stand for “story pattern”. (Strictly speaking, there should maybe be only one monomyth, but I think it’s clear enough what I mean by pluralizing the word.)
    I taught software engineering courses to computer science students at San Jose State University for over twenty number of years, and there’s a relevant phenomenon I want to mention. In the 1990s, programmers began using “objects” in their programs, where objects are encapsulated high-level software constructs that are easier to use than the rats-nests of low-level code that they replace. In the 2000s there’s been a movement towards a still higher-level approach known as “software patterns.” The idea is that most programs can be viewed as plugging together certain standard kinds of objects into one of several standard arrangements. A pattern is the notion of hooking together some objects in a certain way.
    In literature, the “objects” are the stock characters, the classic situations, the props and devices. And the standard ways of hooking them together are the story patterns or monomyths. Here are a few examples.
    Three Wishes. I used this in Master of Space and Time. There were three wishes, and the pattern was comparable to the folktale “The Peasant and the Sausage.” The Secret of Life is also about a series of wishes, in this case there were five, and it’s modeled on the classic children’s book, The Five Chinese Brothers, written by Claire Huchet Bishop and illustrated by Kurt Wiese.
    Love Quadrilateral: In setting up Spaceland, I used the notion of two couples who swap partners, and then try and swap back.
    Campbell’s Monomyth. In order to give my most recent novel Frek and the Elixir a nice mythic feel, I modeled the book on the specific “monomyth” template described in Joseph Campbell’s classic The Hero with A Thousand Faces (as George Lucas is said to have done for Star Wars.) Frek and the Elixir was designed from the ground up to match the monomyth so as to give the book the greatest possible resonance.
    Campbell’s archetypal myth includes seventeen stages. By combining two pairs of stages, I ended up with fifteen chapters. And I matched my chapters to the Cambellian monomyth stages.
    Looking back over my other novels, I was surprised to see how many of them had monomythic patterns in them—it’s hard in fact to avoid them. For instance, the odd-sounding “The Belly of the Whale” stage of Campbell’s monomyth occurs as a faster-than-light trip in White Light, as a boat ride down a river in The Hollow Earth, as a stint inside a hyperspherical creature named Om in Realware, as a ride inside Kangy the hyperspace cuttlefish in Spaceland, and so on.
    It’s worth mentioning that even though I