Discover how non-Western story traditions – cyclical, communal and porous – can expand your writing beyond the usual linear arc.
I’ve been studying the principles of story-telling for so long sometimes I forget to look up and look around.
I spend my time lost in the Western canon, lashed to that Western paradigm of the Hero’s Journey (think Luke Skywalker in Star Wars.)
This is how that paradigm goes (and it will sound familiar because it’s everywhere from Stranger Things to the John Lewis Christmas advert):
A story begins with a disruption, builds through rising tension and resolves in a final act where the hero changes or the world is set right. Characters develop through conflict, choices have consequences and plots are judged by how tightly they move from cause to effect. The three-act structure, with its neat arc, turning points, and demand for resolution, embodies a worldview.
Shorter still? OK:
Life itself is a purposeful progression, character is destiny, and a person proves their worth by overcoming adversity rather than remaining shaped by the past.
Slap on a label
But that’s just us. If you’re looking for labels, maybe post-Enlightenment humanism or something like that. Either way that’s the compost of the Western outlook.
The Western canon is shaped by a deep faith in the individual, and it often reads like early capitalist thought. As Europe moved from communal, agrarian life into a world of markets, mobility and private ambition, its stories followed.
The modern novel placed personal agency at the centre, presenting characters who shape their own fates through choice and effort.
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In contrast with traditions that treat the community or the cosmos as the true protagonist, Western storytelling elevates the solitary hero as the engine of meaning and individual self-fulfilment as the only goal. It reflects a worldview in which life is imagined as a personal journey rather than a shared or cyclical one.
So what do other cultures do with story? I went digging and made these surprising discoveries and “disruptions”.
1. Time does not always behave itself
Japanese and Indian classical works treat time as a cycle rather than a straight line. This reflects religious and philosophical traditions – Buddhist impermanence, Hindu cosmic recurrence – in which life is understood as a series of repeating patterns rather than a march towards resolution. A story completes its circle when a mood returns, not when a plot is done.
2. The hero is not always an individual
Communal storytelling in many African, Indigenous American and Pacific cultures reflects societies organised around kinship, land and collective identity. The story holds the wisdom of the group, so the protagonist is often a role rather than a psychological character. The land itself may speak because the land carries authority.
3. Plot is not the point
In traditions with strong oral roots, meaning accumulates through rhythm, repetition and performance. The Western obsession with forward motion feels less relevant than the preservation of knowledge. A tale repeated with variations signals continuity with ancestors rather than narrative urgency.
4. Morality is not tidy
East Asian and Middle Eastern storytelling emerges from cultures shaped by duty, hierarchy and social harmony. Characters are often caught in webs of obligation, making simple moral judgments feel naïve. Tragedy arises not from villainy but from an impossible collision of duties, so resolution is deliberately ambiguous.
5. The storyteller is part of the tale
In regions where oral storytelling remains central, the teller’s authority matters as much as the tale. The presence of the griot in West Africa or the elder in many Indigenous cultures reflects a belief that story is a living event, not a fixed artefact. Each retelling adapts the tale to its audience, keeping culture alive.
6. The world is more porous
Many cultures maintain a fluid boundary between the visible and the invisible. This reflects cosmologies in which ancestors, spirits and deities remain active. Supernatural elements appear as straightforward realism because the world is conceived as layered, not divided into “real” and “fantastical.”
7. Stories can contain other stories without end
The great framed tales of the Middle East, Central Asia and parts of Africa mirror traditions of courtly storytelling, where entertainment depended on sustaining interest night after night. Nested narratives, digressions and cliffhangers create a sense of endless unfolding – deferral rather than destination.
8. Emotion can outweigh action
Works shaped by Japanese aesthetics or Persian poetic traditions aim to evoke an emotional truth rather than drive toward a plot. Beauty, melancholy and longing are treated as meaningful in themselves. The story succeeds when the reader feels the atmosphere, not when the protagonist wins.
9. Stories are not always entertainment
In many Indigenous traditions, storytelling is an act of law, memory and survival. Tales teach geography, ethics, seasonal patterns and social norms. The idea of a story existing purely for pleasure is modern. Elsewhere, the tale is a tool: it keeps a people coherent and a landscape legible, retaining its evolutionary purpose.
How can you use this?
Writers can draw on these other cultural approaches by loosening their grip on conventional linearity. Cyclical time can create narratives that return to earlier moments with new meaning. Communal perspectives can shift focus away from a protagonist and open space for ensemble storytelling or landscape-centred tales.
Porous reality can allow the mythic, the spiritual or the uncanny to sit alongside the everyday without explanation or over-elaboration. Most importantly, these approaches invite writers to see stories not only as journeys but as rituals and shared acts of memory.
The Splintered City by Giles Broadbent is out now.