More on visualizing the shape of narratives

The Lord of the Rings may encourage this kind of thing: a brilliantly detailed drawing of who appears with whom over 9 hours or so in Middle Earth (and in some other movies too).

From: http://xkcd.com/657/ via https://twitter.com/le0nl

How to Draw a Novel, by Martin Solares

I found this while googling "Novel Shapes" (as one does). It gives a lovely introduction to a challenging idea, the visualization of literary structure, mostly using the shapes of certain Mexican novels. There's much more to say here, when it comes to visualizing literary structure - we want to be able to see plot, character, word usage, points of view, and so on! - but Solares's work is a liberating start.