In Great Rock n’Roll Pauses, a diagrammatic story is told through the author’s point of view as the daughter in a family consisting of herself, her brother, her mother, and her father. She tries to explore the different behaviors of her family members, trying to make sense of their actions through a PowerPoint presentation. The main source of conflict comes from her father’s inability to understand or try to connect with her brother, his son, about his interests. Albeit unusual, her brother is interested in the pauses between songs. Her father does not understand and blows up at him one day and her brother cries. There are also little conflicts between the author and her relatives, things like her father’s negative behavior or her mother’s obvious favoritism towards her brother.
The conflict is eventually resolved when the father asks her to take a walk and he calms down. He comes back home and tries to connect with his son once more. Or at least not get mad at him. The characters change inwardly because their actions and thoughts change not their appearances. The diagrammatic format lends itself to this story by being able to express whatever emotion it wants to convey through the images the author puts together. She can replicate a physical or mental wall between her brother and herself just by placing a rectangle in the middle of the screen with dialogue on either side, things like that. Or the seriousness of a situation with harsher colors and less imagery.
The ideas that I want to try out for my own diagrammatic story waver more on the writing side. Specifically, the part in Drucker’s Diagrammatic Writing on page 10 when she mentions the blank page produces anxiety from the audience simply for being empty. In my own writing, I tend to keep important sentences in their own line, even if it does not create a paragraph. It adds an important tenseness to whatever I am writing. I would love to try and create small images or words going in wonky directions or fonts to convey my story as well, not just the words. Things like keeping a steady rhythm by keeping words in the same spot and suddenly changing where they are to break the flow. Making words huge or small depending on the context of the story, anything at all to enhance the meaning.