It was as though making this turn in our life plans had not only taken us down a different road, but led us into a parallel universe where magic happens every day: A crystal clear overview of the trilogy's structure came to me on my Vipassana retreat.
She likes to experiment with form: each play in the Elliot trilogy takes its structure from a different musical genre a Bach fugue, Coltrane jazz, Puerto Rican folk music which gives her poetic dialogue an almost ritualistic resonance.
"What I think is exciting about the standalone films is since they don't have to follow that three-act structure of a trilogy, they can really get in, establish the story, and get out and leave you wanting more," Hamill says.
Ndibe borrows the culture-contact motif that structures Achebe's trilogy.
As the trilogy unfolded, it revealed a complex internal structure, based on the repetition of themes and the rhyming of images.
This "three-act" structure is also apparent in the trilogy as a whole; Collins stated that she "knew from the beginning" that she was going to write a trilogy.
There's just a scattering of songs; otherwise it's instrumentals – a structure, Doyle says, inspired by David Bowie's Eno-supervised "Berlin" trilogy.
("Smule" is a shortened version of Sonic Mule, a reference to a character in Isaac Asimov's "Foundation Trilogy" who influences others without their knowledge, disrupts existing power structures and builds an empire).
Throughout his unique career in American independent cinema he has structured several films around long conversations (the Before trilogy), mixed animation and live-action (Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly) and sometimes even jettisoned plot altogether (Slacker).
***** Some Luck by Jane Smiley Picador, £7.99 Smiley's first novel in her historical trilogy won't please post-modernists who will reject her traditional linear structure, her recourse to truth as opposed to truths, and her character-led view of the past 100 years in America.
By the standards of previous American literary trilogies, notably USA by John Dos Passos, an early 20th-century masterpiece, this structure might seem a little pedestrian in its conception.
