Today, I want to talk about story, and will attempt to define what it is in terms of some of the elements we typically use to create them. To get us started, let’s look at two narratives.
Here’s the first:
A man goes to his local store, buys some food, goes home, cooks it, watches his favourite television show, and goes to bed.
Enthralling, right? Let’s try again.
A man goes to his local store to buy food. He is unwashed and unshaven, his mood being too low to allow himself the benefit of self-care. He has been in dire financial straits since his recent divorce, so he browses for the cheapest food, but when he spots his ex-wife turning into his aisle, accompanied by her handsome young lover, the man turns tail and retreats to his home.
Depressed and hungry, he goes to bed and dreams of his ex sending him a text message to say she wants him back. On waking, he checks his phone, hoping against hope… but there is nothing. He realises he has let himself go, so he rises, showers and shaves, and decides to treat himself to a nice breakfast.
Better, I think you’ll agree, but what turned a series of events into a story? Below, I attempt to answer this question by looking at some of the essential elements, and at the end of the post, I will offer an axiom to define what a story is.
Disruption
I’ve heard it said that story starts with but…
The man goes to the store, but…
The chicken tried to cross the road, but…
A condition which existed is changing, and the status quo is disrupted. The character now faces a challenge. How will they react, and how will they cope with their new circumstances? These questions will keep the reader engaged. Does the chicken make it? Will the man ever find true love again? We will read on to find out the answers because the human brain loves solving mysteries and puzzles.
But… transforms a mundane set of events into a story by altering conditions within the narrative world. It is the hand of God, the ghost in the machine, the devil in the detail. It creates a catylst that we as writers can use as a precipitator of change.
Not all stories are about transformation (I’ve written a great many myself where the character’s arc has been more or less flat), but I think they should at least be about the possibility of change. It can also be that the story ends on a grand dramatic moment and the reader is left to wonder what change might occur beyond the last page - but even then, there is a suggestion of change.
But… can also introduce conflict, either internal or external, and conflict can act as a precipitator of change by amping up the pressure and raising the stakes of the story. What does the character stand to lose or gain? What will they risk or sacrifice to get what they want? It might be that they are not even aware of the stakes until it’s too late. For example, the protagonist might not foresee that an argument will lead to a secondary character self-harming. Only later will they appreciate what was at stake, and what they could have done differently.
What’s At Stake?
As I’ve mentioned stakes, we should take a look at their importance, because when something is at stake for the protagonist, be it implict, explicit, internal or external, it heightens the tension in the story, and can propel the reader from moment to moment and from page to page. The protagonist themselves might not even be aware of what’s at stake, but in my opinion there should be some sense of there being a risk in the story to create a degree of narrative momentum.
In the example above, the man’s well-being is at risk. In the movie Alien, the safety of the space-going vessel Nostromo and its crew are at stake. In Donal Ryan’s brilliant novel The Thing About December, Johnsey Cunliffe’s happiness, safety and the future of the farmland he inherited are all at stake.
When the protagonist stands to lose or gain something, when they risk runination and reward to get what they need, the reader will root for them and love your story.
Why Now?
Another point to consider is that stories happen at a certain time or during a span of time in the narrative world, and writer and reader both can wonder why the events are happening now.
The chicken begins his journey across the road. Okay, but why, and why now? If the answer is that he must save his beloved who is trapped on the other side then we have motivation and high stakes, but how come she’s trapped in the first place? It may be necessary (but I’m not going to say it’s essential) to know what lights your story’s fuse. The chicken’s beloved is suddenly in danger because a carnival is passing through and needs a new chicken for the show. The man encounters his wife when he goes to the store because… well, maybe that was just plain bad luck, and that’s another narrative factor, that coincidences do happen, and can be useful if sparingly applied.
Character & Story Arc
In our second example above, we get more of a sense of who this man is, and the personal journey he is on.
At the start, he appears to be in crisis, and is struggling emotionally and financially.
This is the starting point of his character arc, and also of the story.
There is an inciting incident in the sudden appearance of his ex, and the feeling that something, the man’s emotional state, is at stake.
The course of events is altered when he encounters and initially fails the challenge. Here he hits a low point, which is further deepened by his dream, nonetheless he rallies, cleans himself up and decides to treat himself to a nice breakfast.
This is the end point of his arc.
I like to express these principles as a simple axiom:
A character arc is powered by the driving emotion, and moves through the inciting incident, from lack to fulfilment, so that the character gets what they need, but not necessarily what they want.
By driving emotion I mean the root motivator of a character’s actions, such as fear, lust, envy, anger… the list of possibles is not quite endless but it is very long. A character can have more than one driving emotion, and they might even be conflicting. Just so long as they have something pushing them forward, so in this context we can think of emotion as energy in motion. Without it, our characters would meander along the page, saying, ‘It’s nice here, isn’t it?’
Narrative Unity
In The Poetics, Aristotle stated that a story:
“… should have for its subject a single action, whole and complete, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. It will thus resemble a living organism in all its unity, and produce the pleasure proper to it.”
As in a living organism, the parts of a story should be interdependent, and function together in a unified manner to support the whole. There should be nothing superfluous, and each component should play an integral role.
To take our facile example story above, let’s say he encounters an alien creature on his way home and has a cup of tea with him, then finds an ancient Roman coin as he stumbles through a field. Could they be a part of the story about him seeing his ex? Perhaps, if he is hallucinating and if the alien and coin have some particular symbolic significance (my hat’s off to the writer who can make that work), but chances are good that the writer herself is hallucinating, or is dropping a few of her favourite things into the narrative because she wants to write about them. Which is fine, it’s her story and she can do whatever she wants with it, but the reader is unlikely to engage with a wandering and disconnected narrative.
Putting It All Together
Let’s see if we can put the above elements together to form a definition of what a story is.
A story is a cohesive and unified narrative that brings a character, who is sufficiently motivated by need to overcome the challenges they face, to a potentially transformative resolution via conflict and a disruptive incident.
Refining it to a simpler form, we get:
Story transforms character via a disrupted narrative.
I’m not saying these are perfect definitions, nor that they are definitive, but they provide us with a starting point from which to understand the essence and nature of story, why they work, and why in some cases they don’t.
Please feel free to share your own thoughts on story in the comments.
Watch out for the next Angel Fall post, in which we’ll assess how far we’ve come with the project, and the first post on Plot, in which we will look at the three-act structure.