It seems a common principle held by swindlers of all stripes is to sell you a story rather than an object, an ideology, or a set of facts. It’s easier to swallow because it’s easier to tweak, to disguise, to make less or more personal. There are many more knobs to twiddle, micro-adjustments to make to communicate from the speaker to the listener.
You don’t have to tell a story in such conniving fashion. It’s not a requirement. But it’s an easy habit to fall into when you’re speaking to someone, and even easier when you’re writing something out, with time to think about the words, because it really does get the point across.
All it takes to shape events into a narrative is to streamline out irrelevancies, paring the sequence down to its core. Push the buttons of the people you’re trying to reach. Identify what’s key to provoking the appropriate emotion and highlight those moments. And your reward is to bring about shared levity, sympathetic frustration, secondhand embarrassment.
It’s powerful stuff, really, when you lay it out in those terms, which is one reason why the general public prefers to take in information in this way: it’s all the plausible deniability of being affected by something you like for other reasons, mixed with the palatability, simplicity, and clarity of a prearranged path to follow through the forest of facts and figures.
But let’s focus on the personal, rather than the pastoral, political, or popular; to frame an argument, or even to convey substance, one is often advised to write it out with a series of charming parables. (Or, failing such wisdom to offer, to present it in anecdotes, which are the worse sort of vignette, as they haven’t stood the test of time but the test of twenty minutes and the most-self-indulgent excesses of the speaker’s own capricious memory.)
Whether you’re listing out everything you’ve done that day to some poor sap who only asked out of misguided courtesy, writing out a five-paragraph introduction for a twenty-five-paragraph essay, or regaling the party’s other attendees with a charming, overlong joke to which you’ve forgotten the punchline: make it a story, common wisdom cries from the rafters, and others will listen.
This is an old tool. Folktales, myths.
It’s because of the preponderance of this advice and its examples, primarily, that I’m surprised that ‘what a story is’ is often reflexively supplied with the wrong answer or no answer at all.
I would normally put some caveats and qualifiers on the main point, but I expect that if you’re reading this, you’re reasonably well-acquainted with the level of confidence I normally have with frame proclamations and can infer that it applies from this sentence instead.
Stories are about decisions.
There are other ways to retrofit an amusing encounter with a telemarketer into something worth hearing, or to script out a blockbuster motion picture. Those alternatives may be better placed to accommodate fabrication within constraints, but the model on which they’re based is necessarily reliant upon assumptions. Objective, perimeters, shared cultural context on a small or large scale.
Whatever’s at work there is reducible to the white-room truth proposed here, because to say ‘about’ is to mean ‘composed of.’ The atomic unit of a book, movie, or campfire recollection is the decision.
The main model of which I’m aware which opposes this statement is the ‘trinity:’ that a story, whether fiction or nonfiction, is manufactured from three parts, like so:
‘Plot’ is our list of events: what happens at each step? What connects the two? If someone’s telling you a story, this person is passing you information. Take that information in its totality, strip out the details that are ‘unnecessary’ or ‘unimportant,’ and you get the plot.
‘Sidequests’ are plot, but a lesser, tangential form. Anything that rounds down to insignificance, that anyone wouldn’t notice at all were it removed, isn’t. A description of putting socks on, maybe, when the story is instead all about putting on gloves and hats, priding itself on its exploration of the complicated moral question of which to don first.
‘Character’ is our term for any agent that factors into the story with its own motives, whether fully described or unrealized, left to assumption. Anyone taking action, meaningful or otherwise, is a character. Inanimate objects are not characters, animals are not characters, etc., barring some fictional perspective that grants these beings a form of interiority.
‘Setting’ finds a synonym, generally, in the more colloquial ‘world’ of the story. Any space and time in which the story takes place is part of the setting. Here, too, we find our factors external to any character within the story.
A society is part of the setting, because it doesn’t have its own motives except in aggregate. It can’t be characterized as an actor in and of itself, despite such easy summary. Events outside of the story are set dressing as well: consider the difference between history, the yet-unseen future, and what’s happening right now, in the stories you tell.
Some of these definitions are self-referential in parts, or seem to rely on each other. They would be clearer, perhaps, were they simplified and condensed, but I think it’s important to note, for a person seriously interested in the distinctions, that the categories are somewhat fuzzy, if not variable.
Meaning: these categories overlap because they feed into each other, and any attempts to wrestle them apart are forced to reckon with the inextricable truth that:
A plot is events that happen to, around, and in reaction to the characters; characters only exist, only leap out of the setting, within the confines of a plot that contains them; setting is conveyed when it’s new to the audience, but more often when the plot demands that we understand some particular facet of its construction.
In fact, we can express the causality present here with a neat diagram as before:
This is the engine which drives the telling of a good story. Now, based on the specifics, you might imagine the arrows as having different sizes. A story set in the current year, involving a purchase of moldy fruit at the corner store, will have small arrows all around. There may be a narrative taking place, but it’s not particularly grand.
Which isn’t to say it can’t be interesting, but the juice usually has to come from somewhere. A character whose defining trait is an unchanging stoicism may shrink the red arrow into insignificance, while the yellow and blue arrows hold you at the edge of your seat. A setting fixed, set in its ways both locally and globally, may blunt the impact of the blue arrow, but still provide a worthy backdrop for the conversion of changes in plot to those in character. So on.
But if this is a cycle, it must start somewhere. The recycling process, to throw in another analogy that doesn’t quite align, begins with manufacture. (Here I refer not to the vagaries of an author’s process, “where does a story start,” but to analysis of the finished product.)
The three arrows kick off with a change in setting or in character. (As in the first diagram, plot is the purest output, a result of the other two, progression along the step function rather than a step in itself. For a story to ‘begin with plot,’ to me, seems almost to be a tautology.)
The arrows start there because it’s where decision-making begins. You will notice the word “decision” in the above diagram, and note that there are only a few dozen words in it, and assuredly conclude that it must be important. (“Orion, that seems kind of circular.” No, it’s triangular. Keep up.)
Jokes aside, a character taking action has made a choice between actions to take. That’s what drives the rest of it.
(This statement isn’t exactly axiomatic, though, though to me it makes sense intuitively, so I’ll posit one frame within which it’s somewhat obviously correct, and attempt to demonstrate that it’s at least broadly applicable.)
The natural conclusion is that there must be some other reason why the story is compelling. This is not a misapprehension, exactly, as it’s not wrong, but generally relies on several assumptions to get there, each mostly unfounded.
An important first step here is to realize that any character has a multitude of options at any time, and can pursue many actions. Most of them are counterproductive, more-or-less impossible due to resource costs, or otherwise inaccessible in practical terms. They do, however, exist.
Even if our hero is kidnapped, tied up to a chair, blindfolded, he may be scheming a plan of escape, attempting to think through the villain’s plan, reflecting on the failures of the mission which landed him in such a sticky situation, or thinking up a quip to deliver upon his inevitable rescue.
Now, just as many of these possible options are not, for the most part, actually available to our characters, many of the decisions they create aren’t interesting. They don’t merit inclusion in the text, film, or oral recollection because the difference between the outcomes they’re sure to produce is minimal, the outcome doesn’t matter at all to the audience or the character, or the correct choice is obvious.
To have included a scene in which a character cooks breakfast, one of the following is true: the story is sprawling enough to swallow such trivialities without complaint; cooking breakfast is a vehicle for more important information; the piece of fiction has some unusual purpose behind it, and is therefore unconcerned with being good; it’s poorly written.
So you can understand that the quantity of ‘decision points’ included in the story, especially as regards the number which are highlighted explicitly, is largely artificial, just as the narrative is. There are few constraints other than making them meaningful, so their quantity doesn’t factor into a measure of how meaningful the discrete ‘decisions’ that make it in are.
I had a conversation recently in which my interlocutor put forth the following idea, paraphrased: all games can be considered turn-based. Even real-time games, with no formal turns whatsoever, can be sliced into individual thin slices of time; the width of these slices is the minimum time necessary for a player to react to incoming information. Each slice, therefore, is as reducible a unit as is useful, and therefore constitutes the atomic turn which those involved much consider.
The same can apply to the setting of our story. Repeatedly, in very small increments, our character is given opportunities to make a decision. In a sense, the significance of a character’s decisions can be summed up by taking the integral of an imaginary function which estimates the volatility of possible outcomes at any given point.
If you tell someone a story, a good one, with a good cliffhanger, the question you’re asked is “what happened next?” If you’re the protagonist, as is usually the case, it’s “what did you do?” It’s a question that applies at any point in the narrative, but the skill in the telling, the authorship, is determining when to halt to emphasize a particular decision.
There are other ways to approach the construction or deconstruction of a given tale, but I think this one is easy to apply, not especially context-reliant, accurate, and irreducible to something that more fully encapsulates a given situation you’re trying to discuss.
(For example, the “beat” model of screenwriting; maybe that’s the smallest unit that a script page can handle, but one beat holds many decisions within it, like a cruise ship set on a particular course, and to fail to consider them because the tools you’re working with are clunky seems like a recipe for passing up subtlety in your storytelling.)
The next question to ask is: in what changes does adopting this perspective result?
If you listen to movie review podcasts, it’s one more lens through which to form a more informed diagnosis regarding what’s made a movie unsatisfying to watch, or why a particular outcome felt cathartic.
If you write blog posts with an arc behind them, explicit or implicit, it gives you an ironclad guideline to follow: heighten the decisions.
‘Meaning,’ ‘significance,’ etc., are rarely bad or misleading goals to pursue. At worst, you get a sort of attempted poignancy that doesn’t quite land, maybe coming across as maudlin, but it’s much more interesting and easier to revise than something without any gestures towards weight or impact.
In spinning a yarn, you’re attempting to rouse specific emotion or incite particular thought in your audience, and too much is better than too little in the same way that a wild haymaker can still knock someone out.
Many stories can be improved with the following sub-rules of thumb:
design a character such that the choices you have architected for it to face are maximally compelling, first and foremost: in virtue and vice; priority and value; familiarity and exploration
produce a setting within which hard decisions can be made along those axes: both sides might matter, or new dimensions made available or revealed, or the mundane artificially heightened
the plot, as it is, is made of connective tissue, stitches between the movements, and the movements themselves: one decision after another, surrounded by events which demonstrate that which we must know to interpret them.
The admitted interreliance of these still-separate elements is responsible for some spillover between supposedly discrete pieces of advice. These sorts of guidelines can be applied iteratively, though, and the ease with which the ‘interlinked’ process can be broken down demonstrates that it can be done further, in micro-plots, -settings, -characters.
When you’re just telling somebody about your day rather than tossing your exorbitant silver-screen budget into the nearest trash can large enough to take it, these ideas apply on a smaller scale.
You have your character, but you tease out the elements of uncertainty. Throwaway lines emphasize the stakes at hand as you approach the butcher’s window. Will you haggle for the cut of meat?
Establish your fluency with discomfort before, or your disregard for price, and the result is something to hang your hat on instead of a dreary relation of a confrontation that never took place. Something of a movement, a build and release rather than a flat, boring lack of expectation.
Your setting is, of course, the world we live in, the society: emphasize its differences, its relevancies and spots of color on a grey, bland canvas. Was the counter soaked in blood, aged, used, long-worn— or just replaced?
A plastic screen, smudged— or streaked with traces of cleaning fluid? The chalkboard at the back: was it crowded with prices of cuts, was there a sketch of a cow cut into parts in scraggly, unsteady writing, or was it neatly printed with a welcoming slogan?
What information did you use to make the decision, in other words?
The plot follows as these elements crash together: on what basis did you come away with the outcome you earned, and then:
Did you fear it, blundering into a negotiation nevertheless rather than shy away? Were you confident, but intimidated by the treatment of another customer and savvy to the margins at play, settle for the first offer, which was close to a cut-rate anyway?
(You may notice that this is a form and function of advice similar to that to which an individual might hew were the goal, instead of writing a good, entertaining, even instructive story, to create one with a deliberate theme. This is mostly an accident —I noticed it a few paragraphs back— but I suppose it applies just as well to something didactic or fairy-tale as your more usual cases.)
Of course, doing this all at once is the puzzle of putting a story together: you choose the incidents, their incidence, the individual prominence of each, and tear away that which doesn’t support any one of them.
It is more difficult to do this without making a habit of it. I suspect that people are often flummoxed by requests for charming anecdotes because they don’t. More often, alternatively, they haven’t bothered to unearth grist for the mill in the form of mildly impactful, mildly interesting decisions which can be neatly painted and packaged.
alright. I think that’s it for the free association.
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They read my posts.
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all the best, a share of the mediocre, and some of the worst, in the ideal quantities such that you might grow and prosper,
Orion