Impulse

You know the feel­ing. You get it after read­ing a good book, watch­ing a movie, or lis­ten­ing to a friend’s tale. It’s warm sat­is­fy­ing feel­ing — the feel­ing of a good story. We all know a story when we see one, but what is it about a sequence of words that makes it a story? What dif­fer­en­ti­ates a story from a poem from an abstract word piece? It’s a ques­tion I’ve been pon­der­ing for a while now.

You can ask any­one this ques­tion and they’ll tell you what makes a good story. Depending on their per­son­al­ity, they’ll say that it’s inter­est­ing char­ac­ters, a richly devel­oped world, amaz­ing events, or won­der­ful lan­guage. These do make a piece good, but do they make a story a story? A poem can paint an inter­est­ing por­trait of a char­ac­ter or a fan­ci­ful world, yet have no action take place nor any prob­lem resolved. Is it still a story? Then there’s the Iliad — a poem with enough sto­ries to inspire most of west­ern lit­er­a­ture.
A few months back, I wrote a story about a writer strug­gling to get out of a rut (all authors write this story at some point). I showed it to sev­eral peo­ple and they all thought that, though it was hilar­i­ous, it was miss­ing some­thing. After read­ing it over, I real­ized that the prob­lem was that there was no change. The char­ac­ter was inter­est­ing, the events enjoy­able, but it never went any­where. To make it feel like a com­plete story, I needed to have some­thing change — either he gets back in the groove, or gives up and becomes an Amway sales­man, or even in the last few moments of the story sim­ply real­izes he’s in a rut. Any change will do.
That’s the essen­tial ele­ment that makes a story: change. Change in the pro­tag­o­nist, his envi­ron­ment, or the reader. The change can be overt — rid­ding the world of evil; or sub­tle — a change in the character’s per­cep­tion (or even just the reader’s) like in It’s a Wonderful Life. Whatever it’s form, there needs to be some sort of change. Without it, the piece is just a por­trait or chronol­ogy. While there are many great lit­er­ary por­traits, they feel dif­fer­ent than sto­ries. Right away, we know that there will be no change or res­o­lu­tion, so we can relax and enjoy the descrip­tion. When a piece feels like a story, we wait anx­iously for some­thing to “hap­pen”, and if there is no change, we feel empty.
Change alone won’t make the story good. It’s just the basic struc­ture — sort of like a car that is only a frame and dri­ve­train. It’ll get you from place to place, but you’ll look weird and be a lit­tle sore after­wards. For a “good ride”, you do need all that great ban­ter, believ­able char­ac­ter­i­za­tions, and the rest of the acces­sories. As a writer, I can change the blend of acces­sories to suit my intended audi­ence. Some peo­ple like Mercedes, some like Volvo. Some like screw­ball com­edy, some like Rambo (or so I’m told). It’s impor­tant to remem­ber, though, that char­ac­ter­i­za­tion, etc, are just acces­sories — you still need change to get the thing rolling.

Related posts:

1. Story struc­ture, Joseph Campbell, and choco­late disasters
2. The per­fect story
3. Story time!