Defining Story
Laura J. Mixon August 5th, 2006
Greetings, all, and thanks to the web hosts and my fellow authors for inviting me to play in this great sandbox. For my first contribution to this forum, here is an essay I recently wrote on the nature of story.
At its simplest, a story can be defined as a character in a setting with a problem. These are story’s subatomic particles, if you will. You’ll find exceptions, as storytelling is a highly subjective and idiosyncratic artform, but stories without a character, a setting, and a problem are about rare as anti-hydrogen.
Good stories both entertain us and have characters whose problems we care about. Great stories linger in our minds long afterward – because they strike a chord that resonates with us. That chord that rings in us when a story moves us — that gut-deep feeling, that “aha!” when we have read or watched something that just feels right somehow — is tied to its theme.
A theme can be expressed by a single sentence — a truism or cliche, even — that summarizes what the story is about. “Love conquers all.” ‘The best laid plans go oft awry.” “You can’t take it with you.” “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.” Chris likes to give the example of the Eensy Weensy Spider, a thirty-eight (!) word story whose theme is “Perseverance furthers.” A story whose theme can’t be summarized in a single sentence has no clear theme, and I can pretty much guarantee you that it’s a story that flounders. (Don’t worry if you don’t know your theme when you start out, however; writers often don’t know what it was about till after they’ve finished it…but if you have a completed or mostly completed work, it’s a useful exercise to see if you can work out its theme — or take some of your favorite works, and see if you can boil their themes down to ten words or less.)
A good example of the power of story is One Thousand and One Nights, the medieval Arabian tale of Scheherezade, and King Sharyar. The king’s first wife had been unfaithful to him, and he went mad with rage. He killed his wife, and decreed that he would marry a woman every night, consummate the marriage, and then have her executed in the morning. And so he did. This went on for a while, until, to protect the young women of the kingdom, young queen Scheherezade came up with a plan. She agreed to marry him, and every night she told him a story that ended in a cliffhanger, so that to learn how it ended, he would have to let her live till the next night. Finally, after several years of this, he finally became convinced of her fidelity, and rescinded his decree.
There is an excellent TV movie based on this story called “Arabian Nights.” Scheherezade marries him not only to protect the other young women of the court, but also because she had loved Sharyar when they were both children. Gradually, as they discuss together the meaning of the stories, he begins to find his way out of the trap of terror, alienation, and madness that had led him to be so evil. Her stories, and her courage, redeem him. Ultimately, she saves not only her fellow young women, and the king, but her kingdom, through the power of story. She first distracts him, entertains him, and gradually helps him discover and tap into his own courage and compassion.
Storytelling, thus, has two primary purposes: it entertains us, and it teaches us what it means to be human.
The entertainment elements in stories are things such as:
* Story hooks — the initial setup that draws people in (“I’ve seen a lot of strange things in my day, but I never thought I’d see a dead man hire me to catch his murderer…â€). Steven Spielberg is a master of this (think about the beginning scene of “Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark” — it starts with him fighting off armed thieves with a treasure map in one hand and a whip in the other, and ends with a harrowing escape in a seaplane (snakes in a plane, omg! 
), etc…).
* Clever content – well-crafted plots, eccentric and intriguing characters, witty dialog (Dorothy Sayers’ Peter Wimsey mysteries, the movie “Chicago,” and many older movies, such as the Nick and Nora films, Danny Kaye’s and Kathryn Hepburn’s comedies are some good examples).
* “Eye candy†– clever use of language, exciting or lush music, striking visuals (Ang Lee’s “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” is a good example of this, as are the Wachowshi brothers’ “The Matrix” and Tolkien’s books and Peter Jackson’s movies “The Lord of the Rings”).
Coming in along with all the entertainment elements, though, is something less obvious but, done right, much more powerful: the elements that give the story depth, and these include:
* The characters, and what happens to them, that causes us to identify with them. (Characters can be both entertaining and provide deeper meaning, incidently, which is why I’ve included them in the entertainment elements list as well.)
* The larger themes that linger in our minds – a feeling that we’ve somehow been moved or changed in a positive way.
A good rule to follow when creating fiction — and I believe that an analog of this rule will also apply to interactive storytelling — is that every scene must absolutely do one of four things, and preferably, it should do at least two or three:
1. Provide sensory detail.
2. Illuminate character.
3. Advance the plot.
4. Elucidate the theme.
Many people talk about the trade-off between entertainment and depth. Often you’ll hear it as an argument about the artistic value of a work versus the commercial value. The fact is, there is no intrinsic conflict between high entertainment value and depth of meaning. I repeat, there is no intrinsic conflict between entertainment and depth. It’s a false dichotomy. Some of the world’s storytelling giants were wildly popular in their day. Homer, Shakespeare, and Dickens were the bestselling storytellers of their times. And the works of today’s storytelling giants — Stephen King, Steven Spielberg, and J.K. Rowling — may live on for centuries.
There is one intrinsic conflict, however. The biggest hits are what keep the industry alive, and they come from highly idiosyncratic personal visions on the part of the artists…that just happen to resonate with a large proportion of those who encounter it. There’s a well-known saying in the writing business: “How do you write a bestseller? The same way you write a flop.†There is no surefire way to predict ahead of time whether any particular work will be a success or not.
Here are some basic rules about entertainment versus depth.
1. Entertainment without meaning outsells meaning without entertainment, but neither sells nearly as well as entertainment with meaning.
2. “Story factor†is a blend of entertainment, characterization, and theme.
3. The storyteller’s goal is to optimize these elements of entertainment, characterization, and theme.
4. Entertainment elements must support character and theme.
5. Hits invariably have a high “story factor†(i.e., high entertainment value, great characters and themes).
In short, storytelling is a high-risk business, and the successful companies have figured out ways to effectively manage their creative risks.
Bingo.
I’ve never been a fan of the “theme in one sentence” school of thought. Yes, you might be able to do it, but that generally grinds out everything that makes the topic interesting — all the nuances and complexities and perhaps even contradictions that made me interested in the story. Some of my favorite works, I couldn’t begin to tell you what The Theme of each one is. I can tell you some of the things they’re about, but that’s not the same thing. And I don’t think that a difficulty boiling them down to single sentences in any way means they’re floundering. Clear theme tends, in my experience, to equal preachiness.
Mel Brooks said many times that he wrote The Producers because he knew that the best way to fight Naziism in particular, and bigotry in general, was to belittle it.
And even childish comedies like The 40-Year-Old Virgin, There’s Something About Mary, and Animal House work because they have complete stories as foundations for the gags. Virgin is about how a true heart can find true love–even if the true heart is in the body of a 40-year-old dork who rides a child’s bicycle to his job in electronics store every day. Mary is about how good character wins out over deceit and treachery (yeah, the gross-out jokes and childish humor in Mary is great, but what’s also great is the way that the story establishes that the Down’s syndrome brother freaks out if his ears are touched by anybody but someone he trusts, and how the hero, saying good-by at the end, casually plucks the headphones from the brother’s ear to do so.
Marie, I’d certainly be willing to concede that there is no particular need to extract a story’s theme, in order for the writer to write it, nor readers to read and benefit from it …
The thing about theme is that it has no meaning without the accompanying characters, setting, and other symbols. And to focus on any sort of “message” while you’re writing your story can actually make it come out mechanical and flat. Theme has to emerge from the story, not be imposed upon it. If that’s what you are saying, then you and I are in agreement.
But I find that when people are describing what moved them or grabbed them about a particular work, there was a “something” at the center of it all, and that something can usually be boiled down into something pretty basic about human nature and relationships.
-l.
Oops — I posted when I meant to preview.
Mitch, I think you are exactly right. I think in fact that one of the reasons story is successful in giving meaning to people’s lives is precisely because it is entertaining, even silly, sometimes. Storytelling is not about someone trying to teach lessons; it’s about sharing experiences.
-l.
[...] 2 – Defining Story Laura Mixon at DeepGenre talks about the components of a story. This site is really churning out some great pieces at the moment…see further down this list. (tags: discussion theme setting character components definition books literature fiction story) [...]
Overall, a great overview, but in the way one scientific error can nag at a physicist reading hard SF, I kept being distracted by one detail, and thus I have to nitpick:
It’s more than 38 words.
I’ve heard that version sung at filk circles and seen a picture book of the complete thing (Possibly short one verse).
Lenora, heh! I’d never seen that version. Thanks for sharing.
-l.