While that is not exactly an original statement (I’d even argue that it’s a cliché), there is always some truth in every banality. If a story can be defined as an account of an event or sequence of events, then novels, films, conversations over dinner with your significant other, string quartets, jazz standards, software programs, scientific theories, religions, earnings statements, all are stories to the people who understand the language in which they are told. Our brains are hardwired to understand things in this way. We walk through the universe in one direction through time, and things happen to us along the way. Our entire lives are stories, so it seems that the easiest way for us to learn anything is through storytelling.

Perhaps I should amend the statement then. Anything created by one person to communicate with another is a story.

I know this statement would get a lot of sneers from the post-modern anti-narrative crowd (if anybody actually saw this blog), but quite frankly, their ideas are merely a fad. For tens of thousands of years, humans have transmitted ideas through story, and a “revolution” of ideas that has lasted a small fraction of our total time on the planet will not change the way we transmit and receive information. It will not change the fact that information is conveyed primarily through story, though it could change the way the story is told. This is why I am now tackling list item #62 – Understand the basic structure of storytelling.

As humans change, so does the story. The early humans sitting around the campfire and listening to Klogg tell the story of how he slayed the saber tooth prairie dog had no need to understand more than the basic elements of their own language to appreciate Klogg’s story. But play for them, or me for that matter, Beethoven’s Quartet in A minor, and, though the sound will probably please them, the subtleties of the piece will no doubt escape them (and me, too). That is the key. We, the early humans and I, have enough of a grounding in story to understand and be intrigued by the music. We recognize a movement of events through time, and are enthralled by it. We can hum along with it, tap our feet to it, but we don’t truly understand it. We have, however, taken our first step towards understanding it, because we know the idea of it is grounded in story, just like Klogg’s tale.

As storytelling changes through time, the basic elements of story do not. They may be told in grunts, on film, in equations, or on saxophones, but they are still stories. So, in order to understand any of these stories in other languages, I need to be able to recognize the fundamentals of story itself. I will, of course, start with what everyone starts with, Aristotle’s Poetics. Though I read it once in college, it probably deserves a re-read before starting on the other texts. Finding the other texts, however, was a little more difficult than I expected. Doing a search on Amazon or Google for storytelling or narrative brought up items in three main categories. The first were items on, literally, storytelling, meaning telling oral stories to an audience. While learning about the craft of storytelling might be somewhat enlightening, these books seem to be more devoted to story selection and performance than actually the roots of story itself.

The second category was books on narrative theory, which seem to be a little denser than what I am looking for. Either that or I’m a little denser than what they’re looking for. I took many of these types of classes in college while minoring in English at a very liberal west coast university. They amused me with their sense of self-importance, but that was about all that amused me in those classes. I always sensed that the professor was struggling to find a reason to be needed, as if one needed a professor to read Dickens in the way that people need a priest to understand god. All of these classes were about some theory or other, and were rarely about the books themselves. All very meta-, which is usually self-perpetuating nonsense, and rarely very enlightening. I know I would much rather read Great Expectations, than some professor’s theory of Dickens. (It reminds me of the old canard about masturbation: do it too often, and you begin to mistake it for the real thing.) However, I did glean enough from these courses to know that there is some value in theory; it is just a matter of wading through the nonsense to find the buried nuggets. With that in mind, I picked up two books on narrative theory. The first, The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, I selected in the hopes that the dons of Cambridge will have already waded through the mire, and will present to me only the pearls. The second book Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film by Benjamin Chatman, I selected because it overlapped into the third category, screenwriting.

I found this to be quite interesting, as I expected most of the hits would come back with links for how-to-write-a-novel manuals. Most of them, though, were about writing for film. This actually makes a lot of sense. As filmmaking is one of the most lucrative forms of storytelling, it must necessarily appeal to the widest audience. Appealing to the widest audience, means being the most comprehnsible to the most people, or in somewhat snootier terms, the lowest common denominator. This is not necessarily a bad thing.

Most films must have certain elements in order to be commercially viable. They should be around 2 hours long, the plot should be relatively simple yet exciting, and the characters should be somewhat interesting. Learning to write a story that is all of these things requires structure and discipline, and this is what these books purport to teach the reader. The first one I picked up was what some considered the classic text in screenwriting, Screenplay: the Foundations of Screenwriting by Syd Field. Many people, while acknowledging Field’s wide influence in Hollywood, consider him to be a hack and his methods to be dated. So, I picked up a second book, aimed at a new style of screenwriting, The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers by Christopher Vogler. Vogler has taken the mythic structure of story as defined by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and adapted it to method for writing compelling screeplays. Basically he has taken George Lucas’ ideas and turned them into a how-to book. I suppose I could re-read Campbell, but discovering how Vogler adapts the concepts into a concrete formula is more interesting to me.

That is, after all, why I am taking this particular path through story. Many people have theories of story, but I am more interested in the practical. What are the elements that make up a story in general, and how do storytellers use these elements to build a complete story? In other words, what makes a story a good story?