One measure of success for any story must be audience pleasure. And, as loathe as I am to say it, the larger the audience, the more successful the story. This is not to say that the quality of a story can be determined solely by the size of its audience, but that the more people who enjoy it, the more likely that it is an effective story. Currently, no storytellers are as effective as those in Hollywood, and for proof of this we need look no further than Harry Potter.

In 2005, Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince was the best selling book of the year, with a reported 7.2 million copies sold. As we all know, Harry Potter is a publishing phenomenon, the saviour of the book industry, the thing that will get kids reading again, etc. But, if we look at the highest grossing film of 2005, Revenge of the Sith, and divide its gross ($380 million) by $6.41 (average price of a movie ticket in 2005, according to the MPAA), we can conclude that it sold approximately 59 million tickets. Looked at in another way, a movie that sold 7.2 million tickets in 2005, would have landed in 65th place, between Boogeyman and The Legend of Zorro.

The stories that are reaching audiences are being written for film (and television).

Reasons for this, are of course many. Books are more expensive, and take longer to finish than films. People are moving away from printed media to electronic media. Movies are social, books are solitary. The list of reasons is nearly endless. However, Robert McKee, in his book Story sums it up fairly accurately in two quotes. The first, from the introduction, discusses what has happened with literature.

“Over the last 25 years, …the method of teaching creative writing in American universities has shifted from the intrinsic to the extrinsic. Trends in literary theory have drawn professors away from the deep sources of story toward language, codes, text – story seen from the outside.” (p16)

Which is exactly what I encountered in college, and in the Chatman book I read last week. It is as if the examinations of the story, characters, and language have been exhausted, and, in order to be original, people have dreamed up new ways of looking at books that have no relevance whatsoever to what is between the covers.

In the second quote, McKee discusses the three types of plot, and why larger audiences respond to what he calls the Classic or Arch Plot, on which most Hollywood scripts rely.

“Most human beings believe that life brings closed experiences of absolute irreversible change; that their greatest sources of conflict are external to themselves; that they are single and active protagonists of their own existence; that their existence operates through continuous time within a consistent, causally interconnected reality; and that inside this reality events happen for explainable and meaningful reasons. Since our first ancestor stared into a fire of his own making and thought the thought, ‘I am,’ this is how human beings have seen the world and themselves in it. Classical design is a mirror of the human mind.” (p62)

It is because of this that those movies that seem to be a re-hash of old, tired formulas, often do so well at the box-office. It is also the reason that the interesting conversations about art are happening in the film world, and not the book world. The book discussions happen in small presses, weekly book review sections, and specialty blogs, and they rarely discuss the books most people are actually reading. Conversations about film happen on television, in daily newspapers, and around the proverbial water cooler. When was the last time you talked about a book in the break room? When was the last time you talked about a movie, or a television show?

Film and television are experiencing the same surge that books did a century and a half ago. They are the modern idiom. Books have passed this point and are now usually divided into two categories: artistic and popular. Not many people would say that the two overlap with any regularity. Hollywood studios, however, are regularly putting out stories that are both popular and artistic, and this can only be due to good storytelling.

As a lifelong reader, it has taken me a very long time to admit this. Film, and especially television, were always the guilty pleasures of my life, from which I thought I extracted very little beyond the temporary escape from the ordinary. I watched them for the same reason I read Stephen King or Robert Ludlum, sheer escapism and entertainment. As I have started to listen to the film conversation, I have begun to realize that filmmakers are expressing a depth of wisdom that is rarely found in modern literature.

My next step in understanding story, then, is to learn about it from the screenwriting, not the novelistic, viewpoint. McKee was a great starting point, and I will continue with Syd Field and Christopher Vogler. As far as pure story, I’m not sure if these books will help much more than Aristotle, as most are focused on actually writing screenplays. But, they should at least define the structure of story for the screen, and will probably help me with item #36 – Develop an appreciation of film.

After reading Aristotle, I wanted to stay in the realm of theory for a while, so chose to read the books I had picked up on Narrative Theory. As I mentioned before, I had taken many classes in literary theory while in college, but as that was some time ago, I needed a bit of a refresher course. After reading these books, I realized I had probably forgotten most theory on purpose.

Seymour Chatman’s Story and Discourse, was, quite frankly, a waste of time. It was bloated with the kind of self-importance that I loathed at university, and it did little to enlighten me. For Chatman, “Story… is something that exists only at an abstract level.” This is exemplary of the kind of nonsense that just isn’t very helpful to most people. Stories are not abstractions, as they exist in reality for everyone who experiences them (except maybe university professors). While how they are conveyed is extremely important, the medium, contrary to the popular theorist, is not the message. Plus, Chatman seems to hold in contempt certain forms of storytelling. “Comic strips without dialogue, captions, or balloons are relatively pure (if banal) examples of narrative….”

In The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, H Porter Abbot helps refine what is required for a story. He uses simple examples, such as “I fell down,” to represent what he considers a story. He states, “There are two components to every story: the events and the entities involved in the events.” So in the example above, the event is the falling down, and the entity is the speaker, or I. These are Aristotle’s objects of mimesis.

Overall, I found Abbot to be quite enlightening, allowing me to separate story from narrative, which, if I take away nothing else from these books, are actually quite different. Abbot states, “Narrative is the representation of an event or series of events.” If a story is the event or sequence of events, how it is told is the narrative. He further explains, “The difference between events and their representation is the difference between story (the event or sequence of events) and narrative discourse (how the story is conveyed.)” Thus, according to Abbot, narrative is Aristotle’s mode/manner of mimesis.

His examples were very useful, citing newspaper reports to help define how narrative can shape the story, and showing that narrative is how politicians present themselves to their electorates. He acknowledges the power of story in any form, but mostly separates it from what he is discussing. He writes, “Story, you will remember, is something that is delivered by narrative but seems … to pre-exist it.” Referencing Jung’s archetypes (while simultaneously eschewing them) he believes that some stories are universal, and the manner in which they are told changes their meaning. All of this is incredibly fascinating to read, and Abbot does an excellent job of treating all of the stories, and all of their audiences, with respect. However, I am not there yet. I am still trying to completely understand story. Then I must understand the languages in which stories are told. Then and only then can I begin to investigate narrative discourse. Crawl, walk, run.

For now though, I can take away one thing. Abbot writes, “The story is always mediated – by a voice, a style of writing, camera angles, actors’ interpretations – so that what we call the story is really something we construct.” In high school, I had a social studies teacher who was one of those who inspires you your entire life. Every single one of her exams started with the same question: “True or False: All history is an interpretation.” This was the one thing she wanted all students to learn in her class. I didn’t know it at the time, but I’d say Mrs. Lee was a narrative theorist.