Lost Finds Story

December 1, 2008 By

Maybe I was a little too hard on JJ Abrams in my last post. After all, he is telling stories for television, and television requires viewers to keep watching. On network television, shows that keep viewers watching stay on as long as they can continue doing that. It is rare for a show on one of the major networks to end just because the story has been told.

The creators of Lost have maintained that they have known the entire story since the pilot episode. This is utter nonsense. In 2005, the first season, Damon Lindeloff, one of the producers/writers said in an interview:

Every mystery that we present on the show? What is the monster? Where does Ethan come from? Why hasn’t Claire had her baby yet?? All those are questions that we know the answers to.

He follows that up by saying

As the show progresses it won’t venture too far into science fiction as its mysteries unfold. We’re still trying to be … firmly ensconced in the world of science fact. I don’t think we’ve shown anything on the show yet … that has no rational explanation in the real world that we all function within. We certainly hint at psychic phenomena, happenstance and … things being in a place where they probably shouldn’t be. But nothing is flat-out impossible. There are no spaceships. There isn’t any time travel.

Anyone who watched last season knows they’ve tossed that out the window. Which of course means that he could not have known how the past season ended at the time of the interview. Which means they didn’t know the whole story while they were telling it.

In a group interview for Nightline in 2006 Abrams as much as admits this.

And we kept getting these calls: “You have to shoot an ending so we can air this as a movie.” And we asked, “Well, what’s the end? How do you end it?” It’s sort of the beginning of something. We didn’t know how to wrap it up. How do you do it?

These guys are good enough storytellers to know all of this. They know they needed an end. Stringing out the story will only frustrate the audience. The third member of the team, Carlton Cuse said in the same interview,

Certainly Twin Peaks was a cautionary tale in terms of basically frustrating an audience by never giving any answers and/or by also focusing on one central mystery and putting so much emphasis on that mystery that once that mystery is solved — in that case “Who killed Laura Palmer?” — then everyone’s interest in the show goes away.

And, in fairness to these guys, they understand all of this. They know you cannot have a good multi-season arc unless you know when and how it ends. As Lindeloff said in the New York Times,

We didn’t know whether the mythology we constructed had to last two more seasons or seven more seasons. And that was driving us crazy because we didn’t know how fast it was going to play out…. the pragmatic reality of the network television business is we don’t own the show. We don’t get to decide when the show ends.

And, Carlton Cuse said

It’s time for us to find an endpoint to the show. It’s a struggle for us, because we don’t know if we have three years, four years or more to go. If we had an endpoint, then we could figure out where everything goes.

Well, they now have that endpoint. ABC announced that the 2009-2010 season will be the last for Lost. I’ve started watching again, because it means they know how many episodes are left, and can write out the rest accordingly.

They had a beginning, which they nailed. They tried to tell the middle, and started to flag. They now have an end and we can all watch as the whole story gets told.

Lets just hope that Abrams and crew know how to show us what’s in the box. Otherwise they’re all box and no gift.

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Story Secrets

November 25, 2008 By

One quick way to know the story your reading is being spun by an inferior storyteller? Secrets.

Is there a character, or worse, more than one character, who has a secret? Do they let someone else in the story know they have a secret, but won’t reveal it? Is this secret crucial for the protagonist to move towards his goal?

Cheap. Suspense.

The storyteller is doing this so you know there is a secret, and wants you to keep reading the story to find out what it is. Though I’ve seen this in some bad suspense novels, I see it far more often on television.

The classic example is The X-Files, where Mulder kept getting a little closer to the Big Answer, only to have the rug pulled out from under him every time. He was Charlie Brown and Cancer Man was Lucy holding the football. Viewers, and maybe even Chris Carter, tired of this and eventually the show spiraled downward off the air.

Of shows that are still on the air, 24 does this constantly (at least they did when I still watched it, in the first 2 or 3 seasons). Someone knows something that Jack needs to know, but they won’t tell him until he does something for them first. This keeps the reader on the hook until the next secret comes along.

Good storytellers avoid this. They build suspense by making you wonder what a character is going to do, not what a character knows. By only making a character’s knowledge interesting, the storyteller has neglected to make the character interesting.

There is one storyteller working today who walks the line between these worlds, though more often on the side of the secrets. JJ Abrams, producer of Alias, Lost, and Fringe, takes pride in this style of storytelling. In his TED Talk, (JJ Abrams: The Mystery Box), he appears onstage with a box. He explains that this was a box of mystery prizes he ordered from the back of a comic book when he was a kid, and has never opened it. He says that the mystery of what’s in the box is far better than what is actually in the box. Unfortunately, his storytelling reflects this as well.

In his new show Fringe, the main character is haunted by her dead lover/partner who apparently knows stuff. When she asks him what’s going on, he replies, “I can’t tell you now.” Now. He can’t tell her now. Because if he did, we would know also, and then what would keep us coming back week after week?

And this is the point. Television requires people to keep watching the show week after week. Storytellers like an arc. Combine these two factors, and you have a badly designed story. An arc that never resolves itself, and eventually wears out the storyreader.

Abrams biggest show, Lost, is an example of this. I went digging around in old interviews and found some interesting information about the development of the show. But, I’m out of time right now, so I need you to come back next week before I can tell you what I learned.

(See how cheap that is?)

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Storytelling and Storyreading

November 19, 2008 By
  • tell :
    1. to relate in detail
  • read:
    1. to receive or take in the sense of
    2. to interpret the meaning or significance of

Thus storytelling is the relating in detail of a story, and storyreading is taking in the sense of a story and interpreting its meaning or significance.

I am a storyreader.

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Everything Is A Story, Redux

November 13, 2008 By

When I was in the corporate world, my personal bête noire was PowerPoint. It is a massive timesink, and its potential to cause great boredom is limitless. 99% of all presentations I’ve seen, and I’ve seen a lot, were simply bulleted versions of what the speaker was saying. But, oh the time said speaker spent noodling that deck, deciding on diamonds versus dots, or bold versus italic. Inevitably, there would be printouts of the deck for everyone, which always made me wonder why they didn’t just email me the printout, then use the presentation time to just answer questions about the deck, rather than walking everyone through it. Instead we are given the same information three times in three formats.

During one major project, I made my opinion of PowerPoint so well-known that whenever someone started up a presentation, all eyes turned to me. When we went to a major software vendor’s Silicone Valley headquarters, and they showed us their software as static PowerPoint slides, I started to ask if we were going to be able to see the actual software. My CFO held me back, and laid into them far worse than I would have ever done.

After I started consulting, I had to work with sales reps directly, and few people love PowerPoint as much as salespeople (except for maybe consultants). I watched one salesman take two weeks to build a deck, then panic when the client asked him a question in the middle of the presentation. He broke out into a sweat, and forgot how to advance the slide. Another salesman had a deck that was so out-dated that prospects would point out errors in it during presentations, yet he continued to use it for the few remaining months I worked with him. I once had a project manager who used the same deck for years, but still read aloud directly from his notes in order to avoid going off script and messing up the whole presentation.

All of these problems are based in one basic emotion: fear. If PowerPoint is good for one thing, it is being a mask. Most presentations are given in darkened rooms, and people in the audience are watching the screen rather than the person speaking. It takes the focus off the speaker and re-directs it at something else. It is a classic magician’s trick, usually done so the viewer will not notice the performer pulling something out of a sleeve. But with PowerPoint, it is done so the viewer will not notice the wet spots under the arms, or the flop sweat on the speaker’s upper lip. PowerPoint is a crutch for bad public speakers.

The problem is that most companies think it makes people better public speakers.

I was frequently asked, when I expressed my opinion about PowerPoint, what I would do instead. My answer was always the same: uninstall it from every machine, and give everyone a copy of Henning Nelms’ Magic and Showmanship . I have owned at least three copies of this book, and have given them all away to friends and colleagues. Though its main focus is on teaching would-be magicians how to create a compelling stage presence, it is invaluable for anyone who wants to create a story to present to an audience.

Inevitably, these people would then ask me, what does that have to do with PowerPoint and presentations? My answer, again, was always the same: Everything is a story.

From the formation of the Himalayas to the pile of leaves on your front stoop, from the history of humanity to the sparrow chirping on your windowsill, all of these things have stories, are stories. Whether or not the story is interesting is in the presentation. Though I have seen PowerPoint used in a compelling way once or twice, it is not something that makes anyone’s presentations better. It is simply a tool. Only by understanding what we want to do can we do it well. Put me in the New Yankee Workshop with a pile of lumber, and I’ll build a pretty crappy bookshelf. Teach me carpentry, and with some simple tools and that same pile of lumber, I’ll build a better one.

Give a consultant a laptop and a script, and PowerPoint quickly becomes PowerNap. Give an accountant some basic storytelling skills and an awareness of narrative, and a budget variance report can be, well, not uninteresting.

What the hell does this have to do with anything? Did this suddenly become a corporate blog? Hardly. Everything is a story. Understanding the basic tools and techniques of storytelling allows one to extract meaning from the profound or the mundane, from the Big Bang or the balance sheet

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What Is My Obsession?

November 3, 2008 By

“Find your obsession.”

Tough words, from Merlin Mann. Tough for me anyway.

I have never been one to obsess about any one thing for very long. This world is far too interesting and life is far too short to devote myself to one tiny sliver of a sliver of it. I learn about one thing, and after it increases my knowledge of the world, I usually move on to another subject.

Many other people do the same thing, and, when I started this blog, I thought this was its topic: learning about learning. But that really doesn’t interest me. I don’t really care how I learn, except for how I might do it better or faster. Instead, I launched it as a story about learning, how learning about the world can change someone. That, I realized, was the arc of my blog.

Though I had an arc, I still didn’t have the topic, the obsession. What about those subjects I consistently spend time with, those things that are a regular part of my life? Reading and writing have been constants; I’ve been doing both as long as I can remember. I started birding 10 years ago and I still make it out into the bush several times a year. In the past 18 months, critical thinking (the subject of my other site) has become a more prominent part of my life. But I would call none of these obsessions. They are tools to help me understand the other subjects.

What, then, did all of the items on my list have in common? Why would I have selected those things, why were they important? When I made the list, and when I have subsequently amended it, I thought the items on it would enable me to understand what it was to be human at the beginning of the 21st century. But, I knew there was more to it, an undercurrent beneath all of the items, something I couldn’t quite see.

In order to find it, I had to find the obsession. To do that, I asked, “What is my weakness? What do I find it difficult to stop doing?”

Until a few years ago, I finished every book I read, and never walked out of a movie or changed the channel before the end of the TV show. Though I have started edging away from this compulsion, I can count on one hand the total number of books I’ve left unfinished and movies I’ve walked out of.

This was my weakness: I have to finish a story.

I looked back over the list, and I saw it. Every item was about story. Either a story of my own life, or a tool to help me see a bigger story.

Shit.

I was left with a personal blog about story and narrative. Like thousands of other blogs.

I looked again, and realized there was something more, though. All of the items were pieces of a big picture. They are an attempt to uncover the story of being human, a mini-story trying to find the truth of the mega-story.

I’m left with being one infinitesimal story about trying to understand The Story.

The Story is my obsession.

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So, Then, What Is a Story?

January 15, 2007 By

After reading all of these books about story and narrative, I now have a clearer view of what a story is and what narrative is. Though I am not certain I can put my definitions into a single, succinct sentence, I believe I can illustrate them through example.

More than 2000 years ago, Aristotle said that all stories must have a beginning, a middle, and an end. This is still true today, though they do not need to presented in that order. Take, for example, a very simple story: “The man fell down the stairs and died.” Not exactly a great story, but it does have a beginning (implied, in that the man was at the top of the stairs to start), a middle (he fell down the stairs), and an end (he died). Changing the order of the words in the sentence does not change the basic events or character of the story, but instead changes its narrative. “The man died after falling down the stairs.” The end is presented first (the man died), then followed by the middle and the beginning. Two modern film examples, Pulp Fiction and Memento, present the story in a manner that is significantly out of order, but they are both still coherent, even compelling, stories.

Entities, or characters as I will henceforth call them, are essential to a story. As a sentence must contain both a subject and a predicate, so must a story contain both character and action. In the above simple story, “the man” is the character. The story becomes a little more fleshed out if I simply change the words from “the man” to “my grandfather,” for now I have given the reader a little more information. The reader might picture an elderly man falling down the stairs, and the story has a little more pathos. In this sad, but relatively uninteresting story, the character has merely been acted upon.

I could add to the story by defining the reason he fell down the stairs, say he slipped on a roller skate, or I can expand both character and action by either showing how the fall was caused by his own actions, or by showing his reaction to the fall.

“My grandfather fell down the stairs, and just before he died, he popped back up on his feet, and said ‘Ta-da!’”

The character’s reaction to his imminent death competely changes the feel of the story. It is far less pathetic than before, as “my grandfather” has changed from a frail, elderly man into a vibrant, comical person. The character and the action have been unified into one complete whole, with each essential to the other.

But, does this necessarily make it a “good” story? Probably not. To further expand on the above story, I can add elements to both story and character, and at the same time alter the order in which the events are told. Thus, I am both adding to the story and changing the narrative at the same time.

“Ta-da!”
Those were my grandfather’s last words. He had been a vaudevillian as a teenager, and never lost his flair for the dramatic. One Sunday, when the whole family was gathered for dinner, he went upsatirs to use the bathroom. On his way back down, he lost his footing, and started to tumble down the stairs. As he reached the bottom, he somehow managed to jump to his feet, spread his arms wide, look at the assembled guests, and exclaim, ‘Ta-da!’ We later discovered he had broken his neck in the fall, and I still wonder how he managed to pull off this last theatrical gesture.

By putting the end of the story at the beginning, I have changed the narrative, and changing the narrative in such a way has arguably made it a better story. To make the story less predictable, I have added suspense (why were his last words “ta-da”?) It has also made the end seem more inevitable (of course that’s why, he’s an entertainer). Whether or not this final version is a good story, I am not the one to say. (Incidentally, it is pure fiction.) But, I can state with certainty, that it is a better story than “The man fell down the stairs.”

Thus, I come to these definitions: A story is a limited sequence of events with a distinct beginning, middle, and end, in which entities (characters) act or are acted upon. Narrative is the manner or medium in which the story is told. A good story is that which is not predictable, but somehow seems inevitable. These are by no means my final definitions, but for now they work. They are quite sloppy, but in my mind, coherent enough to proceed.

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Hollywood Stories

January 4, 2007 By

Syd Field is apparently the pre-eminent authority on screenplays in Hollywood. It is said that some agents and producers will not even look at your screenplay unless you have read all of Field’s books. At the same time, there are many who blame him for the lack of orginality sometimes exhibited by Hollywood. One reviewer at Amazon describes it as, “quite simply, the book that ruined Hollywood movies.” All of this because Field put into writing, in 1979 in his book Screenplay (I read the 2005 edition), the basic structure of American films.

“To tell a story, you have to setup your characters, introduce the dramatic premise (what is the story about) and the dramatic situation (the circumstances surrounding the action), create obstacles for your characters to confront and overcome, then resolve the story.” (p3)

This is the core of what Field wants the aspiring screen writer to know, and it is called the Three Act Structure. In the first act, called Setup, the writer sets up the story, establishes characters, launches the dramatic premise, illustrates the situation and creates relationships between characters. It is usually the first half-hour of the movie, and in Field’s paradigm, ends with a plot point, usually the Key Incident, but also sometimes called the Inciting Incident. Field defines his plot points as “connect[ing] the acts, usually by hooking into the action and moving it in another direction.”

Robert McKee, in Story, states that “the inciting incident radically upsets the balance of forces in the protagonist’s life.” (p189) Typically, this incident can also be the first major event of the plot, and, in a piece of advice for any storyteller, McKee adds, “as a rule of thumb, the first major event of the Central Plot occurs within the first 25% of the telling. This is a useful guide, no matter what the medium.” (p200)

It is also at this point where the writer usually defines the character’s dramatic need. Field defines this as “what does the main character want to win, gain, get, or achieve during the course of the screenplay?” This is what drives the entire story, and Field gives a few examples: Frodo’s quest to destroy the ring, or Jake Giddes’ need to discover who set him up in Chinatown.

After Field’s first plot point, comes Act 2, Confrontation, where the main character encounters obstacles that keep him from obtaining his dramatic need. This act, according to Field, should be approximately one hour. In his book Good Scripts, Bad Scripts, Thomas Pope helps explain how the second act should move the story through to its only possible conclusion. He writes, “each scene should present a new problem or expand on an old one, creating a narrative imperative that powers the story past any hesitancies or questions.” (p177)

At the end of Act 2 comes another plot point, and then finally Act 3, Resolution. Act 3, simply stated, is when the protagonist’s dramatic need is either achieved or not.

This structure is one of the things that irks people about Field. Another reviewer at Amazon said, “This book is much oriented around following a certain structure.” She gave the book one star out of five. I think the people who are negative about Field’s paradigm might be misunderstanding his goals. He clearly states many times during the book that he is defining a form, not a formula. The difference being the same as the difference between soup and a recipe for chicken noodle soup: one is general outline of how things generally should be, the other a strict path from which one should never deviate. Field is merely offering a structure that he has seen work (and most importantly to him, sell) in Hollywood innumerable times. It is also a revision of Aristotle for the 21st century. After all, Aristotle defined a good tragedy as having three distinct parts: beginning, middle, and end. Field has given them different names, and suggested exactly what action each should contain.

Another objection is his seeming over-emphasis on plot and structure, with no really useful advice about developing character. While his advice on how to develop characters did seem a bit thin, he clearly believes that character and plot are equally important, and inextricable. To him, the subject of the film is the action and the characters, or Aristotle’s objects of mimesis. He is fond of quoting Henry James: “What is character but the determination of incident? And what is incident but the illumination of character?”

Overall, Field is very enlightening, at least to someone who has no plans to ever write a screenplay. I doubt I’ll ever watch a film in the same way again, as I’ll always be looking for the plot points and inciting incidents. But, learning about the craft does not detract from the art. If anything, it gives me more respect for what the artist has to do to create a successful story, and has made me anxious to continue my study of film.

Field has also helped the idea of story solidify a little more in my mind. Though he doesn’t define story as such, he gives a sort of definition in the negative.

“All drama is conflict: without conflict you have no action, without action you have no character, without character you have no story.”

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King Hollywood

December 30, 2006 By

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.

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Narrative vs. Story

December 19, 2006 By

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.

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Aristotle's Poetics

December 13, 2006 By

For 2300 years, this book has loomed over everyone who has ever tried to tell a story. Even those who would deny Aristotle’s influence must admit that, by ignoring his prescriptions for good storytellying, they are tacitly acknowledging that they must grapple with him. The book starts with a line that has been quoted perhaps more than any other line in all of literary criticism: “Tragedy is the imitation of an action.” This is what he calls mimesis, and it has defined literature ever since.

After thus defining poetic tragedy, he attempts to empirically define what makes such literature great. He uses examples from his time, most of which have not made it to our own, and breaks down tragedy (or for our sake, drama or literature) into its component parts; by doing so, he hopes to reveal a universality of quality.

“Every tragedy must have six parts, which parts determine its quality.” These are plot, character, diction, thought, spectacle, and song. Of these 6, 3 are ignored almost completely in the text (diction, spectacle, and thought), and one is analyzed in a way as to make it irrelvant to any but the most studious scholar of ancient Greek poetic meter (song). Which leaves plot and character, and plot is primary in Aristotle’s formulation.

In Aristotle’s definiton, all stories must have a beginning, a middle, and an end. While this seems self-evident, it is the key to everything. He elaborates further on this idea with what he calls the Unity of Action, in which the drama presents a single, unified action or series of events. He further states that the unity of a story cannot be Unity of Character, for the entire scope of a man’s life cannot possibly be encompassed in a single intelligible story. He writes, “In composing the Odyssey [Homer] did not include all the adventures of Odysseus…. but he made the Odyssey and likewise the Iliad, to center round an action that in our sense of the word is one.” It defines why a story can resonate with us, as it defines a self-contained unit that we comprehend as its own piece of reality within a given timeframe.

He further states that there are two types of plot, simple and complex. A simple plot is one where the action is one and continuous; a complex plot follows a straight path, until it encounters Reversal, where the action veers around to its opposite, and ultimately Recognition, a change from ignorance to awareness. The complex plot he likens to a knot, in that the action prior to the Reversal is the tying, and the action after is the unraveling. He warns, “Many poets tie the knot well, but unravel it ill.” An obstacle that still vexes many writers.

Much of the text is recommendations like this, seemingly dedicated to helping the writer create good stories. For example, in the section Four Methods of Skillful Handling he writes, “The poet should prefer probable impossibilities to improbable possibilities.” This means that an audience is more likely to believe that a man born on another planet is able to fly on Earth, than they are to believe that an ordinary man could guess a 64-bit encrypted password.

While there is much more that he writes about, I won’t discuss it in detail as it doesn’t relate to my purpose. For now, I am only attempting to discover what a story is, and from Aristotle, I gather two things. First, that a story must contain a beginning, a middle, and an end. Second, that a story must be based around Unity of Action, not character. This part is by far the most controversial, and one that I am certain sends many modern writers and readers into conniptions.

It is also the Great Irony. While reading all of these prescriptive definitions, I could not help but think that Aristotle was the first art snob. The guys who sit around music stores and mock those who don’t share their taste, the film students in university cafes who discuss character arcs, the literature professors who look down their noses at Stephen King, all can trace their origins to Aristotle. He was attempting to define empirically what makes something great, and also therefore to objectively exclude those that do not fit his criteria. His notion of primacy of plot is often scorned today, so the very person who codified art snobbery is derided by his heirs who are using his own weapons against him. No wonder irony is such an often-used literary device.

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