When many people consider how to tell a story, they think in terms of plot and character. While these are often the most visible aspects of a story, there is an underlying foundation of principles that support a well-told story. These principles could be compared to a house foundation. Without a solid foundation, the other effects of a house -- its character and design -- cannot be fully enjoyed. In the same fashion, these principles of storytelling are also mostly out of sight, but a badly laid story foundation has effects just as damaging as a badly constructed house foundation.
While these story principles are presented in a particular order, a storyteller can come at these issues from any direction. There is no inherently right or wrong way to understand them.
1) Understanding the human need for stories.
A story is a world where every character, every action, every story element has meaning and purpose. This makes a story fundamentally different from life, which offers facts and ideas that don't necessarily have a clear meaning; events that generate emotional states that have no clear resolution; or, events engage the senses, but not in a meaningful, fulfilling way.
Real life, then, can be chaotic, or appear to lack a desirable purpose and meaning. We don't marry the love of our life...or we do, and things go terribly wrong. Or, the one we love is taken from us by a freak accident. Or, we work hard but don't get the rewards we desire. Worse, they appear to go to someone who appears to be completely undeserving of the reward and honor we have worked to attain.
So real life can be painful, unpredictable, or even wildly rewarding. But in spite of our best laid plans or efforts, we can never predict the outcome of any action or series of actions.
Most people, then, have a need for something that assigns a desirable, discernible meaning and purpose to life. This is what a story does. A story promises its audience a dramatic journey that offers resolution and fulfillment of life-like issues, events and human needs.
2) How stories meet the needs the human need for resolution and fulfillment.
Because stories promise experiences of life having meaning, a story fills a basic human need that life have purpose. All stories, then, from the simple to the complex, revolve around some issue that arises from the human need to experience that life have a discernible meaning and purpose. That allows us to experience states of love, honor, courage. Fear, doubt, revenge. To feel a part of a world, even an imaginary one. To feel the freedom to explore new worlds. Or, to experience a desirable state of the movement of the senses, intellect, or feelings to an engaging, desirable outcome. To experience insights into life we might not see on our own, or see deeply. Only when a story engages the attention of its audience via what a story is about at this deeper, foundation level does a story promise something of value to its audience.
Romeo and Juliet, as an example, is a story not about its title characters, but about the power of love. When readers enter its world, they are led to experience something deep and potent and dramatically satisfying about love. This makes the story Romeo and Juliet totally unlike a life-like, factual telling of the courtship and deaths of Romeo and Juliet. To be told that two teenagers committed suicide because their families kept them apart, and to go over the true, factual events that led up to their deaths, is not the same as to create a story around those same events. The story Romeo and Juliet uses the deaths of Romeo and Juliet to create a deeply felt, fulfilling story about the power of great love.
4) Perceiving how a well-written story is true to its purpose.
While a story premise sets out the overall scope of a story's world, every element within that world must be true to it. To visualize this, consider a race with several runners. It has a beginning, middle and end. The varied actions of the different runners makes the action of the race from its start to finish -- its movement to resolution -- visible and concrete. So far, the same could be said of a factual accounting of the race.
In a story, however, the events of the race and its outcome are arranged by the storyteller to create a particular state of fulfillment for the story's audience, in the same way Romeo and Juliet is shaped so readers can experience a deep sense of the nature of love. So the storyteller understands the why a race matters enough that an audience internalizes its movement to resolution. To be story-like in its movement, then, the outcome of a race would revolve around the nature of courage, or faith and determination defeating overwhelming odds, heroism, victory achieved even in defeat, hard work its own reward, some issue of human need being acted out to fulfillment.
When a story's movement -- on this deeper foundation level -- comes across as unclear, a story's audience can struggle to internalize and assign meaning to the actions of the story's characters and its plot. Such characters and plot events can appear to be life-like, i.e., unclear and unfocused, and not story-like, i.e., acted with meaning and purpose. The result of faulty movement is that the story's audience turns aside. Even when the members of an audience can't consciously identify why a story feels false, false movement jars them out of a state of being able to internalize a story's movement. This is comparable to out-of-tune notes in a song detracting from the experience of listening to the song (unless the out-of-tune notes serve some purpose that satisfies the song's audience).
In the case of Romeo and Juliet, the story is true to its movement because every action and expression of Romeo and Juliet moves this story about the nature of love toward its fulfillment. They become the embodiments of the story. But it is what the story itself is about that gives birth to these characters and assigns meaning to their actions.
5) Perceiving how story elements are arranged in a particular way.
A storyteller arranges the elements of a story to create the effect of dramatic movement toward the fulfillment a story promises its audience. Referring again to Romeo and Juliet, this is a story about the nature of love, but its opening scenes play out the hatred of the Capulets and the Montagues via a confrontation on a street in Verona.
Because Romeo and Juliet is about the nature of love proving itself, it is clear what kind of action generates opposition to that: Hate. In Romeo and Juliet, then, the story starts out by demonstrating the hatred of the Montagues and Capulets, because that shows the depth of hatred the power of love must overcome to prove itself. So the story, in its arrangement of its elements, immediately sets out what's at stake in the story; what is at stake for the story's characters, AND, by extension, its audience; and what love must overcome to fulfill the story.
Again, keep in mind that the opening lines of the story refer to the deaths of Romeo and Juliet, so the story's drama is not over the outcome of its plot, but in the arrangement of its dramatic elements in a way that creates a powerful experience of the nature of love for its audience.
Because a story's arrangement of its elements also creates questions about the outcome of events and character issues, a story generates a continuous pull on the attention and interest of its audience.
10) The Craft of Storytelling.
Part of the craft of being a storyteller means learning to create images with words. That requires a willingness to learn the craft of language, how to use words to create metaphors, evocative descriptions of scenery, strong dialogue, just as being a qualified carpenter or mechanic means a mastery in the use of the tools of that trade. The storyteller must have a mastery of words, or be willing to study and master that craft.
11) Technical knowledge.
To set a story on a ship, one must have some knowledge of ships. To set a story on an airplane, one must have some knowledge of planes.
This is not a call that to set a scene on a ship one must be a ship's captain, but the writer must be clear about what they describe. Otherwise, by lying to the reader in some detail, they give readers a reason to set aside their stories, to question whether the storyteller understands how to fulfill a story's promise in a way that rings true.
12) The desire to be a storyteller.
In the main, one does not become a storyteller out of a desire for wealth, or fame, or prestige, although some do...and a few even succeed for those reasons. People more often write stories because they feel moved to do so. A storyteller's first audience is themselves. The trap for many inexperienced writers is mistaking their feelings about their stories for the craft of writing stories that evoke potent experiences of fulfillment for their audiences.
13) Understanding the role of characters in a story.
Characters in a story operate to make a story's movement visible and concrete. But a storyteller needs to make the subtle distinction between what a story is about on a deeper, foundation level, from what's at stake for its characters.
In Romeo and Juliet, Romeo is hot blooded and impulsive. He will not be denied the woman he loves...even if death is an obstacle that must be overcome. So Romeo is a character of great strength of will. All characters in well told stories must have this strength of purpose. Whether the issue is love, greed, revenge, compassion, hate, jealousy, characters must be willing to confront and overcome whatever obstacles the story places in their path. Weak characters often fail to offer readers/viewers a reason to internalize their actions because their actions fail to generate a quality of movement. No movement, no drama. No drama, no fulfillment. No fulfillment, no audience.
14) Perceiving how a plot operates to make a story's movement concrete and dramatic.
This issue -- understanding what a plot is -- is easily the most misunderstood in writing.
The purpose of a plot is to make visible and concrete the dramatic movement of a story. A plot serves to make the movement of a story dramatic and potent by taking character concerns and intertwining them with what's at stake in the story itself, then compelling characters to act to resolve what's at stake in the story while plot-generated events block their actions. As characters face increasing obstacles, they must strive with greater purpose to shape the outcome of a story. This generates the effect of a story's plot, a heightening of a story's movement to fulfillment.
To illustrate, consider the novel The Hunt For Red October. On the surface, this story might appear to be a plot driven thriller about a Lithuanian-descended commander of a Russian nuclear submarine attempting to flee to America and freedom. But on a story level, this story is about a clash between freedom and authoritarianism. Because many people desire to experience that state where the values of freedom win out over oppression -- which many times doesn't happen in real life -- the story's audience readily internalizes this story's movement. Because the story, in its every action, proves that freedom can, indeed, overcome oppression, it drew in readers and rewarded their interest.
To describe a story's plot is not the same as describing what a story is about on its foundation level, but to understand a story's movement is to see what gives rise to a story's plot.
To conclude...
A storyteller should to be able to perceive what a story is about at its deepest level, and how to move that to a resolution that offers fulfillment to a story's audience. Understand what about the movement of a story engages the interest, the needs of an audience. Such a writer can better perceive how characters, plot devices and POV work to create a dramatic movement of a story toward its fulfillment. How every element of a story works together in its characters, plot, environment and ideas to make vivid and potent a story's world.
That's why I say that at its heart, a story must have an issue at stake that is of consequence to the story's audience. Something the members of the audience will desire to experience in a state of resolution and fulfillment. Love. Courage. Redemption. Renewal. Some issue that revolves around the aching need of humans to feel they matter, that they have a place in the world.
Even though I assign character, plot and point of view as the last of these principles, it is not to suggest that most writers don't come to a story through some insight or interest in a character, scene, or plot. Some issue that pulls at them. That won't let them sleep at night. But the underlying issue I've sought to explore and illuminate here is the why an audience desires stories, the how a story meets those needs of its audience. From that foundation of understanding, a writer can more easily perceive how words create vivid, potent images that move audiences.
The ideas expressed in this essay are developed more comprehensively in my workbook, A Story is a Promise , available on Amazon and Draft2Digital. Each chapter of the workbook concludes with a series of questions designed to help writers integrate this story as promise concept of thinking about stories. Each class is designed to take students from a story idea, through creating a potent, dynamic plot, to deep into the nitty-gritty of writing evocative, potent sentences and visual images.
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