People immerse themselves in stories for all kinds of reasons. They want escape or adventure. They care about the characters. They love the world of the story. They love the familiarity of a genre. Many appreciate the “moral of the story,” whether it’s subtly developed or explicitly stated.
Readers sometimes get annoyed when they hear conversations about the story’s allegories or deeper message or hidden structure. Why can’t a story just be a story? Why do academics and gurus have to spoil the immersive experience of a story by breaking it down into patterns and pieces?
Here’s a typical grouse against the analytic breakdown of stories (taken from an online discussion board):
I think some of the analysis that can go on in a classroom for literature can kill the enjoyment of a book. I mean, why does a dude traveling down the road have to be some grand allegory for man’s journey through life? Maybe dude just wanted to go to the store or something.
You could say the same for a piece of music, a painting or sculpture, dance, performance art, or comedy. As E.B. White cracked: “Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. You understand it better but the frog dies in the process.”
Here’s the problem with that way of thinking–and why storytellers must always strive to understand the detailed structure of writing:
If you can’t understand what makes a story work, from the scene-setting to the action to the dialogue to the conflicts to the overall arc of the piece–you’ll never be able to write or perform a great story. You’ll never understand why a reader or viewer likes The Sopranos or Succession or Harry Potter or Sherlock Holmes or Frankenstein, to name just a handful of popular stories.
Miranda makes this point in response to Andy’s smirk in the sweater scene in The Devil Wears Prada:
Andy, the whip-smart intern for Runway magazine, is bemused by the endless conversation and debate about fashion. An aspiring investigative reporter, she has taken the job at the fashion magazine as a way to get started in journalism. But she smirks when she watches her boss and coworkers debate the pros and cons of various fashion choices. What’s the big deal?
She doesn’t understand anything about what makes a piece of fashion succeed or fail. When she buys a sweater, she just thinks she “likes” it, the way an uncritical reader or viewer “likes” a story. She doesn’t understand that her sweater was the result of countless discussions, analyses, creative exploration, A/B testing, fashion shows, and more.
So with any creative enterprise. To produce something at a high level, you must understand the deep structure of that thing. What are the necessary elements of a creation? What goes where, when, and how?
For two millennia, storytellers have started with Aristotle’s narrative arc. From there, they have followed the teachings of Shakespeare on tragedy, Jung on character archetypes, Poe on mystery, and Shelley on horror. Modern storytellers turn to Joseph Campbell on the Hero’s Journey, Robert McKee and Blake Snyder on story beats. More recently, we have benefited from John Truby’s work on genres.
Every time we write, we have to learn these architectural elements anew. Storytelling is not a paint-by-numbers operation. But over the millennia, we have learned a lot about what makes storytelling work. We have learned how to structure a story, how to rceate scenes, how to explore complex issues. Certain storytelling basics, which have evolved over time, are eternal. Follow them or doom yourself with an eminently put-downable story.
