Storytelling, Defined
The simplest possible definition of Story that doesn’t leave out something important.
Story: How & why the world and the people in it CHANGE in response to the protagonist pursuing a goal while coping with conflict.
I might get this tattooed on my forearm.
It comforts me.
The Purpose of Storytelling
Stories are a language-based technology for transmitting wisdom in a memorable and repeatable way.
The reason storytelling is so effective at this, is because stories disguise wisdom as entertainment and/or inspiration in order to circumvent psychological resistance in the audience.
By “wisdom,” I mean lessons important to the survival and thriving of humanity.
That’s not hyperbole.
Storytelling evolved because it helped our ancestors survive in a harsh environment.
Before writing, important lessons about avoiding predators, hunting game, and exploring new lands were encoded in stories because stories made the lessons easier to remember and way more fun to share around the campfire than watching Caveman Dan draw stick figures of his kids in the dirt.
Even today—when saber toothed cats aren’t a concern, and the most popular stories are written down in genres like romance, and fantasy, and science fiction—a good story still transmits information relevant to the prospering of humanity. For example:
Romance novels are about love and lust, which encourages sex and reproduction.
Science Fiction is about innovation and human ingenuity, which leads to better medicines, new ways to harness energy, and so on.
Thrillers and Crime fiction are literally about life and death.
Change
Everything in storytelling is ultimately about change.
If you don’t develop the skill of conveying change on the page in a compelling way, readers will ignore your book.
The more fiction you write, the more you’ll notice how almost every tool in storytelling becomes more powerful when it’s wielded to express change, and how a lack of change in your story kills it dead.
Take this to your tattoo artist:
Theme—aka the “How & Why” of Change in a Story
How and why change occurs in a story, is critically important . . . and interconnected.
In a word: Theme.
Think of theme as the glue that binds together plot and character, and what smuggles the essence of your story into the mind of readers.
Theme is what makes your character’s struggle to reach their goal coherent. Without theme, your protagonist flounders and flails. Their behavior is erratic. Their response to conflict, seemingly arbitrary.
Theme is also what ensures your plot progresses in a way that makes sense. Without theme, your story seems shallow, haphazard, and ultimately pointless.
Finally, theme is what makes a story relevant and meaningful to your readers. Without theme, readers feel little to no connection to your protagonist, and finish your book with no compelling reason to read your next release.
Which would suck.
Some writers will tell you not to think about theme before writing your novel. They say to wait until THE END and hopefully a theme will appear. I have a term for these writers:
Wrong. 1
When a story lacks impact, it’s almost always because the changes in the protagonist and in the world of the story don’t reflect a coherent theme.
That’s because theme is about competing values (values tied to the “human thriving” I touched on above). More specifically, which values ultimately win out as a result of the choices made by the protagonist, as they’re responding to conflict.
It's not enough to have a character simply make choices, the choices have to be meaningful. And choices are meaningful, only when they're made in response to conflict. Because whether it was the right choice (a choice which leads the protagonist closer to their goal), or the wrong choice (the protagonist is even further away from their goal after making the decision)—they learned something in the process.
More on Theme later. Until then, just be aware that, as important as change is in a story, the change must be meaningful and purposeful, and that doesn’t happen by accident; it happens through the adept application of a theme.
1. With all due respect to the masterful Stephen King, who says in his great book ON WRITING: “Good fiction always begins with story and progresses to theme; it almost never begins with theme and progresses to story.”
As I elude to elsewhere, knowledge of craft becomes intuitive once you truly master it, as King certainly has. I’m sure he doesn’t consciously consider theme until after he completes his first draft. But the fact is, he writes in a genre, and every genre is largely defined by the values they explore. If you write in a genre, you can’t help but have an idea of what your theme might be. And your story will only improve if you make the theme explicit (to you, the author, not the reader--not until the climax, and even then they should arrive at the theme on their own). Knowing the theme when you start your novel, you can purposely manipulate elements in the story to amplify the impact of a coherent theme.↩︎
