A five-bucket theory of story
Summary: Stories that ‘work’ are clear, believable, engaging, affecting, and meaningful.
There’s a lot of story theory advice floating around in blogs and videos and courses and books. Some of it is plain bad and will cause you trouble. Some of it is decent when applied in the right context. A lot of it is quite good. With a little bit of discernment, you and I can find ourselves living in a sort of “story theory golden age.”
But, even with this embarrassment of riches, for me at least, two areas of inquiry remain.
Missing pieces
The first is that so much storytelling advice focuses on the what and how: “write compelling characters,” “always escalate stakes,” “you must have conflict,” etc.
This is all great advice, but my brain immediately wants to know more. How does it work — and why does it work? What are the underlying psychological hooks that make the advice effective or ineffective?
I don’t want to just follow a recipe. I want to know how the ingredients function. Then, I can tweak and recombine them in new, interesting ways.
A lot of what I do here in my notes is attempt to answer those questions for myself.
But there’s another question.
The majority of the storytelling advice I’ve seen feels a bit like loose pieces in a puzzle box — a pile of things which each have a tiny part of the picture on them, but which aren’t yet integrated into a coherent whole.
I want to know how the pieces fit together, see the bigger picture that they make. The same way that Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat explains how these four fundamentals of cooking interrelate, I’d like for someone to integrate the various elements of story theory. A
So — at the risk of ending up like the characters in the famous standards XKCD comic — this is my first, fumbling attempt in that direction.
A quick caveat: I’m focused here on describing what makes a good story, not how to make one. Process is a whole separate topic, which others have written about in useful ways. (I personally found Mary Carole Moore’s Your Book Starts Here to be beneficial — especially her idea of capturing “islands.” Lisa Cron’s Story Genius is another good pick.)
Here, I’m concentrating on the thing itself.
Buckets
Much of story advice fits into one of five categories or “buckets,” each of which build on the ones that came before.
A story that “works” — one that satisfies — is clear, believable, engaging, affecting, and meaningful.
- To be clear means that you share your story in a way that isn’t confusing to your audience.
- To be believable means that your audience agrees with you about how your world works and how your characters act. (You never want your audience to disagree with you. They may disagree with your characters — that can create interesting tension — but you don’t want them to disagree with you as the storyteller. If they do, you risk losing them.)
- To be engaging means that your audience is “bought in” and wants the story to continue.
- To be affecting means that your story makes your audience feel things.
- To be meaningful means that your story gives your audience some kind of lasting impact.
Road trip
Let’s use a metaphor to explain how these elements interrelate. Imagine you and I are going on a road trip.
Clarity and believability are like the underlying foundation and surface of the road. You need them, and they need to be pretty decent to make the trip pleasant. Success with them is mostly about removing obstacles to your audience’s experience of the story. If the road on a trip is poor, you can bet that people will gripe about it. On the other hand, nobody finishes a trip and raves about how amazing the tarmac was. So, clarity and believability are necessary for a good story, but they’re not enough on their own.
Engagement is like the engine of the car. It’s the thing that keeps people moving forward. Pure engagement plays on dopamine and our brains’ reward systems. It makes us want. But while wanting alone will keep us moving, it’s a far cry from a meaningful experience. Again, people will complain about a trip if the car breaks down and the engine won’t work. But for many types of road trip, they won’t even think about the engine as long as it’s working.
Some people do like to drive faster than others, though. That’s a factor that differentiates engagement from clarity and believability. The pacing and intensity of your story can have a dividing effect on your audience. Some prefer to enjoy the scenery at a pedestrian pace. Others want to mash the pedal and really see how the car can perform.
. . . Which leads us to affect, the experience of the trip. Affect is everything the story makes your audience feel. It’s the texture of the material on the car seats, the snacks you brought along the way, the scenery out the windows, the smell of popcorn at the gas station, the jokes and laughter of the friends you have with you and the people you meet along the way.
Affect covers all the normal things — excitement during action scenes, romantic tension during “will-they-won’t-they” moments, nail-biting suspense as the shadow of the monster appears on the wall behind the protagonist. But affect also means that jolt of insight and wonder, the feeling of epiphany you get when a great revelation slaps you in the face. It’s the moment when inspector sits the whole cast down to explain the murder mystery, and, a second before she actually says it, you realize, “Oh!, of course it was the butler!”
Affect covers the whole range of feeling, and feeling is the first part of what makes a story pay off. It’s what makes your story worth your audience’s time. People won’t talk about the road. Only a few will be concerned with the engine. But everyone will remember how the trip made them feel.
Last of all comes meaning. Meaning is the destination of the trip, the reason you set out in the first place. As in all good road trips, the “destination” in a story can be two things at once. A big part of the reason we travel is for the sum of the affect — the things we see and the camaraderie we share along the way — the total experience of the journey. For most trips, there’s also a change. We go from one place to another.
The meaningfulness of a good story is similar. There’s some ineffable sense of life that we synthesize from all the feelings a story delivers, a new whole that’s greater than the sum of its parts. The most meaningful stories also embed change deep in our models of the world. They fill in new corners of our understanding and enrich our worldviews.
Setting off on the journey
This has all been summary, an introduction for my little five-part model. In the future, I hope to flesh these things out practically. What techniques and story advice can you employ for clarity, for example, or engagement?
For now, I’ll leave you with one last observation. Note how each element in the list integrates parts of the previous ones. Belief hinges on understanding, on clarity. Likewise, you can’t engage with something unless it’s both clear enough and believable enough.
This phenomenon really gets going, once you start talking about engagement and affect. Wanting is a feeling. So stories that are engaging already have a sort of affect, even if it’s mostly one-dimensional.
Not surprisingly, the blending of elements is most pronounced with the last of them. Affect and meaning are deeply interrelated. What you feel as you experience a story is, in large part, what that story means to you. There’s more, of course, but feeling is a fundamental part of it.
As philosophers and pop artists are so fond of reminding us, it’s as much about the journey as it is the destination.
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