The Energy of Story

Brief Notes On Basic Story – A Story Toolkit for Authors & Creators

Whether in Hollywood or in magazines, on stage or in high lit, in graphics or memoir, story creation can be greatly assisted by using key story tools (not rules) and by understanding key story details (not dogma) found in the most widespread and popular, commercial and literary renderings of story.

Authors Pursue Themes As Characters Pursue Goals — The Two-Eye Nature of Story:

Story flows from a main character pursuing a goal, in a challenging and dynamic world. Characters suffer, struggle, and overcome (or succumb). Constant pursuit of a goal is as crucial as constant focus on the one thing the story is really about — the theme. E.g.: How to be human in an inhuman world?

Event & Experience & Coherence:

The backbone of a story is a sequence of events — a structure of incidents. A story is a shaped event, an experience, a change, a turn — in scene, by scene. Scenes show change toward the character's goal and and scope of the author's theme. Stories make sense of life. Stories explore sensory, emotional, social, intellectual, psychological, moral aspects of life. Stories stimulate feelings, perceptions, ideas, actions.

Action & Proaction & Causality:

The most compelling structure of events is causal — where one event causes another — rather than incidental or episodic. A story-launching inciting incident often compels the main character into this causal and sequential pursuit of a goal. The most engaging protagonists are proactive, not passive.

Form & Content — Technique & Energy:

Form derives from content and technique. Content first, most important. Technique is the author's preferred style and use of event, incident, character, place, action, reflection, emotion, ideas, morals.

Risks & Rewards — The Stakes:

The greater the risks and rewards for the main character (and for the audience), the more compelling the story, whether the risks and rewards are social or individual, public or private, emotional or intellectual, moral or cultural.... Literal or figurative life-or-death stakes are often most compelling.

Greatest Fear or Greatest Desire — A Key Story Motor:

The most compelling stakes are often created when the main character is forced to confront their greatest fear and/or their greatest desire, on threat to life (figurative or literal). Often, an externally imposed event or situation targets, or creates, their greatest fear or desire and launches the story with a problem that grows increasingly painful, dangerous, or complicated, and seemingly impossible to solve or escape. If characters are forced to confront a greatest fear, flaw, or weakness, this may lead to a moving and illuminating arc of character change and transformation — or tragic failure.

Press & Ask — Four Key Story Motors — 1) Conflict, 2) Fear/Desire, 3) Question, 4) Paradox:

Pressure and question fueled motors compel and impel (push and pull) protagonists to act toward a goal: 1) escalating conflict, 2) intensifying greatest fear or desire, 3) provocative questions, and/or 4) puzzling paradox. (Many of these techniques are well organized and taught online in good detail by Corey Mandell.) These story motors create drama and suspense by building and releasing pressure that make emotional, moral, intellectual, and sensory impacts on character and audience both. Intense pressure and intriguing questions move, motivate, shape characters and rivet the audience. (Example of paradox as story motor: Robin Hood and his exploits, good in bad, bad in good. A thief benefactor, a hero villain, acting in a causal sequence of confrontational or puzzling actions toward a goal.)

Powerful Escalations:

To keep the audience eagerly engaged, emotional and sensory, intellectual and moral stimulation are achieved causally by powerful and timely escalations or accelerations of story motors and their fuel.

Layers & Tangents:

Micro conflicts and micro questions related to the macro pressures and questions also create suspense and drama. Micro motors — within scenes or over short sequences of scenes and sections — power layers and tangents in stories driven by the macro motors that span many scenes, sections, and story.

Recognitions & Reversals — Key Changes & Turns:

Recognitions of surprising new realities or apparent truths occur while a character pursues a goal through a causal structure of events created by using the four main story motors of compelling conflict, intriguing questions, greatest fears/desires, and paradox. The same is true of periodical reversals of fortune and realities. Recognitions and reversals are compelling and unexpected, momentous and illuminating. For example, friends may become enemies, by reason or by force. Then flip again...

Reflections & Takeaways — Key Changes & Turns:

Authorial or character perspectives and conclusions, that is, reflections, commentary, humor, or other discourse about elements in the story, especially core elements, broaden and deepen the range and power of experience in a carefully structured story. Reflections and takeaways are especially pronounced in memoirs and novels, often following details of incidents, actions, events, or upon introductions or re-visions of characters and places, settings and scenes. As in some script voice-overs.

Pace & Rhythm & Balance — Key Changes & Turns:

Compelling pace, rhythm, and balance of events, reflections, and all elements, keep the story sharp and lively. One common tool, not rule, of thumb is to dynamically vary the length of each scene or section while keeping each part to 3 or fewer pages (of a TV or movie script — that is, 3 or fewer minutes of screen time) or 2 or fewer pages of a novel or story. Longer scenes or sections may be very effective but often require more care in construction per story tools and technique. (Use of a centered # (hash) divides sections within a novel or short story, as a slug line divides scenes of scripts.)

Maintain Character Focus on Goal and Author Focus on Theme — Two Eyes:

In an engaging and accomplished story, the protagonist's relentless pursuit of their goal and the author's pursuit of the theme are constantly driven by story motors that spur emotion, insight, wonder, delight. Each scene or section must illuminate or evoke the main theme to give the story artistic unity, integrity.

Tools Not Rules:

Story tools are to be used or not used. They are not story rules to be obeyed. These story tools are widely used in the movies, on TV, on stage, and at short and long length by authors and illustrators both popular and literary. These tools and concepts consist of Hollywood and TV shorthand, Aristotelian terms, and other staple understandings and techniques of narrative, literature, story.

Genres & Modes:

Many different genres and modes may influence the structure and qualities of a story. The tools and concepts described here can be used within all types and mixes of genre (romance, fantasy, mystery, memoir, literary, etc) and mode (comedy, tragedy, epic, drama, etc). That said, much can be learned, additionally, from studying the specialized tools and conventions characteristic to particular genres and modes themselves.

Story & Change:

Story tools and techniques help create great stories, ones that powerfully move and reveal, impact and alter their audience and world. To the extent that story is structure (form), and structure is the shape of energy (content), a story, as a novel structure of energy, gives new meaning, new life to the world. New structures of energy (new stories) change the world. As form is the shape of content, as structure is the shape of energy, art may be a potent and valuable change in the experience of life. Created by tools.