Writing: Three more kinds of non-story · 4:51am Jan 21st, 2014
I’ve gone back and put Summary lines at the start of my more-confusing blog posts, followed by a page_break, so I can go back and quickly check which of my blog posts are relevant when I have a problem. Like this:
[Summary: Three common errors that make narratives non-stories:
- Character does the right thing for the wrong reasons
- Character already knows the thing they “learned”
- Author passes the protagonist ball among characters for a single character arc
]
(What, you thought I made these blog posts for your benefit? Altruistically? Don’t insult me. 
)
In 335 BCE, Aristotle kicked off literary theory by writing,
Tragedy is a representation of a serious, complete action which has magnitude, in embellished speech, with each of its elements used separately in the various parts of the play and represented by people acting and not by narration, accomplishing by means of pity and terror the catharsis of such emotions.
(Did you notice the origin of “Show, don’t tell” is in that quote?)
Today we’d say that much of what Aristotle said about tragedy and comedy was, well, wrong. But it’s more useful than a lot of later theories, because Aristotle was also something of a logician and an ontologist, and tried to define drama in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. [1]
The problem with later literary theories is that they were developed by non-logicians looking at famous literary works and trying to come up with things they all had in common. It’s like trying to define “bird” by looking at a hundred different birds, and coming up with, “X is a bird if X has wings.” You didn’t look at airplanes or bats or beetles, so you didn’t realize that having wings is necessary but not sufficient.
For instance, Aristotle says that a story’s protagonist must be virtuous, as people do not want a story about “villains making fortune from misery". Later literary theories fail to mention this point! Every later theory I can think of would happily accept a story in which the protagonist was morally repugnant, and “grew” by “learning” a new way to exploit people. Hell, they even gave a Pulitzer to one such story, A Confederacy of Dunces. [2]
(Let’s get this clear up front: When I talk about whether something is a story, I don’t mean whether it satisfies anybody’s definition of a story. I mean whether it feels to me like a dramatic story. A Confederacy of Dunces does not feel to me like a dramatic story. I'd call it a very long crack-fic. There is a very good ponification of Confederacy of Dunces somewhere on fimfiction, BTW. But I'm not counting comedy in my definition of story. Like poems and songs, comedy is probably different enough to get its own rules.)
So it’s easy to write something that satisfies most theories about what a story is, and find when you’re done that it isn’t a story.
Here are some other common kinds of narratives that look like stories if you compare them to a “Hero’s Journey” or other checklist, but are not:
- Stories that wrap up the plot, but don’t then relate that plot resolution to larger character issues. Covered in “The story isn’t over when you wrap up the plot”.
- Stories in which the theme is told rather than shown. Covered in “Show us the theme”.
- Stories in which the character does the right things for the wrong reasons. Take the scene in Return of the Jedi where (spoiler alert!) Darth Vader saves Luke from the Emperor. Suppose that what really happened is that Vader had just remembered that the Emperor was a big jerk and kept threatening to kill him, and this was a nice chance to off him and rule the galaxy. That wouldn’t be a story.
- Stories in which the character already knows the thing she’s supposed to be learning. Suppose Ebenezer Scrooge were a generous soul who loved Christmas at the start of “A Christmas Carol”. Not a story. I see some of these on fimfiction, where the characters overcome an obstacle using the Magic of Friendship (™) one more time. This is okay if it’s a pure adventure story with no character growth, but it’s disastrous when the story is framed to look like a story about character growth (e.g., if they write a friendship report about it). Lampshaded in The Super Speedy Cider Squeezy 6000.
- Stories which pass the protagonist ball for a single character arc. Suppose that in The Old Man and the Sea, the old man had hired a tourist to go out and catch a really big fish for him. And then suppose that the tourist tried and tried and was finally able to catch the fish because his fishing guide finally overcame his fear of shiny pointy things and attached a real fish-hook to the end of the line. One person had a problem; another tried to solve it; a third grew in a way that allowed it to be solved. This is possible in Friendship is Magic episodes because the Mane 6 are cooperating and therefore sharing “intentionality” (goals and intentions). But the tourist doesn’t know what the old man’s problem is, and never discovers that he’d been fishing without a hook all this time. The protagonist’s character arc is split across three people. No one person experiences the entire arc.
Today I came across a story on fimfiction that falls into all of these last three categories. Let me retell the story, with pony names changed to protect the guilty:
Rarity wants Fancy Pants to attend a showing of her designs. But he says no. Rarity decides the magic of friendship will fix that, so she tries to befriend him, bringing Sweetie Belle along because of her power of cuteness. Sweetie Belle discovers that Fancy Pants won’t attend the showing because he would have to travel by train, and he has a fear of trains because his older brother told him when he was very young that they take you away, but they never take you back. Sweetie Belle laughs at Fancy Pants, who then realizes his fear is silly and overcomes it. Out of gratitude, he attends Rarity’s showing. Rarity exits the story, having gotten what she wanted, and it closes with Fancy Pants and Sweetie Belle having a sweet friendship scene.
This story is trying to match this story pattern:
- Character X has a problem (Rarity wants FP to attend her showing).
- Character X tried but fails to solve the problem (Rarity asks FP to attend her showing).
- Character X grows in a way that enables him/her to solve the problem (Rarity learns the Magic of Friendship (™), resulting in FP attending her showing).
You can fill in the blanks and say the story matches the pattern. But it still isn’t a story, because of these issues:
Already knows the thing they’re learning: Rarity already knows about the Magic of Friendship (™), so a story that focuses on her choosing to use it isn’t really a story.
Right thing for the wrong reasons: It’s clear in the story that Rarity just wanted FP to attend her showing, and decided to manipulate him via friendship. She acted selfishly, and got what she wanted. How’s that a story?
Passing the protagonist ball: Rarity chose to use the Magic of Friendship (™), Sweetie Belle used it, and Fancy Pants grew. Fancy Pants didn’t choose to solve Rarity’s problem. Sure, he overcame his fear of trains, and good for him; but from his perspective, solving Rarity’s problem was an accident. Sweetie Belle didn’t choose to use Friendship (™); she was just being nosy. Maybe SB learned that friendship is nice, but she didn’t learn any moral lesson along the lines of “making friends can help solve your problems” (and is that really a moral?)
These three problems appear as separate when we define a story in terms of a protagonist’s character arc. I think that this story had all three of these problems because they’re all manifestations of a single underlying problem: A story is (usually?) a moral lesson, and this narrative doesn’t have any moral lesson.
I don't know if a story has to have a moral lesson, but most of the great ones have some kind of lesson.
For a better understanding of what is and is not a story, we’ll have to dig deeper than the formula of “character X grows to overcome a problem”, and probably talk about morality.
[1] Necessary and sufficient conditions are now known to be insufficient to define natural linguistic terms. This was discovered by philosophers in the 1930s, then by anthropologists and linguists in the 1960s, and then by artificial intelligence researchers in the 1990s, all independently of each other, because people are stupid that way.
[2] The specific point of the virtue of the protagonist may be overlooked because it isn’t fashionable anymore to reference morality in literary theory. If, as I argued in “Sex, violence, and meaning”, stories are morals, this causes problems for modern literary theory.
I'm going to have to vehemently disagree with the assertion that these examples you provide aren't stories. Rather, I would say they aren't subjectively well-crafted stories. Perhaps not all stories ought to be told. After all, many times in real life, these things that you describe as no-no's do indeed happen. There's a reason I don't feel bad when I write a tale about a character ridiculously lucky/powerful/rich/blessed/etc.: I'm choosing to focus on a good story, not on the other hundred stories i could tell which don't make for as good of storytelling, even if they are just as much stories as the one I do choose to tell.
Did that make any sense?
1742276 What you call a well-crafted story is what I mean when I say "a story". I say it that way because there's something qualitatively different about a story than a non-story. "Well-crafted story" makes it sound like you could take one of those non-stories and polish it up until it was well-crafted. I consider them not to be stories in the same way that I would consider a boat with a hole in it not to be a boat.
Have you never seen A Blackadder Christmas Carol?
I'm going to have to get back to you on this, but right now, I think you are trying to define 'a story' to strictly, especially when it comes to comedy (see Terry Pratchett). The best I can say right now is that the characters don't have to learn something as long as the audience does.
Interestingly, this parallels my thinking in lots of ways even though I'm writing a 'nonserious genre'. There's no better name for the conflicts my characters get into, than moral conflicts.
[youtube=NlpRBLkgcBo]
1742591 Agreed, in part because not having the character learn the lesson is a way to ensure you don't end up 'telling the lesson' by having the character give a yankee-doodle speech near the end of the story.
1742591 That's why I said,
I agree the character doesn't have to learn something. That's just one pattern. Actually a more common mistake than writing a story where the character already knows the lesson is writing an "audience learns something" story where the lesson is something everybody in the audience already knows. For instance, there's very earnest a story on fimfiction where the lesson is "Slavery is bad".
Does that mean Uncle Tom's Cabin is no longer a story? I haven't read it, but I think it depends at least on whether the story focuses the reader's attention on the lesson, e.g., a friendship report.
1742854
I don't understand why you are trying to define a story by such strict and exclusive parameters.
Here's my definition of a story: A series of events passed from one person to another that provides some form of entertainment or catharsis.
Morals are wonderful and can improve a narrative, but if you sacrifice entertainment or catharsis then you aren't telling a story, your writing an essay.
"Three men walked into a bar, the next one ducked."
That's a story, and it even has a moral (watch where you're going), but more importantly, it's funny---to me anyway. As opposed to simply saying "Watch where you're going."
As further evidence, I'd present Cold in Gardez's Lost Cities which has no characters at all but still manages to pass along a series of events and a few moral messages as well.
1742871 I just told you that I'm not trying to define comedies, so why do you give another comedy as a counter-example?
Also, what is "Lost Cities" supposed to be evidence of? Are you under the impression that the pattern I showed, where a character learns a lesson, is my definition of story? It isn't.
1742387 Look, not to be an ass (I'm a bat pony, not a donkey), But by your definition, the Titanic ceased to be a ship once it hit the iceberg. (I could make a joke about shippers going down with their ship, but I won't.)
1742898
Like I said, I don't understand why you are trying to define stories this way.
By what you are saying a story is where, and only where, a socially acceptable moral is passed along. Your example (Confederacy of Dunces---excluding the comedy bit) is about a character who learns a lesson that is, by our social expectations, amoral. Why is this not a story (again, ignoring the comedy nature)?
As for comedies, poems, and songs. What is the point of defining a story such that you explicitly exclude things that would be stories except that the narrative is written in such a way as to be funny, lyrical, or rhythmic?
1742920
As with all definitions, the purpose is to create a useful category that has natural boundaries, that is more-sharply defined than the larger category it fits into, and that enables us to draw more conclusions about items in that category because of its narrowness.
I exclude poems and songs because, well, they're not stories, and I don't see anyone claiming they are. They are so different that any definition that included them would be useless in writing stories. I exclude comedies because they are very different and would make the category larger and less useful.
You could argue that I should use some word other than "story", but that's just arguing semantics. Don't lose sight of what's going on behind the names. There is a natural category there, and cheerful, un-ironic narratives where Hitler learns how to manipulate people more efficiently is not in that category for any of us reading this.
But the natural category is reader-dependent. It is a formula that has a function f(R) somewhere in it, where R stands for the Reader of the story. At bottom I'm trying to get at the question, "What feels like a story to reader R?" If reader R has different morals than me, it'll feel that different things are stories than I do. Atlas Shrugged is a powerful story to some people, and not a story to others. I can't do anything about that, and I'm not trying to.
1742909 Yes, the Titanic stopped "being a ship", if what you're interested in is floating rather than sinking. I want to write stories that work, not stories that don't work. A definition that allows in stories that don't work is useless to me. I don't want a dictionary definition of "story", which would be needed, among other things, to talk about things found in books that were bad. I want a definition that includes good stories and excludes bad stories.
Imagine you're stranded on an island, and you open a bottle, and a genie comes out and will give you one wish, and you say, "I wish for a boat!", and the genie says, "Well, what's a boat?" And you know, because you've read stories, that the genie will take your definition of "boat" and try to screw you over. You'd better not read out the dictionary definition. You need to define "boat" in a way so that "the Titanic after it crashed into an iceberg" doesn't qualify, because your intent is not to define the term so that it's useful for indexing books and talking about bad boats, but to get something that floats and will take you somewhere.
1742996 Fine, but can't words have more than one definition? I'd say we can define a boat as specifically or generally or litterally or metaphorically or etc. as we like, depending on the situation. And to add to that, as Nietzsche said,
Mmm... add me to the camp of dissenters. This definition sort of disqualifies broken Aesops, subverted tropes, betrayals, dark/tragic twist endings, etc.
For instance, take the Star Wars example. Darth Vader striking down the Emperor is satisfying because it validates Luke's stubborn assertion that he's redeemable, and he gives a heroic sacrifice to not only prove it, but to save his son and the galaxy. Audiences are well-conditioned to like endings with redemption, and Good beating Evil, etc.
Is your alt version not a story, though? Vader strikes down the Emperor, takes control, and tells Luke "no seriously, you're joining me." Luke either heroicly sacrifices himself, or clings to his ideals and is struck down as a callback to Obi-Wan. Before this new Emperor can do too much damage, Lando and the fleet take out the Death Star as per the original script. Celebrations are had over the death of the Emperor, but it's made bittersweet over the loss of their friend and the last Jedi Master. But at least he shows up blue and sparkly at the end, just like Obi-Wan and Yoda. Luke's assertion of redemption then turns into "sometimes evil does corrupt a person beyond redemption, but there's something noble in clinging to your ideals even when the situation is hopeless." Does the bittersweet ending make this no longer a story?
Really, I think the issue is when a story claims to be X but is actually Y. Notice how I needed to adjust the moral of Star Wars to make my dark ending make any sense. If Darth Vader just decapitated Luke for the evulz, with no opportunity for monologue or symbolism, the emotional arc of Luke's Jedi journey and redemption of his father would have zero payoff, and yes that would be frustrating, no matter how clever Lucas thinks he's being. Jumping to the Fimfic example with Rarity, you point out that this is claiming to be a Magic of Friendship story but there's many gaping flaws in the premise, and the author doesn't own it. If the author reframed the story so that Rarity's selfishness of the request is obvious, or perhaps inferrable through an unreliable narrator, then there could be a twisted bit of fridge logic when readers connect the dots.
Perhaps in this situation, like many of the rules of writing, it's okay to break the rules if you know what you're doing. As a corollary, if you need to ask if you're "ready" to start breaking rules, then you're not ready.
EDIT:
+ The Titantic, pre iceberg, is a vessel. It carries you safely between Point A and Point B. You may get nauseated by sea sickness, which is highly undesirable.
+ The Titantic, post iceberg, is supposed to be a vessel, but it is no longer of any use in that function.
+ The roller coaster Corkscrew is also a vessel that will carry you safely from Point A to Point B (well, technically A == B, but the journey is the important part). You may become nauseated by the loops, but it is satisfying its design, so riders leave satisfied.
1742960
So, a subset then? Like Physics and Trigonometry are to Science and Math?
Semantics are important, without them we have no way of understanding each other.
1743182
Yes, sure. Yes, semantics are important. I wouldn't want to take the concept of story that I'm trying to discover, and use it in the sentence "My Little OC is a bad story." That would be incoherent in two different ways: Calling something a bad story that was not a story, and calling something a story without specifying who the reader is.
But my attempt to find those (observer-relevant) properties that delineate a particular category of satisfying stories--a critique of the terminology I use in that attempt is a critique of its communication, not of its internal consistency.
1743116
That's not my alt version; that's your alt version. I'm just talking about the Vader arc, and if it ends with Vader saving Luke for cynical reasons--no epilogue, no sequel, cut to the credits--it's not a character arc. Your alt version is still a moral lesson anyway, so I don't see how it's a counter-example.
That is an issue. But for any reader R there are some X(R) such that a story that claims to be X(R), and is X(R), isn't a satisfying story to reader R. So both spelling out what kinds of X make a satisfying story, and verifying that a story indeed is an instance of X, are necessary.
(I'm using second-order logic because 'X' is going to say something like "Vader is redeemed by the Magic of Friendship (TM)", but the meaning of that statement depends on reader R.)
So, let me see if I have this correct.
You are trying to define what it takes for a story to be a satisfying narrative[1]. Your claim is that it must have a moral that is discoverable and acceptable for the reader and actionable by the protagonist.
Thus, as society changes, what constitutes a SN will change, while the definition remains the same.
If this is what you meant, then I'm with you so far.
[1] Denoted by SN from here on out.
rmagibess.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/kiwi_bird.jpg
1742960
There are poems and songs which are stories, but poems and songs are not always stories, and in fact frequently are not.
Also, I think using the term "story" here kind of distracts from what kind of story you're trying to talk about, which appears to be a dramatic story. Why not call them dramas? Or do you believe that name is too narrow/broad for them?
But even still, while the idea of a moral being a critical component of this sort of story seems reasonable on the surface, One Ordinary Day With Peanuts and The Last Question both violate that rule, and yet, they feel more to me like stories like Trust than they feel to me like comedies. Maybe One Ordinary Day with Peanuts is a comedy, but I have a hard time really seeing The Last Question as such, but in the end, no one really learned any sort of moral lesson.
1743681 Yes! Except I'm not sure about "needing a moral". Maybe we need a more-general term there.
1743945 But The Last Question is a moral argument! The people in the story want to know if there's a God. Why? Well, they have all these silly assumptions about God, like, "I am morally obligated to obey God", or, "If there is a God, then It will provide a purpose and meaning for my life." And then--they discover there IS a God! And all their assumptions were wrong, and ironically horrible when you think about them now being forced to obey this God and how that may suck all the purpose and meaning out of their lives.
If I change "moral lesson" to a more general concept like "insight", does that work for you? It's a little too general, since I can't see conveying the Pythagorean theorem as a story. But I think there is some abstract level of "insight" that is closer to what I mean than "moral". Like, Bukowski's stories might have the "moral" (insight) that morals are for saps.
1744021
Er, I think you may be talking about a different The Last Question. I was talking about the short story by Isaac Asimov. Unless I'm missing something?
Alright people, we're done here. Everything that doesn't meet this definition needs to be taken down from the site, because they aren't stories and FiMFiction is only for stories.
[/taking your blog too seriously]
1744074 Oops, I was thinking about a different story, where the question is, "Is there a God?", and the answer is, "There is now!"
Well, that is something to think about. It isn't a moral, but it's related to morals and religion, in that it's a theogenesis story. And there's some kind of moral imperative to it; something that makes us feel entropy ought to be reversed. We're not indifferent.
Fiction has to be stuff we care about. We care about people; we care about things we form emotional attachments to (places, or football teams); we care about ethics and justice. What else do we care about?
In Sex, Violence, and Meaning, we got horribly sidetracked, but I did and still do think your idea of morals ("Morals are values derived from other values via thinking and feeling") is too generally applicable to usefully restrict anything from being a story. It also doesn't seem sensible to say that a story is a moral, given the existence of non-allegories. Maybe "stories convey morals" rather than "stories are morals". Or maybe "stories argue for morals".
There's also something strange (though not necessarily wrong) going on with your idea of "personal values" if it's possible to derive morals from those. I suspect that'll be a long discussion if or when it comes up.
1749705 What I'm trying to get at with the "morals" idea is what kinds of causal relations a story needs. I might be completely on the wrong track.
Here's one conventional story structure: A protagonist faces a problem, struggles to overcome that problem, fails, tries again, fails, grows as a character as a result of these failures, tries again, and succeeds thanks to this character growth.
I'm trying to get at "What counts as character growth?" I think that's an inherently moral question. And the idea that growth is good is also a moral question. In Egypt 1000BC, Europe in 900AD, or China in 1500 AD, morality meant accepting your place, and change was bad.
There are other patterns that involve failure to grow, or character self-destruction. Can you encompass all of these within a single, value-neutral definition? Or are the patterns slightly different depending on our moral judgment of the outcome?
Morality also limits the causal patterns allowed. In an individualistic society, where each person is free and responsible for his own actions, people are supposed to solve their own problems, and if a story is about a character's destruction, that character has to be the agent of her own destruction. It doesn't count as a story to Westerners if a character is destroyed by someone else's actions. (I don't mean that doesn't happen within a story; I mean it does not by itself constitute an entire story.)
1750210
If by "character growth" you mean "character becomes a better person" then of course it's not possible to have that without some relevant moral, and of course it's a moral question. It's not a thing that can happen without some idea of "better person", which is presumably a moral issue. Same for "character self-destruction".
These aren't logical conclusions, but they're accurate for the way I think of the words. I don't know the answer for what you're calling a story here, but I would say yes. There are plenty of insignificant-but-memorable-slice-of-lifes that I'm happy to call stories.
1752691 Well, start listing these slice-of-life stories, and let's see if they express values.
1753159
I was thinking K-On and The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya when I wrote that post, but I don't think you're going to want to sit through those.
The Roommate. Very much a slice of life, after Protagonist and RD start getting along.
Surely You're, Joking Mr. Feynman. The whole thing is a loose collection of stories, some of which deal with moral issues, and some of which don't. See Part 2 (page 22) up until the cyclotron story for one that doesn't.
1753159
Does the main character need to change for it to be a story? If the main character grows, does there need to be a question of whether or not that growth is desirable? If yes to both, then "morals" as described in 1752691 are unavoidable in stories.
If the main character doesn't change, then does there need to be a question of whether or not the character's lack of a change is desirable? If yes, then "morals" are unavoidable in this case as well.
"Is this something I want to be?" is a question you can ask about any person or personified character. You can ask this question for the stories in my last post, but they were not written with this question in mind. As far as I can tell, the authors were not trying to convey any desires or ambitions, and they were not trying to make a case for any kind of change. What's left is a presentation of facts, feelings, thoughts, and progressions without moral conditions imposed on any of the above. The only selection criteria for what to leave in them stories seems to have been "Is this interesting?" and "Is this enough to explain the situation?"
I went through about a hundred stories before coming up with those two. All of the rest in some form had the additional criterion of "Can this convince the reader that X is desirable/undesirable?" Here are some of the stories I discarded:
All of these have either a complete plot or a resolution that was conceived for the sake of legitimizing/illegitimizing some ideal. I imagine all of these required a great deal more planning than the two stories listed in my last post because they required the plot to end in some specific place. I think this is why you suspect that all "well-crafted stories" have a moral: stories with morals tend to require crafting whereas slice-of-life can be written from start to finish without any regard for how things will end.
1754684 Surely You're, Joking Mr. Feynman is non-fiction, so I don't count that.
I read the first 2 chapters of Roommate, and it looks to me like the roommates dislike each other at the start, and they're going to come to like each other, and Rainbow is going to deal with her fame not counting on Earth, so there's some character arc.
I've read a lot of slice-of-life fiction. I just can't remember if I liked any of it. That's what's sometimes derogatorily called a "New Yorker" story.
"Dramatica" theory says:
Does that sound any better?
1752691 I think that even if some stories don't need morals or growth or even to make arguments, a whole lot of stories do require moral judgements, and stories of that type will /not/ count as slice-of-life if they make moral judgements that you can't sympathize with. They'll just seem like bad stories. So I think a theory of story needs to refer to judgements of some kind.
1772923
There are stories that raise moral questions without making a judgement
and stories I consider good that make moral judgements I disagree with.
I'm going to strip down the Dramatica theory definition.
This is redundant.
If "tangible" means "easy to grasp" then this is problematic for subtle themes, plot events, and character traits. It's also problematic for events or characters that are intentionally underdeveloped for relatability reasons. If "tangible" means "graspable" then it doesn't differentiate story elements from any other elements of communication (eg. words). I think it's supposed to be the latter, so I'm going to drop it from the paragraph for not conveying anything useful.
These are what I see as the possible points of contention: expression, inequity, empathy, introspection, and method respectively. The inequity and method points are the ones I disagree with.
(The "single" in "single human mind" is arguable, but this is a minor point. When stories are passed down, parts can be retained without the orator understanding their purpose, and parts can be added without the original author understanding their purpose.)
I'll get back to this. I need make progress on something else first.
--
They get along by Chapter 8, a third of the way through the story.
1752691 I just remembered there's a huge population of stories on fimfiction that have no morals or character growth: clopfics. Do we count those as stories?
1773894
And any story that's purely escapist. They do little more than communicate desires and a world around them. They violate method from my last post, but I don't think they violate inequity. (Why can't I be in that world/position?)
1773894
I wonder if something like this could be useful.
1777994 What are the columns?
1779343
They correspond to the blue-highlighted phrases at the bottom of this post 1773882. Left to right, they would be:
--
I think what I called "expression" in this post 1773882 would be better called "perspective".
I disagree with my previous objection to the "single" in "single mind" now.
I changed "standalone quote" to "words of wisdom" in my last post.