A story is a narrative that portrays a coherent series of events (not necessarily in chronological order – e.g., Beloved by Toni Morrison, or – heck! – even Star Wars) toward a logical conclusion. A “good” story is one in which every significant detail shown to the audience is incorporated into the development of that narrative, leading to a conclusion that compiles those events into a thematic conclusion. And a “great” story is a “good” story that keeps the audience guessing what those details mean in the context of the yet-to-be-disclosed conclusion.

To understand this, imagine you and I decide to shoot a film, a simple film you may be able to record on your own, right now. Find a round object and roll it across your desk as you begin recording with the camera on your phone. Watch the video. Your video portrays a series of events (i.e., the individual frames of the ball rolling from point A to point B), which, together, are coherent and lead to a conclusion (i.e., the ball making it to point B). Now, I ask you, was that entertaining? Did watching that clip give meaning to the time taken to create and watch it? 

My answers to those questions were all “no.” Yet, what you watched was still a story. So, what’s the difference between that and those stories that we willingly pay money to see? The “good” stories we read in books and see in theaters imbue importance into every moment of screen time or paragraph of reading time. Imagine you reshot that video, but with a greater budget – imagine if you had Bill Nye.

He could begin your video by explaining the mechanics of rotational kinetic energy and then roll the object down your desk and describe the effects of each component of rotational mechanical energy as it moved.

This film looks somewhat different than the previous: The film had a theme/lesson (i.e., teach its audience about rotational kinetic energy). Second, every moment of the film had some purpose (i.e., to contribute to the overall lesson of the film). Think of how this may carry over to your standard fiction story; perhaps the text’s overall theme is that the heroine learns the importance of friendship. And in accordance with such a lesson, she periodically loses her companions along her journey, each loss contributing to her eventual character development that demonstrates the theme of the story. In our film, those periodic losses draw equivalence to Bill Nye explaining the individual variables that affect rotational kinetic energy in action in accordance with his lesson on the subject at the start of the film. Now, you may start to see some connections between the model of storytelling we are developing and those that you are used to on the big screen. There’s meaning to what you spend your time watching as delivered to you via a pay-off at the end of the film of finally understanding Bill Nye’s lesson (or, eventually, seeing the heroine learn the importance of friendship). But, there are still some things wrong with this model of storytelling. Bill Nye told you what you would learn from the start, and the way he develops his lesson throughout the film leads to a conclusion you knew would happen from the beginning. Such a model of storytelling doesn’t engage the audience. And, since people tend to care for and appreciate more what they can themselves engage with, this model of storytelling fails to capitalize on aspects that could make stories that utilize it all the more extraordinary. So what can be done?

Reshoot your film. Ask Bill Nye to withhold from explaining the conclusion of the lesson until the end of the story and structure the narrative as smaller lessons on individual topics (e.g., inertia, mechanical energy, etc.). This structure encourages the audience to actively consider how events throughout the story may lead to a conclusion (i.e., Bill Nye’s most important lesson). And, by virtue of having the audience engage in the material throughout the narrative, they grow more invested and care more for the conclusion than they would have otherwise – everyone loves hearing the solution to a good riddle. This model of storytelling and narrative development is what makes foreshadow-ridden stories like Attack on Titan so popular and exciting to audiences the world over, and conclusions to once-good stories, like Lost, be so detested because they failed to stay faithful to the promise of a riddle-like conclusion offered to the audience through various “hints” dropped throughout the series.

(Passion Blog #2)