Structures of stories
This presents a lens for looking at stories, and may have potential to become a quant method of story analysis and design
Longform storytelling, particularly fiction novels, can be thought of mixtures of patterns, swirling, beginning, resolving, interacting, surprising and delighting the reader. I imagine this as many oscillating waves all moving at once, overlapping, moving in and out of sync, with elements of order and chaos.
I imagine it as a dance or a piece of music, with structure, surprises and flourishes. Much like music, the patterns of the piece can build at different paces, with different moments of ebb and strength, often building to a satisfying synchronicity at the end of the piece.
If the aggregate patterns are too simple the work is dull. If they are too complex they overwhelm the reader. We want patterns in that delicious middle ground.
While what that middle ground is depends on the reader, on the whole it's extremely broad. See the huge range of successful books and plays.
Sources of patterns:
- Language used. Proust uses beautiful long sentences, others favour short sentences, others rhythmic. Airport novels use simple language and few words you won't have heard of, others require a dictionary on hand.
- Characters. Their personalities. Their interactions. How relatable they are. If you're rooting for their victory or their demise. Are their intentions clear or mysterious? Is the reader afraid of the big bad or are they a pantomime villain you love to hate? I couldn't help but like even the bad guys in Richard Osman's exceedingly popular We Solve Murders.
- Location(s)
- Events, and pace thereof. Revelations of any kind. How many words are spent on a given event - is a death dwelt on for many pages or smoothed over by the end of a paragraph?
- Focus of the narrative. Single protagonist or switching between them? Linear time, or jumping forward and backward in time and memory?
- Invoking the senses. Are you emphasising how things look visually (great vistas or futuristic cities), how they taste (as the Japanese hit Butter does excellently), smell, sound or touch?
- Novel concepts or items, and emphasis placed on them. Sci-fi often involves introducing new ideas or gizmos, and centering the plot around them.
- Moral clarity. Is it clear
- Feelings invoked. Curiosity, empathy, excitement, dread, joy: the timing and placement of when these are felt.
- Level of description. Do you give the reader explicit information or leave them to imagine? Do you paint a picture in great detail or allow the reader's brain to fill in the blanks? In the case of characters, expectations can be established explicitly by stating how the character tends to behave and allowing the reader to fill in the rest. For example, if a characters is old, male and English, is he more likely to be watching football or scrolling TikTok on a Saturday afternoon?
No doubt this list is not exhaustive.
For all the above, for simpler patterns the reader doesn't have to work so hard, however they may get more pleasure from being "played" by more complex patterns. In this view the reader is passive, with the piece "playing" them as one might an instrument. So reading the best literature feels to me, though in reality the experience is co-created by the words on the page and the imaginative proclivities of the reader.
The expectations of the reader influences how they receive the patterns. While many changes to patterns can provide a pleasing level of complexity and variety, extreme changes can be jarring.
Patterns can be used to set expectations. Patterns can be broken. There is much comedy in breaking patterns - often patterns one didn't consciously recognise.
That's the lens: patterns. What to do with it? Oh no please no I don't want to write a novel don't make me do it