The Anatomy of Story (2 page)

Audiences love both the feeling part (reliving the life) and the thinking part (figuring out the puzzle) of a story. Every good story has both. But you can see story forms that go to one extreme or the other, from sentimental melodrama to the most cerebral detective story.

There have been thousands, if not millions, of stories. So what makes each of them a story? What do all stories do? What is the storyteller both revealing to and hiding from the audience?

KEY POINT:
All
stories are a form of communication that expresses the

dramatic code.

The dramatic code, embedded deep in the human psyche, is an artistic description of how a person can grow or evolve. This code is also a process going on underneath every story. The storyteller hides this process beneath particular characters and actions. But the code of growth is what the audience ultimately takes from a good story.

Let's look at the dramatic code in its simplest form.

In the dramatic code, change is fueled by desire. The "story world" doesn't boil down to "I think, therefore I am" but rather "I want, therefore I am." Desire in all of its facets is what makes the world go around. It is what propels all conscious, living things and gives them direction. A story tracks what a person wants, what he'll do to get it, and what costs he'll have to pay along the way.

Once a character has a desire, the story "walks" on two "legs": acting and learning. A character pursuing a desire takes actions to get what he wants, and he learns new information about better ways to get it. Whenever he learns new information, he makes a decision and changes his course of action.

All stories move in this way. But some story forms highlight one of these activities over the other. The genres that highlight taking action the most are myth and its later version, the action form. The genres that highlight learning the most are the detective story and the multiperspective drama.

Any character who goes after a desire and is impeded is forced to struggle (otherwise the story is over). And that struggle makes him change. So the ultimate goal of the dramatic code, and of the storyteller, is to present a change in a character or to illustrate why that change did not occur.

The different forms of storytelling frame human change in differing ways:

■ Myth tends to show the widest character arc, from birth to death and from animal to divine.

■ Plays typically focus on the main character's moment of decision.

■ Film (especially American film) shows the small change a character might undergo by seeking a limited goal with great intensity.

■ Classic short stories usually track a few events that lead the character to gain a single important insight.

■ Serious novels typically depict how a person interacts and changes within an entire society or show the precise mental and emotional processes leading up to his change.

■ Television drama shows a number of characters in a minisociety struggling to change simultaneously.

Drama is a code of maturity. The focal point is the moment of change, the
impact,
when a person breaks free of habits and weaknesses and ghosts from his past and transforms to a richer and fuller self. The dramatic code expresses the idea that human beings can become a better version of themselves, psychologically and morally. And that's why people love it.

KEY POINT:
Stories don't show the audience the "real world"; they show the story world. The story world isn't a copy of life as it is. It's life as human beings imagine it
could
be. It is human life condensed and heightened so that the audience can gain a better understanding of how life itself works.

THE STORY BODY

A great story describes human beings going through an organic process. But it is also a living body unto itself. Even the simplest children's story is made up of many parts, or subsystems, that connect with and feed off one another. Just as the human body is made up of the nervous system, the circulatory system, the skeleton, and so on, a story is made of subsystems like the characters, the plot, the revelations sequence, the story world, the moral argument, the symbol web, the scene weave, and symphonic dialogue (all of which will be explained in upcoming chapters).

We might say that theme, or what I call moral argument, is the brain of the story. Character is the heart and circulation system. Revelations are the nervous system. Story structure is the skeleton. Scenes are the skin.

KEY POINT:
Each subsystem of the story consists of a
web
of elements that help define and differentiate the other elements.

No individual element in your story, including the hero, will work unless you first create it and define it in relation to all the other elements.

STORY MOVEMENT

To see how an organic story moves, let's look at nature. Like the storyteller, nature often connects elements in some kind of sequence. The following diagram shows a number of distinct elements that must be connected in time.

Nature uses a few basic patterns (and a number of variations) to connect elements in a sequence, including linear, meandering, spiral, branching, and explosive.
¹
Storytellers use these same patterns, individually and in combination, to connect story events over time. The linear and explosive patterns are at the opposite extremes. The linear pattern has one thing happening after another on a straight-line path. Explosion has everything happening simultaneously. The meandering, spiral, and branching patterns are combinations of the linear and the explosive. Here's how these patterns work in stories.

Linear Story

The linear story tracks a single main character from beginning to end, like this:

It implies a historical or biological explanation for what happens. Most Hollywood films are linear. They focus on a single hero who pursues a particular desire with great intensity. The audience witnesses the history of how the hero goes after his desire and is changed as a result.

Meandering Story

The meandering story follows a winding path without apparent direction. In nature, the meander is the form of rivers, snakes, and the brain:

Myths like the
Odyssey;
comic journey stories like
Don Quixote, Tom Jones, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Little Big Man,
and
Flirting with Disaster;
and many of Dickens's stories, such as
David Copperfield,
take the meandering form. The hero has a desire, but it is not intense; he covers a great ileal of territory in a haphazard way; and he encounters a number of characters from different levels of society.

Spiral Story

A spiral is a path that circles inward to the center:

In nature, spirals occur in cyclones, horns, and seashells.

Thrillers like
Vertigo, Blow-Up, The Conversation,
and
Memento
typically favor the spiral, in which a character keeps returning to a single event or memory and explores it at progressively deeper levels.

Branching is a system of paths that extend from a few central points by splitting and adding smaller and smaller parts, as shown here:

In nature, branching occurs in trees, leaves, and river basins.

In storytelling, each branch usually represents a complete society in detail or a detailed stage of the same society that the hero explores. The branching form is found in more advanced fiction, such as social fantasies like
Gulliver's Travels
and
It's a Wonderful Life
or in multiple-hero stories like
Nashville, American Graffiti,
and
Traffic.