What Stories Are & Why We Need to Write Them ✍️

For the past five years I’ve been working on a book about writing stories that will be published later this year. In it, I’ve included what I think writers need to know to tell powerful, deep, resonant stories. I’ve organized the material around the five aspects of writing that story-makers need to master: Structure, Character, Theme, Plot, and Scenes.

Here’s why:

Structure contains and organizes the story, and its limits ("freedom within limits") contribute to all the other elements.

Character is the enlivening heart of any story, its main focus, and this main character is the guide, avatar, and/or projected pseudo-self through whom the reader gets to live and learn vicariously.

Theme infuses the story with meaning—a resonant message—that’s conveyed through the character’s interactions with plot situations (including other characters).

Plot is what the character does and doesn’t do in the face of inner and outer conflict generated by an inciting incident that sets up a story problem and a story question.

Scenes express all of the above through “showing” the character in action: dealing with conflict, expressing/repressing feelings, making choices under pressure, trying/failing/getting to achieve a story-worthy goal.

What is a story-worthy goal?

I once heard this clear-eyed yet unusual definition of happiness: Happiness consists of the overcoming of obstacles on the way to a goal of one’s own choosing. Swap out happiness for story and you’ve a pretty good definition for a story arc. In stories, characters are faced with situations and must choose a way to respond. Their ultimate, unconscious desire always relates to happiness—their version of it—so how they choose to respond to the story problems will include a specific, concrete goal that represents their version of happiness. As they head toward that goal, obstacles ensue. That’s storytelling in a nutshell (easier said than done, I know).

I’ve spent a lifetime figuring this stuff out through trial and error an study and it’s still hard. But so worth it. Because stories carry us away, in the best sense. They reveal, inform, inspire, and delight. They help make life bearable, manageable, acceptable, and, when their alchemy is right, they can contribute to change and evolution on a personal level and even a societal scale.

Stories can: heal, guide, expose, educate, enlighten, encourage, aid, direct, repel, activate, support, comfort, motivate, and so much more. They help us overcome the obstacles on the way to the goals of our own choosing.

Stories help us navigate our life situations. They help us grow and evolve in a life, and world, full of change. A human lifetime is finite, and the world goes on without us after we’ve gone; we’re all too aware of this. Many stories deal directly and indirectly with the ramifications of this existential awareness.

At some point, most of us encounter an internal question: is such a life, with its accompanying awareness, a gift or a curse? Your thoughts and beliefs about this will affect how you behave and the choices you make in your life. Writers usually take their worries and questions to the page, and this is how stories are conceived.

The book I've written isn’t a story itself, rather it’s about how to write stories. It’s the guidebook I wish I’d had thirty years ago. Toni Morrison said, “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” I wrote my book because I believe stories—especially in the forms of novels, screenplays, and memoirs—are the biggest magic we have as humans.

When my book comes out, I hope it will be a useful companion to help you write the stories you care about. But in the meantime, keep doing just that. Write what you want to read. Teach what you want to learn. Tell the stories you wish someone had once told you.

“Story is a yearning meeting an obstacle.”

~Robert Olen Butler ~

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”

~ Joan Didion ~

Writing Scenes

You have a ton of tasks to tend to when it comes to crafting your stories, and writing scenes is one of them.

What is a scene? A useful writer’s definition goes something like this: a scene consists of action through conflict in more or less continuous time and space that leads to a minor or major change in character or plot.

“Action through conflict” includes situations of physical action and dialogue that move the story forward in a dynamic way.

“Continuous time and space” means that a scene generally takes place in one location and during a set amount of time that feels like the present moment of the story.

“Change” refers to the particular relevance of the scene, the thing that happens that warrants the scene’s necessary inclusion in the story. This change, small or large, propels the story forward.

The scene is the essential building block of storytelling. It’s your most powerful tool for conjuring images in the mind’s eye of the reader. Your story’s most important events, ideas, actions, and emotions will be conveyed primarily through scenes.

Scenes are different from what’s known as “summary.” A simple, general way to differentiate the two types of writing is to think of scenes as the “showing” part of your writing and summary as the “telling” part.

A scene will make us feel as if we’re right there with the characters, as if we’re watching the action and dialogue unfold in real time. Screenwriters rely on scenes almost exclusively, because their stories must be told visually. They depend on action, dialogue, image, and sound to convey meaning. (On rare occasions they include voice over to convey the inner thoughts of characters.)

Novelists and memoirists have a lot more leeway. They aim to strike a balance between scene and summary. (Though, by balance I don’t mean giving them equal weight, since most stories favour more scenes than summary.) Novels and memoirs include things like inner dialogue, self reflection, memories, backstory, exposition, lyrical description, and some summary of events that are less relevant to the story and can be covered through “telling” rather than “showing.”

In fact, the artfulness of novels and memoirs often depends on the ability of the writer to use summary techniques. Scenes with action and dialogue are the most engaging to read, but prose writers can interrupt or bracket these scenes to enter a character’s inner world or memories, or to summarize accounts of backstory or other story information.

Pure summary is used sparingly to fill in gaps, provide information, bridge action sequences, adjust pacing, and possibly add color, depth, and description to the prose. Literary fiction tends to include more summary than genre or commercial fiction.

The whole flow of story is a kind of action-reaction pattern set in motion from the initial catalyzing event that really gets the story going. Once the story is underway, a character responds to consequential events and makes decisions that lead to more consequences that lead to more decisions and responses. Think of your scenes as a series of dominoes; the events of one scene fall naturally to the next and trigger the next event, which triggers the next event, and so on.

Scene writing is an art rather than a science, but most writers can stand to boost their scene writing skills in order to realize the potential of a story’s scenes.