by Michael Lydon
Sitting down to write this month’s column, I clicked my way through the latest prompts as I usually do, looking for the one that intrigued me most. I didn’t have far to look: there was “Write a Story in 25 Words.” Okay, I thought, that’ll be fun, and started reading.
To my surprise, however, I found few stories. Dozens of evocative word paintings, yes, but few true stories. Looking back in my computer I found a similar prompt in October 2015, “Write a story in six words,” and in 2016 a third such prompt, “Write a story in 99 words.” I considered looking for another prompt to find something fresh to say, but then thought, if after all this discussion of stories, we’re not agreed on what makes a story a story, now’s the time to hammer the point home.
But before we go any further, let’s click-click our way back to my “From My Desk to Yours” column from October 2016 where you all wrote stories of 99 words or less. There we looked back to the derivation of the word story—from the late Latin storis—listed a few of its many synonyms—tale, saga, fable, chronicle, legend, myth, memoir—and opened our minds to the enormity of all that a story can include—“our inner and outer selves, our families and friends, our home, neighborhood, town, city, state, country, and the starry sky.”
An infinity of such crisscross links weave us humans into a vast tapestry of life, I wrote, “a zillion billion nodes sending and receiving signals through the universe, influencing links thousands of miles and thousands of years away.” A story is one thread in that tapestry, and we can follow its patterns and colors from sunrise to sunset, from birth to death, selecting single events in the life-flow and seeing how one event causes the next. That “telling of a happening or a connected series of happenings,” says the dictionary, that is a story.
Now, however, having tasted the cosmic background of storytelling in previous columns, let’s get down to storytelling’s meat and potatoes. I find three elements are indispensable in making a story:
- A beginning that introduces believable characters
- A middle that describes believable actions by those believable characters,
- An ending that reveals a true lesson about life or leaves us with a resolution of some sort.
This, for instance, is a story:
As Joe turned into his street, he saw that his house was on fire, flames leaping from the windows, firemen spraying them with water. Oh no, he thought, Betty was home! Joe ran to the house. There was his wife, safe, with a fireman’s blanket over her shoulders. He put his arm around her.
“Oh, Joe,” Betty cried.
“As long as you’re safe, honey, we’ll be okay,” said Joe.
These 69 words tell a true story because they describe believable characters living through a believable moment in a believable world. There’s much we don’t learn—Joe and Betty’s last name, where they live, how old they are, or how big their house is—but the story does paint enough details—the flames, the water spray, the blanket, Joe and Betty’s embrace—for our imaginations to fill in the rest. The ending, moreover, teaches a valuable lesson about the power of love: “As long as you’re safe, we’ll be okay,”
Note also that our little story has a plot, the barebones structure that frames the particular story of Joe and Betty. We could put the essence of Joe and Betty’s plot in fourteen words:
Danger causes fear,
Fear causes action,
Action leads to knowledge,
Knowledge leads to growth
—and those fourteen words could describe the emotional sequence of countless stories, Joe, Betty, and a mountain lion, for instance, or Betty, her mother, and a runaway car.
Note too that though we call the story’s plot a structure, story structures are not stiff constructs of nailed together two-by-fours. On the contrary: the structure of Joe and Betty’s story and all true stories are dynamic, one action causing another action causing another action in an ever-unfolding sequence of events—with every action revealing more about the characters to the reader. For instance, in my little story about Joe and Betty, Joe’s reaction to the fire shows us that he cares a lot about his wife. I didn’t have to tell you that Joe cares for his wife, his action in this scene does that job for me.
Stories, in a word, spring from life itself. They are the tales we hopeful, fearful humans tell each other about what it feels like to live through the ups and downs, the twists and turns, the minutes and hours and days and weeks and months and years of our lives.
Don’t be afraid to experiment with different ways of bringing action into your story. You may already have everything planned before you begin writing, or, alternatively, you might sit down at your desk with only one clear scene in your head. That’s a fine way to begin. Write that scene (that one action) and see where it takes you—soon enough you’ll be whirring along in this ‘ever-unfolding sequence of events’ with your characters.
So when you begin writing your next story—and I hope that is soon!—I suggest you think less about painting a pretty picture and think more of telling a story as action-packed and ever-changing as what you can see all around you anytime you look out your window or walk down the street before your house.
