how to write story

Defining story


A story is... "that which has a beginning, a middle, and an end. A beginning is that which does not itself follow anything by causal necessity, but after which something naturally is or comes to be. An end, on the contrary, is that which itself follows some other thing, either by necessity, or as a rule, but has nothing following it. A middle is that which follows something as some other thing follows it. A well-constructed plot, therefore, must neither begin nor end at haphazard, but conform to these principles."
-- Aristotle, Poetics
Intuitively we all know what a story is, although we may not be able to articulate all its elements. Generally, story is an organization of experience which draws together many aspects of our spatial, temporal, and causal perception.

In a story, some person, object, or situation undergoes a particularly type of change, and this change is measured by a sequence of attributions which apply to the thing at different types. Story is a way of experiencing a group of sentences, or pictures, or gestures, or dance movements, etc., etc., which together attribute a beginning, middle, and end to something. But typically this beginning, middle, and end are not contained in discrete elements but rather in the overall relationships established among the totality of elements. For example, the first scene of a film is not in itself the “beginning.” It acquires that relationship together in combination with other scenes and in relation to their scenes. Although a scene, or sentence, or page being physically first may be necessary to include it in the beginning, it is not sufficient since a beginning must also be judged to be a proper part of an ordered sequence or pattern of other elements.

Stages of story
What exactly is this pattern? Story theorists argue that a story consists of 5 stages:

a state of equilibrium
disruption of equilibrium
recognition of the disruption
effort to restore state of equilibrium
results of that effort, typically another state of equilibrium
These stages are not random but are produced according to the principles of cause and effect. Mere coincidence may play a part -- but only a very small part -- of what we know as “story.” Cause and effect are the essential rules of process in what we know as story. Events must flow naturally and logically from previous events, based upon what we know of he laws of nature and the way people generally behave.
Cause and effect
When “cause and effect” is violated, story is diminished, sometimes to such an extent that the audience no longer wishes to allocate attention and processing energy. It is likely that all of us at some time has stopped watching a film, or stopped reading a novel, or stopped being engaged by some kind of story because the unraveling of events was marred by faulty cause and effect. That process must ring true.

But to understand the power of story, one needs to know about a broader concept: cognitive schema.

Chunking
When exploring mental processes, we begin with the fact that our brains have severe capacity limitations both in terms of our attention and memory. For example, our short-term memory is said to be able to manipulate only about 5 to 9 “chunks” of data. But by “chunking,” we are able to remember more smaller pieces than by not chunking. For example, the word “red” counts as one chunk, but the letters “edr” count as three chunks. Given a list of 20 letters to remember, one would no doubt have great difficulty recalling them individually.