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1 Beginner St Story Story Foundations

Story

A character wants something, meets trouble, and changes.

The short answer. A story is more than a string of events, because it needs three things working together. Someone wants something, something with reasons of its own is in the way, and by the end they stand somewhere new in relation to what they wanted. Leave out any one of those and you can still write readable pages, but readers will feel the gap, and they'll only be able to describe it in vague ways: nothing was at risk, it went nowhere, it was fine. The word people trip over is change, because your character doesn't have to get better, or even bend. What has to shift is what their situation means. Once you pin it down like that, the definition becomes a test you can run on a series, a chapter, or the scene you're working on right now.

Remember this: if you can't say what your character wants, what's stopping them, and what will be different because of it, you've got material, but you don't have a story yet.

What it is

A story is what happens when someone wants something, can't easily get it, and doesn't end up where they started. There's more in that sentence than you'd think, and if you take out any part of it, the story's gone.

Take out the wanting and you get a description. A character wakes up, makes coffee, walks to work and notices the weather. Things happen in order, but nobody's after anything, so the reader has nothing to lean toward.

Take out the difficulty and you get a shopping trip. She wants the job, applies for the job, gets the job. One thing follows another, but the reader feels nothing, because the ending was never in doubt.

Take out the change and you get an anecdote: a funny thing that happened once, which leaves everyone where they started.

Put all three back and the machine starts running: she wants the job, but her sister wants it too, and her sister is better at it. By the time she gets it or loses it, she's learned something about herself she'd rather not know. Now the reader has a reason to turn the page, and a reason to feel something when they reach the last one.

Story is the umbrella element on this table, the one that holds all the rest. Every other element here is a part of the machine, a way to build it, a shape it often takes, or a kind of story readers go looking for. So Premise is the machine squeezed into a sentence or two. Conflict is the difficulty, and Stakes are what the difficulty costs. Character Arc is the change, followed step by step, and Plot is the order you reveal it in. And Theme is the question the whole thing keeps asking.

One point trips people up early. "Change" doesn't have to mean a character becomes a better person. Sometimes the character is the one thing that doesn't bend, and the world around them changes instead, or refuses to. Sometimes the change is a hardening. And sometimes, in tragedy, the character learns the truth one scene too late to use it.

What has to shift is the story's situation of meaning, which means where the character stands in relation to three things: what they want, what they believe, and what it costs them. If nothing there has moved by the end, readers feel it, even when they can't name it, and they say the book "didn't go anywhere".

A story doesn't have to be original or complicated, either, and it doesn't need a twist, a murder or a dragon. The oldest shapes still work, and readers pick up books in a familiar genre because they want that familiar shape done well.

Why it matters

If you're writing one book slowly, you can hold the story in your head and feel your way forward. But if you're writing several books a year, perhaps juggling more than one series and more than one pen name too, you can't. So at any point, you need to be able to say what this story is, and you need to know whether the scene in front of you is helping it.

A blunt definition helps here, because it gives you three questions that work on anything, at any stage, in any genre:

Writers bring all kinds of problems to a critique group or a developmental editor (an editor who works on the big picture of a book). Most of them, though, turn out to be one of those three questions going unanswered somewhere. The middle sags because the character stopped wanting anything urgent. The ending falls flat because the obstacle was never really a threat. The whole thing feels thin because the character ends where they began: they've learned nothing and lost nothing.

It matters for sales, too: if a reader can describe your book to a friend in one breath, it gets recommended. If they can't, it gets a polite five-star review and no word of mouth. And the way a reader describes a book is almost always some version of want, trouble, change: "it's about a woman who has to work for the sister who ruined her". If you can't come up with that sentence about your own book, your blurb will struggle, and so will everything that depends on it.

It also helps your speed, because when you know the shape of what you're building, you can write a first draft straight through instead of going in circles. You don't need to know every scene, but you do need to know what your character is chasing and what it will cost.

Real-world examples

Andy Weir's The Martian: want, trouble and change with no room to hide

Andy Weir started writing The Martian in 2009 and posted it on his own website, one chapter at a time, for free. Readers asked for an e-book, so he put it on Kindle at 99 cents, the lowest price Amazon would let him set. From there it climbed the Kindle bestseller list, and in March 2013 he sold the print rights to Crown for over US$100,000. Crown published the hardcover on February 11, 2014. Ridley Scott's film version, starring Matt Damon, came out in October 2015.

The book runs the machine with nothing to hide behind: Mark Watney wants to not die on Mars, and in the end to get home. The trouble is Mars itself: no food, no working way to contact anyone, no ride. There's no subplot to lean on, no romance, no villain, and every chapter is a version of "here is the next thing that will kill him, here is what he tries". The wanting is never in doubt, not for a single page, and the difficulty is never fake. So the book works, even though much of it is a string of engineering problems.

It also shows how loosely "change" can be read, because Watney doesn't go through any moral change. He's about the same wisecracking botanist-engineer at the end as at the start. What changes instead is everything around his want. At first he's alone, and everyone thinks he's dead, but by the end he's been seen, believed in, and fought for by people working together, at huge cost to them. So the story's meaning shifts even though the man doesn't.

You may have been told that every protagonist (your main character) must have an internal arc. If so, keep this book in your pocket as the counter-example, because some don't. What you can't skip, though, is this: something must be different by the end, and the difference must have been paid for.

It's also a useful story for anyone publishing on their own, because the order went audience first, e-book second, print deal third, which is the reverse of the traditional route.

Vonnegut's shapes, and the study that tested them

Kurt Vonnegut wrote a master's thesis at the University of Chicago, and in it he argued that stories have simple shapes you can draw. Put the character's fortunes on a vertical axis, from ill fortune at the bottom to great fortune at the top. Put time along the horizontal, and the same few curves keep showing up. The thesis was rejected, but he kept making the argument for the rest of his life, and he counted it among the best ideas he ever had.

In 2016, a group of researchers from the University of Vermont and the University of Adelaide tested the idea on a large scale. They were Andrew Reagan, Lewis Mitchell, Dilan Kiley, Christopher Danforth and Peter Sheridan Dodds, and their paper, "The emotional arcs of stories are dominated by six basic shapes", came out in EPJ Data Science in 2016. The team took a filtered set of 1,327 works of fiction from Project Gutenberg and ran sentiment analysis on them. That means using a computer to score how happy or sad the words are as the story goes along. Then they looked for curves that kept coming back, and they found six. And they got the same six by three separate methods:

So what does this tell you? For one, the change this page keeps asking for can be measured: a story's emotional fortunes really do move, and when they move in one of these familiar patterns, readers recognize it. For another, there aren't many shapes, and none of them is clever. "Man in a hole" (get someone into trouble, then get them out) is most of commercial fiction.

But be careful about what the study is: it looks at sentiment curves in fiction that's out of copyright. The researchers treat it as evidence about emotional arcs, not as instructions for writing a good book. A shape is only a story's outline, and plenty of bad books have a perfectly good one. So use it to check whether your character's fortunes move at all, but don't use it as a template to fill in.

An everyday scenario: the scene that would not work

Here's the kind of problem the definition catches while you're drafting. Say you're ninety thousand words into a fantasy novel, and chapter nineteen is dead. You've rewritten it three times. The prose is fine, and so is the dialogue, but it's still dead.

So run the three questions. What does the viewpoint character (the one whose eyes we see through) want in this chapter? If you're truthful, the answer is "to be told what the council decided", and that's an errand rather than a want. What's in the way? Nothing: she gets told. What's different at the end? She knows things the reader mostly knew already.

More polish rarely fixes this. What fixes it is giving her something to want in that room, something she might not get, and then adding someone with a reason to refuse her. Now the chapter that wouldn't work is a scene with a scene goal and an obstacle, and suddenly you can write it in one pass.

Try it yourself

This takes about twenty minutes, and it works on a book you're planning, one you're stuck in the middle of, or one you've already drafted.

  1. Write the one-breath sentence. Fill in: "This is a story about [character] who wants [goal], but [obstacle], and by the end [what is different]." Write it about the whole book, and don't polish it. If you can't finish it without using the word "and" three times, you've found your problem.
  2. Check that the want isn't an errand. A want is something the character would fight for and would be worse off without. "To find out what happened to her brother" is a want. "To attend the meeting" is an errand. If yours is an errand, ask what the character is really afraid of losing, and use that instead.
  3. Check that the obstacle can win. Write one sentence about how this story ends badly for the character. If you can't write a believable losing ending, the obstacle is just decoration, and the reader will sense it, so give it teeth. See Stakes and Tension.
  4. Name the difference. Write down what's true on the last page that wasn't true on the first. It can be about the character, what they believe, who they have left, or the world. If all you can truthfully say is "some time has passed", you have a premise but not a story yet.
  5. Draw the shape. On paper, draw a horizontal line for the length of the book, and add a vertical axis from "worst" to "best". Then sketch roughly how the character's fortunes run, and mark four points: the start, the moment things turn, the lowest point and the end. You're looking for movement here, not a pretty curve, and a flat line across the middle is the sag you've been feeling.
  6. Test one scene with the same three questions. Pick the chapter you like least, and ask what the viewpoint character wants in it, what's working against them, and what has changed by the last line. Most dead scenes fail the second question.
  7. Save the sentence. Put the one-breath sentence where you'll see it while you draft. That might be the top of your outline, your project notes, or wherever you work. Then, when a scene starts to wander, check it against this sentence.

Here's a copy-and-paste version for your notes:

Story: __________ wants __________, but __________. By the end, __________ is different. Worst plausible ending: __________ Shape: starts at __, turns at __, lowest at __, ends at __

Common mistakes and misunderstandings

Confusing a situation with a story. "A city where nobody can lie" is a wonderful situation, but it only becomes a story when someone in that city wants something the rule against lying keeps from them. Writers with strong worldbuilding instincts get stuck here most often: the world is finished, and nothing is happening in it.

A sequence of events is not a plot. Things happening in order is just chronology, a timeline, while a plot is events linked by cause and effect: this happens because that happened. So if you can shuffle your chapters around without much damage, you have a chronology.

Assuming every protagonist needs to change on the inside. Plenty of stories that last (survival fiction, most detective series, a lot of comedy) run on a main character who stays mostly the same while the situation moves. Series fiction often keeps the lead steady on purpose, so readers can come back to the same person book after book. What these stories do need is for something to be different, and paid for, but the hero doesn't have to learn a lesson.

Mistaking the shape for the story. Pick a structure (Three-Act, Save the Cat, the Hero's Journey) and fill in the slots, and you'll get something that's the right shape but often lifeless. A structure is a way to find what's wrong, and a scaffold to build on, but the want and the cost are the story. So reach for a structure when you're stuck, but don't use it in place of knowing what your character is after.

Putting the obstacle outside when it's really inside, or the other way around. Say your character could solve the problem by making one sensible decision in chapter two. Then your obstacle isn't the dragon. It's whatever stops them from making that decision. Usually that's the lie they believe, or the wound underneath it (the old hurt the lie grew out of). And if a character has rich inner turmoil but nothing in the world pushes back, you have a mood piece.

Thinking "literary" stories get a pass. Quiet novels have wants, obstacles and change too, though they're often smaller, slower and more inward: to be forgiven, to be seen, to stop pretending. But they're there, and a book without them is an essay, however much it looks like a novel.

Deciding the definition is beneath you. Experienced writers skip past "want, trouble, change" because it's obvious, and then they spend six weeks on a middle that sags. Sure, it's obvious, the way checking the gas gauge is obvious, but knowing it doesn't help much. Running it on chapter nineteen does.

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