STORY IS, STORY AS

I had a debate teacher once, and part of his deal was to endlessly hound us on a single point:

Define your terms.

If you were going to make a point — or, more important, refute someone else's — then you had to make it clear what you were talking about precisely, so that there could be no doubt of your message.

It's also an idea that holds true when you're writing a thesis paper — whether that thesis paper is about the unstable geopolitics of North Freedonia or how the mating habits of the unruly puffin helped spawn Western civilization, you have to be clear about every aspect of what you're trying to say. You have to define your damn terms.

And so, it seems like a good idea to try to define my terms.

Which means, up front, I need to define the biggest term of all:

STORY.

One problem, though. Story evades definition. Perhaps because, as I noted earlier, so few rules actually govern the act of storytelling, the very idea of story escapes just as you try to define it. It's like a greased-up python — it'll always squirm and slip from your grip, just as you think you've got a good hold on the thing. Saying that "story is this" or "story is that" is a very good way to invite a dump truck full of exceptions to the rule. You will be buried in them. For every supposed rule that exists in storytelling, countless deviations also exist.

Instead of focusing on a single definition, let's look at story through a series of lenses, each framing story in a different way — not to give us one perfect view of what storytelling is and how it works, but rather, to see it multiple ways, from multiple angles, to give us a larger, broader, and altogether weirder view of narrative and how we create it, evolve it, and share it.

STORY SHAPES

Two words: Freytag's Pyramid.

Nope, it's not the strange occult store that just moved in at the edge of town. Nor is it a game show, the new drug all the kids are doing, or a kinky sex move. Rather, it's a visual device to help you grasp the rough shape of narrative. The shape is, well, a pyramid. At the base of the pyramid, you have exposition, or the information you need to know to get into the story. On the left side of the pyramid, you get rising action, which is the part where, simplistically put, stuff is beginning to happen. At its peak is the climax — the whiz-bang coming-together of all the tale elements! — and then it sinks back down the far side with falling action and denouement. Events slow as the bits of the story are all tied up. All is concluded.

Freytag's Pyramid is also bullshit.

I mean, it's not bullshit-bullshit, okay? Of course it gets a few things right: Most stories do have a rise to action, a climax, and then a conclusion, but that's not really all that different from saying a story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. It's a nice bit of visualization to see the story as a mountain one must climb, true, but at the same time, that single shape is woefully limited and overly simplistic.

No story conforms to a standard shape.

A story might look more like a jagged mountain. Each individual peak, of which there can be many of varying heights and angles, illustrates a rise-to-and-fallfrom-climax in miniature. At every peak, you thin out the oxygen, and in every valley, you breathe more oxygen in. Each peak of the mountain is higher than the one before it, thus creating an overall sense of upward momentum — the same momentum indicated by Freytag's Cough-Cough-Mostly-Bullshit Pyramid, but with greater nuance.

Of course, even the Jaggedy-Toothed Mountain shape is bullshit, too, because stories aren't really two-dimensional. It may offer you a good start, but it's not necessarily enough to convey the overall movement of the narrative. If you think about story in a three-dimensional way, suddenly you get a roller coaster — it rises, it falls, it whips left, it jerks right, it corkscrews through the air before spinning you upside down in a vicious loop de loop. And then it slows and the ride is over. Isn't that how a story looks, sometimes? Or better yet, how a story feels? A two-dimensional variant assumes the tale is predictable in its inevitable ascent, however herky-jerky it might seem. A roller coaster, though, is full of surprises, offering twists and turns that all fit together as part of one track. Some roller coasters are faster and scarier. Some are slower, with gentler curves. Consider the shape of every roller coaster and how each might reflect a different story.

STORY AS A HOUSE

We use the metaphor of architecture a lot when talking about narrative, and it's appropriate because, as with the roller coaster, architecture is more than a two-dimensional blueprint. Architecture is three-dimensional. It has space — and, in a sense, it has time, too, as we move through it (which I think makes it demonstrative of the fourth dimension).

More specifically, though, consider story as a house.

Just as story is not one thing, neither is a house one thing. You think of a house, and you may think of a Cape Cod, or a rancher, or the haunted sprawl of the Winchester Mansion, or one of those fancy "tiny houses." A house is a house is a house, just as a story is a story is a story, regardless of the variance in their shapes.

You could argue that the more two-dimensional representations of narrative (like Freytag's Half-Ass Triangle) are more emblematic of plot than they are of story. And here, it's vital to understand the differences between those two things, once again seeking to (as my debate teacher roars at me from inside my own memories) DEFINE OUR TERMS.

I am fond of saying that story is an apple and plot is the arrow through the apple. Meaning, story is the whole picture, whereas plot is merely our path through the picture. Plot is our sequence of events, the steps by which we experience the story. But the story is bigger, unrulier — a much roomier entity than the plot itself. Apple versus arrow. Or, if you want a more meandering sequence of events (one that is not so much a straight line) think of the worm's path through the apple as the plot, a worm drunk on fermented juice, zigzagging his way through fruit flesh. The fact that this is a "path" matters here because it means plot is not merely the sequence of events, but rather the sequence of events as revealed to the audience. It's how they experience moving through those events — it is in how you arrange them.

If we think of story as a house, then our path through the house is the plot. It is the steps the audience takes when led through the space.

In a sense, the reverse is also true: If we see a story as a...