Writers' Series: What Makes a Story?

Hello everyone!

    I am Sean, a man pursuing a Master of International Business with a long-standing fascination with stories. While I love stories told however they can be told, anime has been my medium of choice for a long time. As time went on, I increasingly realized that anime was not made in a vacuum, and the more I became aware of the emotions and inspirations behind the classics, the more fascinated I became. 

“The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller. The storyteller sets the vision, values, and agenda of an entire generation that is to come.”

    In the lunchroom of one of Steve Jobs' "failures" of a company, NeXT, he struck up a conversation with a coworker by speaking these exact words. It is a quote I heard as a young child that grew increasingly true with time. We all want to do what we want to do; we spend our time and mental resources relative to how much we value the outcome we feel we will obtain by acting. Whether we are going to the gym or scratching an itch, attention and energy are limited resources that we use in accordance with how badly we want the outcome and only to the extent we feel is necessary. 

    Look at anyone who does not work out or eat healthily and you will see that "want" is not reliant on what society values or what science says we should do but on where our own personal priorities lie. A "lazy" person does not avoid the gym because they want less out of life or because they lack discipline, but because they value the time spent in bed or recovering from a long week more. While some (most of us) may base their actions on what they feel is the "right" or "acceptable" thing to do, these are, nonetheless, individual values. We always spend our time and attention on what we want most at any given moment.

    Stories are the tools by which we determine what are problems worth that attention and how we address them. The narratives we build in our heads of the importance of something (which we call purpose) are the lens through which we look at the world. A chair is a chair due to past experiences building that story (and thus utility), just as we can look at a lion and know it is dangerous despite most of us not being harmed by one in our lifetimes. Our perspective (lens) through which we look at the world is the amalgamation of the stories of our experiences, and the stories that have the most impact on us play the biggest role in forming that lens.

    Humanity has spent millennia trying to develop stories that deliver the largest impact for this exact reason. As much as I am a religious man, we all know religion is a faith-based system. Doctrines had enough impact on people thousands of years ago that they chose to believe and die for that which little evidence exists for. Likewise, works like Fate/Staynight and Love Live! have inspired fans to spend hundreds of millions of hours and billions of dollars in support of them, and Serial Experiments Lain has inspired its own religion. Any company in the world can tell you that the narrative set through marketing and branding is the single most important factor in their success. A story that can relate to the pains you have and inspire the action needed to become better can influence you to work in pursuit of an outcome defined by the author; this is what Merriam-Webster defines as power.

“The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller..."

What Is the Purpose of This Series?

    To put it bluntly, this is to get my thoughts on paper. Call it an organized, stream-of-consciousness ramble where I try to get to the bottom of why stories work and ask you to correct me and give counterpoints whenever you'd like. I have no formal education as far as English or Literature degrees go, so I can only discuss what has worked and has not worked on me and those I know personally. Call it one argument for the dialectic of effective storytelling (as pretentious as that sounds). 

    Isn't that what makes philosophy fun though? At least with me, I have always been the type of person to come to my own conclusions first and enter a "classroom" to refine the lessons I took from the situation. This is why I have always been great at math, it is why I am great at science, and it is why philosophy and fiction are so fun to debate. A lot of my worldview stems from my own reasoning and experiences, and anything I can argue philosophically stems from my own conclusions (even though what brought on the thought process was likely inspired by these founding philosophies). When I come to learn of those who had similar thoughts before me, it often turns out that there are nuanced differences in conclusions. This is a win-win; I can call them out where the logic does not track, and I can learn where I may have been delusional in my own argument. Either way, I am of the belief that this is a debate where both sides are wrong no matter what, but being wrong is the fun part, and the goal should always be to learn what I can.

    You may view this as me forming an opinion in real-time, all to get the discussion going on why the traits we see in modern literature have developed the way they have and if/why they contribute to the impact these stories have.

Structure

    The Writers' Series will cover six elements of storytelling: Central Takeaway, Premise, Structure, Style, Characters, and Interaction which I will cover in that order. I feel planning each segment of a story is reliant on understanding all of the former as context. Each element will have anywhere from one to ten posts questioning the facets that make up the respective element.

    Each post will begin with addressing the topic I am questioning, defining the topic, and providing a mapping statement of the different angles from which I will question the topic. The general body of the post will be the Formation of multi-paragraph segments around each of these "angles" and listing examples in fiction of where I have seen them work, not work, and when the absence of them improved or detracted from the story. Of course, I will take the time at the end to summarize each post but do not expect any conclusions from me beyond my personal opinions.

I am hoping I can see this through to completion and we can have some amazing discussions from this!

Thank you for reading,

Sean