•••4
Traditional Story Structure

THE DOGMA

Nothing excites more outright anger in a fiction writer than being told there is a form into which the short story does or should fit. The word formula comes to mind, and it is insulting to an artist that his or her work should ever be dictated by formula.

The story structure fed to us in high school, and in a lot of books about writing, especially on writing for film and television, goes like this. When the story begins, your character is doing what she or he always does: going to school or work, or tending the babies, or getting ready for another launch of the space shuttle. Then something happens that fractures the routine. A beautiful man or woman arrives to sell a vacuum cleaner. A husband arrives home with a dog. A teenage daughter brings home her boyfriend, saying that he will live in her room from now on.

The ordinary way of things at the start is called by some the opening equilibrium. The thing that happens to break it is the point of attack. The story then goes in search of a solution to the problem, or some would say it searches for a new equilibrium. The main character tries to solve the problem created at the point of attack and moves through a couple of minor crises en route to the major climax, the highest point of action in the story, where the game is won or lost, solved or left unresolved forever. The story ends once we know the results of the climax. Sometimes it is said that the main character must be changed by the events of the story.

We all know this old dramatic arc, and most of us hate it, enemy of ingenuity and creativity that it is. A shape like a roof, an inverted V, lopsided to the right. Let’s burn it in a bonfire on the summer solstice, while people dance around holding hands.

In the world of television, especially in books about how to write for television and become fabulously well-to-do, there is no shilly-shallying about the dramatic arc. It not only has to be there in a TV or film script, but the right parts of it have to arrive at certain minutes in the hour or half-hour television slot—so we can go to commercial. The description of the arc appears in books about how to write TV drama, usually differentiated according to the metaphor chosen to describe it. Sometimes, your hero is said to be in a boat on a river. The river curves, hits several sets of rapids, each with more dangerous rocks and whitewater than the last. Oops, here comes a submerged tree! And, finally, hang onto your hat: the waterfall! The character drowns or is saved, and that’s your story.

Another memorable metaphor from film and TV is that you put your hero in a tree, throw rocks at him or her for an hour, then let the poor soul out of the tree. Whatever the arc is likened to—a river, a walk across the Gobi Desert, a voyage to the moon—the shape is the same, the idea is the same, the dogma is the same. Interestingly, writers tend to be more forgiving of the notion of a formula story when thinking about writing for television, perhaps because they have heard that writing drama for television is lucrative, as opposed to the artistic purity and poverty in most every other part of the writing game.

I am all for ignoring the dramatic arc, provided we know and acknowledge one thing: that the dramatic arc is the natural shape of a great many stories, in fact most of the stories that have ever been told on this planet. When the oral storytellers from whom we all descend thought about how they might tell a story, they realized that they needed to begin by getting the listeners’ attention. Then they needed to hold onto it. That required the story to become more exciting along the way. At the end, they needed to pay off the story with some happening bigger or more emotionally powerful than the rest. Finally came the need for it all to be important somehow.

Ever since, writers of fiction and drama have tended to stick with that way of telling a story—because of how effectively it lures, excites, and satisfies an audience.

Am I advocating that you write your stories that way? No. I don’t strive to follow the pattern myself. Why should you? But I am advocating that you understand why that form of story has been so tiresomely enduring. However you orchestrate your fictional text, you will confront the need for something that makes the story move and urges the reader to move with it. A question will exist, and readers will want the answer badly enough to read on. A mood will be created that is so evocative readers will want to stay in it for the sheer sensual pleasure or melancholy. A fictional character, made to live in readers’ imaginations, will try to do something interesting or compelling or creepy, and readers will go along to see what happens.

John Gardner, in his wonderful book The Art of Fiction, used the term propulsion: that which intrigues, compels, seduces the reader into moving forward. The force of propulsion in a story can be of any strength except ineffectively weak. The strength of it may be the strength of your reader’s engagement with your story. It may determine the power of the experience.

♦♦♦ Your Process

• In your first reading of “The Dog in the Van” and “Visitation,” I hope you were reading for story rather than studying form. Now, read the stories a second time to see if they conform to the traditional story structure or if they have a different form. Do they conform in some ways and not in others?
• While rereading the stories, stop every few paragraphs and ask yourself what is propelling you forward as a reader. What is it that you are trying to find out? What enticements beyond simple plot are acting on you?