What makes a story? Distinguished novelist Tim Lott explores why you should shape a novel around points of change.
Novelists are storytellers, so it is said, but the sort of story a fiction writer tells is different from the sort of stories we tell one another.
The stories we tell one another – other than being frequently a bit dull ( I went to the shops today and a woman stood on my foot then refused to apologise, my dog has fleas and I can’t get rid of them) are usually fragmented and unstructured. Whatever comes to mind, so to speak.
Children are masters of the unstructured story. As Nigel Watts, who wrote an excellent book called How To Write a Novel And Get It Published’ remarks, ‘Young children have no sense of plot. Listen to their stories: “This happened and then this happened and then this…” Love them though we may, there is only so much prattle we can listen to before we tire…’
A fictional story is not spontaneous – unless you, perhaps, are Jack Kerouac, the abstract expressionist of novelists – but designed. It has a shape, and this shape is to some extent inescapable.
What is that shape? Simple enough. Beginning, middle, end. Act One, Act Two, Act Three.
Why is this shape inescapable? Because it is the same shape as our minds, which parse the chaos of existence into thesis, antithesis, synthesis.
The writer and dramatist David Mamet has this to say about that shape:
Dramatic structure is not an arbitrary – or even a conscious – invention. It is an organic codification of the human mechanism for ordering information. Event, elaboration, denouement; thesis, antithesis, synthesis; boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl; act one, two, three. [Chapter 3: ‘3 Uses of the Knife’] Our survival mechanism orders the world into cause – effect – conclusion… To create or witness drama [is] to order the universe into a comprehensible form. [Chapter 1: ‘The Wind-Chill Factor’] It was Aristotle, the first story theorist that identified this shape, with reference to Greek drama. The three acts are classically separated by two big Turning Points – the event that sets the story into motion (the ‘Inciting Incident’ and then the loss of all hope for the protagonist, ‘The Darkest Hour Before the Dawn’). An act is made up of scenes. If stories are all about change and the threat of change, then scenes are units of change within the act.
There are many other turning points in a story. In fact a story is made up of turning points, which are simply units of change. And without change your story is dead. But the big turning points, at least in classic
