What makes a story any good?
Two people I admire have taken a crack at that question: Ira Glass and Aristotle.
We’ll start with Ira:
Turns out Ira is cribbing from Aristotle in his first idea about a sequence of actions. I’ve checked; YouTube has no videos from 336 B.C., so you’ll have to read from here on out. (Thank you, Malcolm Heath, for your translation and introduction in the Penguin Classics edition of Poetics.)
First, a few definitions, a la Aristotle:
Tragedy: An imitation of events that evoke pity and fear.
Whole: That which has a beginning, middle, and end.
Character: Someone’s moral disposition.
Magnitude: The extent of a story’s plot.
Recognition: A change from ignorance to knowledge that affects someone’s good or bad fortune.
Reversal: A surprising inversion of the expected outcome of an action.
Vaguely creepy bust of Greek philosopher.
Like Ira, Aristotle believed a well-constructed plot must contain a connected series of events. This just means that everything that happens is a necessary consequence of what came before it. Also, a plot should be self-contained, meaning that its beginning is self-explanatory (not a consequence of something else) and its end is definite (there’s no further necessary consequence).
So,”The woodsman chopped down the tree. The tree fell on an ant.” This is an example of a connected, self-contained series of events. In contrast, “A tree fell to the ground. An ant dreamed about a leaf.” This is unconnected and not self-contained.
Basically, Aristotle is urging writers to keep everything consequential. A journalism professor of mine once put it another way: Send your readers down a water slide. Connectedness in writing equals ease in reading.
Here’s an interesting observation from Aristotle about why anyone would ever fuss over writing a good story, or for that matter create any sort of art: We love to imitate things. For some reason, “we take delight in viewing the most accurate possible images of objects which in themselves cause distress when we see them (e.g. the shapes of the lowest species of animal, and corpses).” Chew on that for a second.
OK, let’s look at magnitude. Aristotle approaches this subject in terms of how much material an audience should be expected to grasp. As for the upper limit, it must be possible for readers to remember everything in the plot. The requirement for the lower limit is more interesting: Every plot must contain a change from bad fortune to good fortune, or from good to bad.
Keep in mind, Aristotle is talking about tragedies here.
But what is a tragedy? First and foremost, effective tragedies possess effective plots. A person’s character is not as central to her story as what she does or what happens to her. Aristotle: “Well-being and ill-being reside in action, and the goal of life is an activity, not a quality; people possess certain qualities in accordance with their character, but they achieve well-being or its opposite on the basis of how they fare.”
So what makes a good plot? First of all, its events must be connected in accordance with necessity or probability; we already covered this with the example of the woodsman and the ant. But a good plot usually has two other elements: recognition and reversal.
The key here is that these elements usually coincide with the change in fortune. So when Oedipus learns that he’s killed his father and married his mother, the recognition of this causes his slide into bad fortune. Reversal is a technique that creates recognition: Oedipus learns of his mistake from a messenger who aims to bring good news but instead reveals the terrible truth. Reversal incorporates another element of a good plot: astonishment. Aristotle says pity and fear “occur above all when things come about contrary to expectation but because of one another.”
Here Aristotle slips in another element of any good plot: suffering. This is an action that involves destruction or pain (e.g. deaths in full view, extreme agony, woundings and so on).
We all know bad things happen to good people. In its ideal form, tragedy aims at evoking an emotion of pity. Here’s where character comes in. If something horrible happens to an outstandingly virtuous person, we are disgusted; this is not pity. If something horrible happens to a bad person, we are satisfied; this is not pity. Heath: “So the ideal tragic plot cannot be constructed around an exceptionally virtuous person or a wicked person; it must therefore be based on someone between these two — broadly speaking virtuous, but not outstandingly so.”
Well, that describes most of us. This is why effective tragedies also evoke fear – we recognize that the fate that befalls a character could actually befall someone like ourselves. Aristotle adds “those who use spectacle to produce an effect which is not evocative of fear, but simply monstrous, have nothing to do with tragedy.” Sorry, Rob Zombie, but you are no Sophocles.
I’ll end with an amusing tidbit of advice that Aristotle offers to anyone who wants to write a good story. We should “so far as possible visualize what is happening… as if one were actually present at the events themselves.” To accomplish this, you must either be “gifted or mad.”
So which are you, brilliant or bat-shit crazy? In terms of storytelling, either one will do.
The embedded video probably did for a lot of people what a friend did for me a few months ago, which is to clue me in to the fact that Ira Glass is old as hell. You listen to This American Life and you picture some (hesitant) college student hoping to get a few more minutes on tape before his parents catch him in the basement. Nope. He is a full grown adult. Who knew?
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