Does Story Have an Essential Form or Order?
What is story? There are many ways to talk about it, many things to consider. But it all boils down to a simple form or order.
According to McKee…
[I]n truth there’s only one story. In essence we have told one another the same tale, one way or another, since the dawn of humanity,and that story could be usefully called the Quest. All stories take the form of a Quest.
It’s a quest.
What is a story, precisely? The essential core event in all stories ever told in the history of humanity can be expressed in just three words: Conflict changes life. Therefore, the prime definition becomes: a dynamic escalation of conflict-driven events that cause meaningful change in a character’s life.
McKee’s expression of story in just three words: Conflict changes life.
And here are some descriptions of story, from McKee …
In McKee’s description, this is what a story is: a human being is living a life that is more or less in balance. Then comes the “inciting incident.” (McKee borrows the phrase from “Theory and Technique of Playwriting and Screenwriting,” which was written in the late forties by John Howard Lawson, the first president of the Screen Writers Guild, and an inspiration to McKee.) The protagonist reacts, his life falls out of balance, and he now has had aroused in him a conscious or unconscious desire for whatever it is that will restore balance—“launching him on a quest for his object of desire against the forces of antagonism.”
The Real McKee, by Ian Parker, The New Yorker, October 20, 2003
Through all history, story has essentially not changed…
So what is a story?
Essentially, a story expresses how and why life changes. It begins with a situation in which life is relatively in balance: You come to work day after day, week after week, and everything’s fine. You expect it will go on that way. But then there’s an event—in screenwriting, we call it the “inciting incident”—that throws life out of balance. You get a new job, or the boss dies of a heart attack, or a big customer threatens to leave. The story goes on to describe how, in an effort to restore balance, the protagonist’s subjective expectations crash into an uncooperative objective reality. A good storyteller describes what it’s like to deal with these opposing forces, calling on the protagonist to dig deeper, work with scarce resources, make difficult decisions, take action despite risks, and ultimately discover the truth. All great storytellers since the dawn of time—from the ancient Greeks through Shakespeare and up to the present day—have dealt with this fundamental conflict between subjective expectation and cruel reality.
Storytelling That Moves People, A Conversation with Screenwriting Coach Robert McKee by Bronwyn Fryer, Harvard Business Review, June 2003
…story is essentially about The Gap.
But let me try to answer that question by making a simple and clear definition of story itself. Story begins when an event, either by human decision or accident in the universe, radically upsets the balance of forces in the protagonist’s life, arousing in that character the need to restore the balance of life. To do so, that character will conceive of what is known as an “Object of Desire,” that which they feel they need to put life back into balance. They will then go off into their world, into themselves, in the various dimensions of their existence, seeking that Object of Desire, trying to restore the balance of life, and they will struggle against forces of antagonism that will come from their own inner natures as human beings, their relationships with other human beings, their personal and/or social life, and the physical environment itself. They may or may not achieve that Object of Desire; they may or may not finally be able to restore their life to a satisfying balance.
…the Christian story is full of Forces of Antagonism.
Story is a whole other mode of thinking. Story is rooted in causal logic. A story is X happens, and in reaction to X, Y happens, and because of Y, Z happens. The story is a dynamic way of understanding life as a dynamic of positive and negative changes of value charge, driven by the forces of conflict in life, in an effort to restore the balance of life. And so a story begins when something throws life out of balance, and everything to restore the balance discovers the truth of life, which is that there are forces in opposition to you that will resist your efforts to restore the balance, counteract your effects, even reverse your efforts. As you struggle through that, eventually you will be able to know enough truth to be able to restore balance.
Thinking like that means thinking in stories.
…thinking like a storyteller is a whole new way of thinking.
Q: You use the words “story design” frequently. What does that mean?
Robert McKee: An event comes along in life we call the “Inciting Incident.” Either by choice, accident, or both – life is thrown out of balance. That imbalance arouses in the protagonist a desire to put life back on an even keel. To do that, they conceive of something that they need, an object of desire so to speak, that they feel would restore life’s balance. It could be justice, it could be putting the bad guy in jail, or, as in the film About Schmidt, it could be a reason for living. Whatever it is, they pursue that desire. The design of the story is built from that inciting incident, when life went out of balance, to the climax when balance is restored for better or worse. Events must be shaped in a progressive way to hold the emotional and intellectual interest of the audience for two hours without interruption and deliver them a satisfying experience. Exactly how that works, film to film, story to story, is infinitely variable. The task of a good design is to hook, hold and payoff the audience’s interest. If that works, then the story can be in one act or ten acts; it can be mono-plot or multi-plot in any genre.
An Interview with Robert McKee, by Debra Eckerling, StoryLink, August 18, 2009
And look how those fit with this, from Storynomics…
The form of story, at its simplest, goes like this: As the telling opens, the central character’s life, as expressed in its core value (happiness/sadness, for example), is in relative balance. But then something happens that upsets this balance and decisively changes the core value’s charge one way or the other. He could, for example, fall in love (positive) or out of love (negative). The character then acts to restore life’s balance, and from that moment on a sequence of events, linked by cause and effect, moves through time, progressively and dynamically swinging the core value back and forth from positive to negative, negative to positive. At climax, the story’s final event changes the core value’s charge absolutely and the character’s life returns to balance.
Story certainly has an essential form.
When story aspires to art, it becomes an infinitely complex and endlessly variable thing. …. At the heart of all these variants, however, beats a minimal but essential form. When we use the phrase storyform, we mean it’s universal, irreducible foundation.
In his first book, McKee describes the elements of story in five basic parts which fit into that form…
A story is a design in five parts: The Inciting Incident, the first major event of the telling, is the primary cause for all that follows, putting into motion the other four elements – Progressive Complications, Crisis, Climax, Resolution.
And Coyne picks up on those five elements in his work on story…
The five elements that build Story are the Inciting Incident (either causal or coincidental), progressive complications expressed through active or revelatory turning points, a crisis question that requires a choice between at least two negative alternatives or at least two irreconcilable goods, the climax choice and the resolution.
But later, McKee identifies 8 Stages of Story in his more recent book Storynomics. But those five elements still play a foundational role…
If we were to dissect every coherent story ever told, eight essential components, assembled over eight stages, would span the creative process from beginning to end:
STAGE 1
EFFECT
Meaningful Emotional Satisfaction
STAGE 2
SUBJECT MATTER
Core Value
Protagonist
Society
Place
Time
STAGES 3-8
EVENT DESIGN
Protagonists Actions Versus Antagonistic ReactionsStorynomics, By Robert McKee and Tom Gerace
I chose to evaluate the Christian story through the 8 Stages of Story, rather than the 5 Parts of story from his earlier work.
But it’s still all about story form. To finish, I’ll include this wonderful picture McKee gives to illustrate the endless possibilities within the essential form of story. It’s sorta like music…
The essential form of story is simple. But that’s like saying that the essential form of music is simple. It is. It’s twelve notes. But these twelve notes conspire into everything and anything we have ever called music. The essential elements of the Quest are the twelves notes of our music, the melody we’ve listened to all our lives.
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