Movement Within Movement: 

The Physiognomy of Story and Narrative 

When we talk about story and narrative, we're talking about the difference between, say, a song and music. The later is the raw material of the medium, the former is a genre. A genre distinguishes itself purley by how the raw material is constrained. All art depends on material constrained. A word is a sound constrained by a beginning and an end, an open vowel (the primitive yowl of existential dread or the mother's sigh over her baby) is held in my the terminus supplied by constenants. 

A story has a temporal condition that is unique to forms like music. Music, of course, doesn't exist outside of time, though narrative or story may. Think for example of a representational painting that displays figures frozen in action, the narrative is the sum reslut of the meaning of the various attitudes of the characters and their props, and the idea, the implication of time: something happened before the event depicted and something will happen as a result.  Even the most dull, static still life, the trompe l'oiel, suggests that that jug of wine has just been poured and lets the viewer imagine the consequences of such a delight, it's taste and refreshment. 

Time's arrow is malleable in a story. I tell my students that far from being a mundane, mechanical gesture it's a truly magical and auspicious maneuver, radical in its possibilities, albeit the closest thing to actually being able to control time that we have. One might concede that the ability of limitless imaging making might trump this exercise, but I would strongly advice the reader to actually begin writing a story with an attention to the flexibility of time and see how unique this astonishing technique really is. 

The containment of a story, its frame, we long ago think of as linear, as having a beginning, a middle and an end, a form that has at its base a truth that is indisputable. Though like every truth it's very easy to fall into the trap of reductive cliche; hence there's a strong aversion among even the dilettante to ignore such rules or rules of thumb. But a story seems to ache under the strain of not having these simple features, these dictates of formalism. The story needs somehow if it exists in time to relate to time in some way, to advance forward in a relative dance with the reader. I am primarily talking about the written form of narrative here, though many of these conditions and constraints are applicable to motion pictures and visual narrative forms as well. 

The motion forward in a written story depends on the reader's ability to do some heavy lifting, to read. And reading in this case isn't the shallow practice we learned in elementary school, the dreaded method of "phonics" which reduces the art to a pasteboard masquerade of sounding out sounds to make sounds, rather than assuming the challenge of exploring meaning. In order to read well, one has to work a bit at it, and a text should both make demands on a reader's skill, but also excite and encourage them to take on the non-passive role that will require them to, say, dig into Moby Dick and remain with Ishmael through several hundred pages. 

The requirement is that the author produce this thing called "narrative drive" that mechanism that catches the reader by the collar and helps them up hill. The reader is doing the work, but the text is what gives her traction, and nourishes her while it's happening. A queer symbiosis is at work here. Part of what keeps the reader reading is that idea that is peculiar to narrative, but also shared by other mediums and art formas, that question of what will happen next is worth answering. The narrative drive is how this question is formed in the reader and gives her that desire to look at the sentences that follows the first, then the next paragraph, and encourages her to lick her finger before turning the next page over. Narrative drive is the fuel, accomplished in many different ways that brings the reader through. It can work in an overt way, keeping the stakes high, (The Painted Bird, Crime and Punishment) or even in a more quiet fashion, (Housekeeping, Herzog). In each case there are two parallel mechanisms that create narrative drive, both opperating in harmony to keep the reader interested and their attention on the page.

The autotelic and exotelic refer to the process of moving towards a target as a straight line, or imagining the target as the action itself. The root of both words, "telos" refers to target and if one imagines a bull's-eye, such an image will suffice. The exotelic narrative drive is what keeps us in the big picture. It's the thing that propels the reader to push towards the ending, even if it's a very long book. These are overt block and pulley systems that keep us in the big picture, the long journey ahead. Will we find out who the murderer is? Will Sam and Frodo deliver the ring to the mountain and survive? Will the child survive his bildungsroman through the horrors of central Europe during the Second World War, will the anti-hero succeed in murdering his landlady? Our noses are pointed toward that final destination, the end result, even the "take away" that we expect when we read the last page. 

The autotelic is more delicate a mechanism, the thing that, when mismanaged, causes us to be impatient readers that jump to the last page to spoil ourselves of the outcome. We might do this because the actual flow of the narrative as it happens lacks the procedural development we require to remain interested. Perhaps the skill of the writer isn't up to making interesting scenes, or developing characters? Or maybe it's that there language is dull, or ponderous, or their insights shallow and cliched. Getting there should be more than half the fun. 

Imagine a canoe trip across a lake. One could set their direction to a distant shore lined with giant hemlock, dip the paddle into the water and begin sliding their canoe in a simple forward direction, sans diversion, a straight line with only the scale of trees in your eyeline growing, the horizon ever stretching away, but your destination an eventual terminus. You arrive. And there you are. 

The other way to canoe might be to simply go in circles, observing at close proximity the transparent depths of the lake, the flora and fauna

A Story is a Relationship

"They is..." A phrase familiar to anyone who's taken an American Lit class in the last twenty or thirty years, an idiomatic droplet that catalyzes and determines the vocation and subsequent tragedy of the life of Anders, Tobias Wolff's protagonist in his diamond cut, "Bullet in the Brain." Find a situation that will get your character in trouble--a setting and problem, a locus and opportunity-- that is at odds with the peculiar fashion of their performative behavior. Anders is embittered perhaps, angry, mean, but in a manner that emerges from the application of a  heuristic begot of an innocent and even humble preoccupation. He takes sarcastic jabs at a woman standing in front of him in line at a bank, mocking her complaints that otherwise would draw strangers together in the face of slow, trudging bureaucracy. "A lousy way to treat customers," She defensively summarizes, and he says, "Surely, heaven will take note." He all but delights in making her feel small, though true delight is a mood he is no longer capable of feeling at all. And his whole arc begins with and seeks to celebrate this tiny, fragile sensation.  

I won't trouble you with a summary, only that we learn that Anders is a book critic, a rather spiteful one who's famous for the "elegant savagery" with which he "dispatches" the writers unlucky enough to end up in his cross-hairs. The final line being the equivocal grammatically awkward "they is..." that somehow prefigures this destiny motivated by a tender urge to rediscover the delight in poetry. That the line maintains an existential odour, a sort of Zen koan answer to a riddle that has yet to be asked, is second to the function it plays in respect to the central question of the story: that wonder and delight are a gift that, when commodified, pursued in the manner of an addict always trying to score, always disappointed a little bit that it doesn't meet up with the memory of that first time, will eventually require payment after the fact. 

 

A Story is A Relationship.

 In my limited understanding, we have several possible forms or criteria that a story can take, even if some theorists, writers, and academics have only one. For example, if you've taken a screenwriting course, a "story" must, absolutely must, have conflict to maintain narrative drive. A muddled mess that goes nowhere and bores the audience is the effect of passionless exchange. In a short story class you might hear instructors insist that a story have characters that change. In a literature class stories must have a revealing theme asking questions that haven't been asked before, even about phenomena (like death, for instance)  examined in literature since the "ur" story. And of course, there's the standard criteria that we learn about in kindergarten: a story must have a beginning, middle, and end.

    As excellent as these rules of thumb may be, I'm not sure if any (except, perhaps, the last criteria) have an absolutely solid foundation. Perhaps if we're merely talking about art, we don't expect absolutes as we might in science. But we're talking about a phenomenon that extends in different directions, that is the material of art perhaps, but could indeed follow something more coherent with consciousness and events. True, conflict creates tension which moves drama forward, but if you look at, say, a Coen Brothers' film, like "Fargo" there are plenty of scenes that don't have much conflict and, truthfully, don't move the story forward (at least not in a singular, exotelic direction). I also insist that a story is a form (a genre) of narrative. No one would argue against this, but I also insist on the essential narrative form as a "chronicle of change." That the bare and atomic elements of narrative are time, space, event, entity, observer/reporter, medium, etc.

         It’s up to us: the destroyers of worlds. As writers, we are the masters of what is under our pen point. But are we? Perhaps the over-controlled, heavy-handed story isn’t really a story at all, just as a blueprint isn’t really a building. To invite chaos, inspiration, confusion, your view of your God, or whatever way that you accept that you’re not always in control of things, even those domains that seem ultimately and absolutely under your control, is to live as an artist.

When we constrain narrative into story, harness and tame it, these elements mirror the habits of molecules. Particles coalesce into more complex materials fashioned to key, or dovetail into the mechanism of a story. There are narratives that aren't story. A list, a litany, for instance, or a ship's log, or a report, an account, an anecdote, a flow-chart, a graph, an algorithm, etcetera, are not stories in the true narratological sense of the word (though they may be in the vernacular sense). Narrative elements constrained are what we're most comfortable talking about character, plot, setting, point of view, theme, voice and style, etc. 

       Think of variations of what a story should have, or how her elemental form might take shape, and that different aspects of the raw narrative elements may be emphasized over others, or more critical to the various definitions that we're speaking of. For example, one might insist that a story has conflict, but I would say that conflict itself isn't the necessary feature, but that conflict, as well as other conceivable patterns of power, is the consequence of relationships between entities. 

    Simply, "a story is about relationships," would suffice here. Whether there's conflict, or not only changes the scale of forward movement within a story's form. Conflict is only one of the many ways two entities (characters) can interact. They can be drawn to each other, or apart or even orbit each other. But without relationships, we have nothing. To get crafty here, one might envision the atomic structure of a hydrogen atom (bear with me here), where one electron orbits one neutron. The energy between the two keeps them in balance, forever in cohort with each other. Without at least those two particles, we don't have matter at all. 

    There can, of course, be more than two entities in a story, and they don't, in this theory, have to be characters at all, really. But characters, as we define them, are complex and reflect our experiences (of course), and stories are usually about the human experience in some way. Even when we think of animation, or magical stories with animal characters, these entities are essentially human characters in drag. Without those very human qualities of wants, desires, and needs, they forfeit their right to occupy the story as characters at all. 

    A story about, say, water, as an entity provides some challenges. Water, much like a character, can change under various pressures and external circumstances. It behaves in a way consistent with its material form, it flows, it drips, it even erodes and provides life. But while it has tendencies, these aren't reliant on any psychology, but on simply their relative relationship to the other material elements and external changes that coerce them. But in my simplified definition, you can imagine that a story can exist as an entity interacting with something else, ergo a relationship between it and some other material thing.

    This is just a way to think about stories. When we don't have conflict it's often a simple problem, though it might be a deal-breaker in terms of a story's set up. Imagine you're writing a story about a character who is all alone. Here, there's no relationship between the character and anything, or anyone else. You might argue that the character's inner world may be subject to a continuing narrative, and assert that the inner world is an excellent domain for exploration by the writer, that literature is the medium that can bring to life our internal worlds, much more acutely than, say, filmmaking or theater. I would agree with that: but I would also insist that once we get inside the domain of a character's psyche, we have to treat it, the brain, mind, or soul, as we would any other material landscape, occupied with features that complicate it, and certainly an menagerie of characters, who inevitably will find themselves in relationships with one another to spar, fall in love, or compete in some way. The devil and angels sitting on our shoulders provide a nice simplified idea of what our internal worlds provide for their inhabitants. So even in a story that takes place in the interior of a single individual, there still must be relationships and possible conflict between the various lobes, souls, spirits, dybbuks, cherubim, G-d, gods, goddesses, demons, ids, egos and super-egos! 

    And as to a story only achieving its form when a character goes through some fundamental change, we've met a lot of characters who don't necessarily turn into something entirely different in a fundamental way. "Hills Like White Elephants," may not have that overt kind of metamorphosis that this idea suggests, nor might "Cathedral" necessarily. Though often the rookie writer may not see the delicate alterations in the fabric of a character's interior world that might affirm this axiom, and it should be through the practice of reading, the art of reading, that we begin to see distinct differences in a character's outlook, mood, or understanding. But sometimes stories really don't work at all on the possibility of a character changing, and it might be that the "entity" that changes isn't in the story at all, but in the parallel experience the reader goes through in which, perhaps, they change! What the story might do in terms of technique is reveal something discreet that we were unaware of at the onset, something that alarms or disturbs or awakens us. Hence, another perhaps necessary feature that a story can take is that it must reveal, like an onion, various levels of truth about our experience as human beings. 

We are the storytelling animal. 

Jim Sidel

A Story is (a) Grammar; Narrative is Language. 

The infant's laugh is sound, her mother's cry as it leaves her room an utterance. "I" the instant the synapses connect to see the self, "U" as the front of the brain reaches to the back and we see the other.

The consonant gives shape to the vowel, form in the void of waves and particles. Shape and then figure, entity to character. 

A story is a sentence,  a relation to things in time connected by action or agreement or repulsion. A verb. 

The analogy is the attainment of a thing not yet imagined, though taped from the surry of experience. The metaphor offering that magic "click" the acid spark that lights up the eyes. 

As we proceed, there are things to remember. A story is a narrative, but a narrative is not a story. A narrative is

A chronicle of change...

Chronicle being the operative word, its prefix from the Greek, Kronos--Time. Events over time (as if there's anything else. The index of a witness that entails jugement for what is narraitable. The analogy here is safe:

A song is to music what a story is to narrative.

Hence, story is a mere genre of narrative. Narrative is the raw material, elemental and formless phenomena in a certain wavelength.

Time

Space

Entity

Event

Witness

One might ask about the tree falling in the woods. Only constraints of a particular style diminish these red hot formless objects into a story. Constraints are freedom. This isn't Orwellian Newspeak, but the same limitations that make light (darkness) and fashion our own character out of flesh. 

A story has its own definitive elements, mostly familiar to the novice.

Plot > event+time

Character> entity

Setting> space

Narrator> witness

We can also add additional material that furthers the nature of the type of narrative unfolding.

Point of View

Voice and Tone

Tension

And then further things by getting into a finer grain.

Narrative Time (scene, summary, etc.)

Tension

Narrative Drive

We can dial in further, if you'd like, but for the time being let's contemplate these materials and what they give us, but also why.

In all things, gray. The pallet nuanced. Indefinite supplants the definite. Melville's river boat passengers in The Confidence Man are shadows, not material, described by the volumes filled. Anti-literature, anti-story, anti-matter. How does the writer retreat from the habit of rendering, in the material of abstraction, the concrete? How does he not fall prey for absoluteness, for accuracy, for truth? To break this taboo, the secular and constant affirmation of "best practices: beginning with details that are concrete, fixed, relevant and absolute presents a catastrophic erasure of the discipline itself. Where does one find the solid if not in the abstract liquid domain of language?

"'I pretend not to divine your meaning there,' said the herb-doctor, after a pause, during which he eyed the Missourian with a kind of pinched expression, mixed of pain and curiosity, as if he grieved at his state of mind and at the same time, wondered what had brought him to it; 'but this much I know,' he added, 'that the general cost of your thoughts is, to say the least, unfortunate.'"

Song is to music what a story is to narrative. Music is an assortment of elements relating to sound: rhythm, tempo, dynamics, harmony, tone, texture, time, and a song is a particular arrangement of these elements according to constraints. A pop song is different from a dance mix, a piece of jazz is different from a symphony. These genres differ in how these elements are constrained; that is, how they are held back, reinforced, shaped, formed, etc. All forms of creative work exist as a combination of elements constrained according to fashion, style, or genre.
    The same is true with narrative and story.  While music is sound configured to, and arranged by constraints. Those configurations might have aesthetic or sensual values, or they might be meaningful in some other way. Narrative, for our sake, we’ll refer to in this class as “A chronicle of Change.” This is my definition and it suits the cross pollinating reality of teaching students engaged in multiple variations of creative work. Note that word “chronicle” begins with the root, “chronos” which refers to sequential time. A chronicle is an index of events over time.
    Narrative (like music) is merely a set of possibilities.  The raw material of event, space, time, entity, and observer: a chronological index of events. More precisely these elements concede to plot, setting, time, character, point of view, voice, tone, style, etc.  A story is a genre of narrative. In this class, we’re focusing on a literary form known as the short story, which is short, but, as all great art attests, much bigger than the sum of its parts.