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
