The Key to Great Storytelling
Summary
TLDRThis script explores the vital role of change in storytelling, drawing on insights from authors like Peter S. Beagle and Ursula K. Le Guin. It emphasizes that meaningful change, both internal and external, is essential for character development and plot progression. The narrative arc should reflect personal growth or transformation, resonating with readers' own experiences of life's pivotal moments. Change at various levels—character, plot, scene, and sentence—enriches the story, making it relatable and thought-provoking, ultimately fulfilling the purpose of fiction to provide context and understanding to life.
Takeaways
- 🧙♂️ The world is seen as mutable and new only by a magician, who understands the secret of change and draws power from it.
- 📚 Writers are considered magicians who create stories through meaningful change, which is essential for engaging readers.
- 👑 A story's impact comes from the transformation of characters, like a farm boy who becomes a prince and experiences a shift in worldview.
- 🔄 Change in storytelling can be subtle or temporary, like a bully showing kindness or the transition of seasons, adding depth to the narrative.
- 📚 Ursula K. Le Guin emphasizes that change encompasses various aspects of life beyond conflict, including relating, finding, and discovering.
- 🎭 The most impactful novels show change on multiple levels, from characters and plot to scenes and sentence construction.
- 👥 Character development involves internal changes in beliefs, attitudes, or goals, and can also reflect shifts in relationships with others.
- 🎮 'Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow' by Gabrielle Zevin exemplifies how characters can evolve through decades, affecting their personal and professional lives.
- 🏆 Flat-arc protagonists may not change but can influence others or be part of a changing world, as seen in 'A Confederacy of Dunces'.
- 🌍 Plot-level transformation involves a shift in external circumstances, as in 'The Giver', where Jonas escapes to a new world, reflecting his internal change.
- 🎨 Changing moods within scenes or chapters can prevent monotony and keep the story engaging, as demonstrated in 'Lord of the Flies'.
- ✍️ Sentence-level change involves introducing new information or varying sentence structure to maintain freshness and momentum in storytelling.
Q & A
What is the central theme of the script from 'The Last Unicorn' by Peter S. Beagle?
-The central theme is the concept of change and its importance in storytelling, highlighting the idea that only a magician can perceive the world as fluid and mutable, and that writers, like magicians, understand the secret of change.
Why is meaningful change essential in storytelling according to the script?
-Meaningful change is essential because it allows readers to observe a transformation from the beginning to the end of a story, providing insight into the characters' lives and reflecting on our own experiences.
What is an example of a narrative arc that demonstrates significant character growth?
-The script provides the example of a farm boy who discovers he's a prince, and instead of returning to his ordinary life, he takes the crown, marries his childhood sweetheart, and faces assassination attempts before abdicating the throne, showing a transformation in his worldview.
How does the script relate life's transformative moments to storytelling?
-The script suggests that life's most transformative moments, such as receiving a diploma, falling in love, or mourning a death, are when our definition of 'normal' changes, and these moments are often the focus of satisfying narratives that reveal the most about characters.
What does Ursula K. Le Guin emphasize about change in her book 'Steering the Craft'?
-Ursula K. Le Guin emphasizes that change does not always equate to conflict. She points out that there are various important aspects of human life, such as relating, finding, losing, bearing, discovering, parting, and changing, all of which are sources of story.
How does the script describe the impact of change on the levels of a story?
-The script describes that impactful novels feature change at every level, including character development, plot progression, scene dynamics, and sentence construction, each contributing to the overall power of the story for the readers.
What is the significance of internal and external changes in a character's journey as described in the script?
-Internal changes, such as new beliefs or attitudes, and external changes, like shifts in physical location or circumstances, are significant as they reflect the character's growth and the evolution of the story, providing a deeper connection for the readers.
How does the script illustrate the concept of 'flat-arc protagonists'?
-The script uses the character Ignatius J. Reilly from 'A Confederacy of Dunces' as an example of a 'flat-arc protagonist' who doesn't grow much from beginning to end, while the world and other characters around him change, revealing his impact on them.
What role does pacing play in the effectiveness of a story according to the script?
-Pacing plays a crucial role in story effectiveness by determining how quickly things change and how frequently the character takes steps to pursue their goals or alter their situation, which can affect the reader's engagement and interest.
How can changing sentence structure and content contribute to the freshness of a story?
-Changing sentence structure and content on a line-by-line basis introduces novelty and keeps the reader engaged, as demonstrated by the script's analysis of Zadie Smith's 'White Teeth', where sentence length, syntax, and tone are varied to maintain momentum and interest.
What is the purpose of fiction as described in the script?
-The purpose of fiction, as described in the script, is to provide context to life, help understand it better, offer new perspectives, and allow audiences to heal, learn, mourn, and celebrate through the experiences and changes depicted in stories.
Outlines
📚 The Magic of Change in Storytelling
This paragraph emphasizes the transformative power of change in storytelling, drawing on Peter S. Beagle's 'The Last Unicorn'. It suggests that writers, like magicians, harness the universal tension of change to create compelling narratives. The summary highlights the importance of meaningful change for character development and plot progression, using examples such as a farm boy turned prince and the transformative life events that alter our perceptions of 'normal'. It also touches on the idea that change can be subtle or temporary, and references Ursula K. Le Guin's view that change encompasses a wide range of human experiences beyond conflict, ultimately arguing that impactful novels reflect change at multiple levels, from characters to sentences.
🌟 Character and Plot Transformations in Narratives
The second paragraph delves into the specifics of character and plot transformations within stories. It discusses how characters often remain static while the world around them changes, as seen with Ignatius J. Reilly from 'A Confederacy of Dunces'. The paragraph uses 'The Giver' by Lois Lowry to illustrate an external plot transformation, where Jonas's physical and internal journey reflects his disillusionment with a society devoid of emotional depth. It also addresses the importance of pacing and mood variation within scenes and chapters to maintain narrative interest, citing 'Lord of the Flies' and 'The Curious Case of Benjamin Button' as examples. The summary underscores the need for change to keep stories engaging and reflective of life's dynamic nature.
📖 The Dynamics of Change in Prose and Story Structure
This paragraph focuses on the micro-level changes in prose and the macro-level changes in story structure. It begins with an analysis of Zadie Smith's 'White Teeth', highlighting the use of sentence structure and content to create a tragicomic tone and build narrative momentum. The summary contrasts effective prose, which gradually reveals details and varies sentence length, with a choppy rewrite that lacks the original's poeticism and voice. The paragraph also discusses Kurt Vonnegut's writing rule that every sentence should reveal character or advance the action, and it encourages writers to consider change as a fundamental element of storytelling that resonates with our human need for meaning and reflection of life's constant evolution.
Mindmap
Keywords
💡Magician
💡Change
💡Narrative Arc
💡Internal Change
💡External Change
💡Flat-Arc Protagonist
💡Scene
💡Sentence Construction
💡Mood
💡Pacing
💡Storytelling
Highlights
The world is fluid and mutable for a magician, who understands the secret of change and draws power from universal tension.
Writers are likened to magicians, capable of transforming 'all things' into something new through storytelling.
The essence of great storytelling lies in meaningful change, visible from the beginning to the end of a narrative.
A narrative arc should show a character's development, such as a farm boy becoming a prince and evolving his worldview.
Transformative life moments, like receiving a diploma or falling in love, redefine our 'normal' and are key to character development.
Narratives often focus on moments of change to reveal the most about characters, which resonates with our own life experiences.
Change in a story can be subtle or temporary, such as a bully's unexpected kindness or the transition of seasons.
Ursula K. Le Guin emphasizes that change encompasses various human behaviors beyond conflict in storytelling.
Impactful novels feature change at multiple levels, including character development, plot progression, scene dynamics, and sentence construction.
Characters' internal changes can involve new beliefs, attitudes, or goals, and shifts in their relationships or understanding of others.
The novel 'Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow' by Gabrielle Zevin exemplifies complex character relationships and internal changes over time.
Some characters, like Ignatius J. Reilly, serve as 'flat-arc protagonists', provoking change in others or remaining static while the world changes around them.
Plot-level transformation involves external shifts in a story's circumstances, as seen in 'The Giver' with Jonas's journey to a new society.
Scene dynamics should avoid monotony by introducing mood changes from beginning to end, adding emotional depth to the narrative.
Fast pacing in storytelling is achieved through frequent changes and the character's active pursuit of goals or alterations in their situation.
Every sentence in a story should reveal character or advance the action, introducing new information or building on established details.
Zadie Smith's 'White Teeth' demonstrates the importance of sentence-level change for maintaining narrative momentum and reader engagement.
The purpose of fiction is to provide context to life, offer new perspectives, and connect with our humanity through the reflection of change and lived experiences.
Transcripts
“For only to a magician is the world forever fluid, infinitely mutable, and eternally new.
Only he knows the secret of change, only he knows truly that all things are crouched in
eagerness to become something else, and it is from this universal tension that he draws his power.”
These words of wisdom come from The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle. Writers are magicians who
know that “all things are crouched in eagerness to become something else.”
The key to great storytelling is change—meaningful change. Readers
want to look at the beginning and ending of a story and see that something has happened.
If at the start, a farm boy discovers he’s a prince, it might feel pointless if by the
end he returns to his ordinary life with all the same beliefs and relationships.
A more intriguing narrative arc could show him deciding to take the crown,
marry his childhood sweetheart, and fend off assassination attempts before
abdicating the throne. His worldview might morph from blissful ignorance to world-weary
cynicism. A journey has taken place, one that provides insight into our own lives.
When you ask people what moments transformed them, the answers are similar:
receiving that sought-after diploma, falling in love, cradling a newborn,
mourning the death of a loved one. Life’s most transformative moments are when our
definition of “normal” changes, rewriting the routine. Satisfying narratives often
focus on those moments of change where we learn the most about the characters.
Change need not be dramatic or lasting for the story to be meaningful—it can
be barely noticeable, even temporary. It’s the moment a bully reaches down
to pet a dog when no one’s looking, or when winter passes into spring.
In her book Steering the Craft,
speculative author Ursula K. Le Guin explains that change does not always mean conflict:
“Modernist manuals of writing often conflate story with conflict . . . Conflict is one
kind of behavior. There are others, equally important in any human life,
such as relating, finding, losing, bearing, discovering, parting, changing.
Change is the universal aspect of all these sources of story. Story is something moving,
something happening, something or somebody changing.”
The most impactful novels feature change at every level, from the larger character
and plot arc to the smaller scene and sentence construction. Let’s look at an
example of each level of change—character, plot, scene, and sentence—and see how you
can apply those ideas to your own stories to elevate their power for your readers.
Characters are how we most deeply connect to stories, identifying with their thoughts,
emotions, and experiences. We learn about ourselves through observing
others and the way their lives play out, whether in real life or in fiction.
A character’s internal change can involve new beliefs, attitudes,
or goals—which can be positive, negative, or neutral. Change can
also entail a shift in their relationship with or understanding of other characters.
Gabrielle Zevin’s bestseller Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow traces the
lives of Sam and Sadie in their shared obsession with video games. Naturally,
the passing of decades creates change for both characters. They improve as game designers,
storytellers, and business owners in creating their company, Unfair Games. Sam struggles
with his health and his unrequited love for Sadie, while Sadie enters and exits other
romantic relationships and fights to make a name for herself independently of Sam.
Sam and Sadie’s relationship as friends and business partners oscillates across the novel.
They start as close companions when they’re young but have a falling out. By chance, they
meet again in college and create their first game together. They butt heads over business decisions,
but both of them attempt to bridge the gap and reforge their friendship. Their feelings
toward each other are what shift the most across the course of the novel, speaking to
the complexities of how a relationship can fall apart and reform over and over and over again.
Sam’s thoughts when he reunites with Sadie in
the first chapter foreshadow that changing relationship:
Sam looked at Sadie, and he thought, This is what time travel is. It’s looking at a person,
and seeing them in the present and the past, concurrently. And
that mode of transport only worked with those one had known a significant time.
Not all characters change. These types of “flat-arc protagonists” might instead be the
ones provoking change in secondary characters, or the world changes around them even as they
don’t. The lazy, pompous Ignatius J. Reilly from A Confederacy of Dunces doesn’t grow
much from beginning to end, which is kind of the point of this comedic novel. However, Ignatius
shreds his mother’s last nerve, and by the end, she decides to marry and have her son committed
to an asylum, showing that she has experienced an internal shift as a result of his behavior.
Stories often take place at the greatest point of change in a character’s life; otherwise,
there wouldn’t be much of a story. This is why it’s vital to see characters make choices—their
decisions reveal something to us about our own lives and understanding of human nature.
In a plot-level transformation, the story’s external circumstances shift. The character
or world end up in a different place than where they started.
In the young adult dystopian novel The Giver by Lois Lowry, eleven-turned-twelve-year-old Jonas
experiences a dramatic upheaval both internally and externally. In this world, people are assigned
specific careers and spouses, with a limit of two children. This conformity is meant to
eliminate conflict, and their society further prevents suffering by suppressing everyone’s
emotions and memories—even pain and colors. The exception is the Receiver of Memory, who keeps
the mental records of humanity’s suffering and joy and all the color that once existed.
I’m going to talk about the book’s ending, so skip ahead one minute if you want to avoid spoilers.
The final scene of The Giver shows Jonas escaping his community,
along with a baby who was going to be euthanized. Jonas rides a sled into
a town outside the oppressive boundaries of the world he’s known and toward new freedom:
The runners [of the sled] sliced through the snow and the wind whipped at his face as they
sped in a straight line through an incision that seemed to lead to the final destination,
the place that he had always felt was waiting, the Elsewhere that held their future and their past.
This external change in physical location underscores the internal metamorphosis Jonas
has experienced in becoming disillusioned about his colorless, pain-free society.
Across a novel, the reader often travels on an adventure with the
protagonist. The character might return to a place they were in the beginning,
but their experience feels different. “It’s a funny thing coming home. Nothing changes,” Eric
Roth writes in the screenplay of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. “Everything looks the same,
feels the same, even smells the same. You realize what’s changed is you.”
The Giver opens with Jonas feeling frightened by an unidentified aircraft from outside the
community, but at the end, he’s excited to head toward the world beyond. The opening
and ending echo each other, but so much has changed between those two points.
Stories would be boring if every scene and chapter had the same emotional tenor. If the
author is constantly pulling on the audience’s heartstrings with tragedy after tragedy,
it can feel like “trauma porn,” losing its impact. A book that constantly presents
scenes where the character is just going about their day without any challenges
can taste stale because nothing is happening—nothing is changing.
One way to combat sameness is to flip the mood from the beginning
to end of a scene or chapter. Maybe a chapter starts happy but ends sad. Or
the protagonist achieves their goal, but there’s an added complication.
Lord of the Flies by William Golding shows how a group of young boys marooned on an island slowly
descend into brutality. Toward the middle of the novel, Ralph, the main character,
looks out to sea in despair, thinking, “but here, faced by the brute obtuseness of the ocean,
the miles of division, one was clamped down, one was helpless,
one was condemned.” That moment is followed by a short interaction with one of the other boys,
Simon, who interrupts Ralph’s thoughts, repeatedly telling Ralph, “You’ll get
back all right,” giving him hope. The scene ends with the two boys smiling at each other.
Not every scene or chapter needs change, but it’s a good rule of thumb when you’re feeling stuck,
or the story is losing momentum. If there’s a lot of doom and gloom,
give your protagonist a surprising win. If things have been looking
up and the character is full of hope, throw in a moment of despair.
Sometimes the point of a scene is to show frustration at a lack of progress. However,
when you have a string of scenes that don’t move the story forward,
the pacing might feel too slow. Fast pacing involves how quickly things change and how
frequently the character takes steps to pursue their goals or otherwise alter their situation.
One of Kurt Vonnegut’s rules of writing is “Every sentence must
do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.” Change on a
sentence level entails introducing new information or building on what you’ve
already established. There’s freshness in content and form, in diction and syntax.
White Teeth by Zadie Smith begins with a suicide attempt—a darkly comical one.
After opening with two scenes—the attempt and the thwarting of the
attempt—the narrator explains why the character would do something so drastic:
Archie Jones attempted suicide because his wife, Ophelia, a violet-eyed Italian with a
faint mustache, had recently divorced him. But he had not spent New Year’s morning gagging on
the tube of a vacuum cleaner because he loved her. It was rather because he had lived with her
for so long and had not loved her. Archie’s marriage felt like buying a pair of shoes,
taking them home, and finding they don’t fit. For the sake of appearances,
he put up with them. And then, all of a sudden and after thirty years,
the shoes picked themselves up and walked out of the house. She left. Thirty years.
Let’s go line by line here. First, we’re presented with a statement about the reason for his suicide
attempt. The second sentence presents a “turn,” going against readers’ potential expectations
in saying that it wasn’t sadness at losing her love. Building on that second sentence,
the third reveals it’s actually the opposite and he didn’t love her. Then we’re presented
with a simile about how his marriage feels like owning a pair of shoes that don’t fit.
The gut punch at the end of the paragraph is that she left suddenly after thirty years.
We see the change in syntax throughout, with those final two sentences composed of two words each,
contrasting with the longer ones that came before. Notice that the tone of the writing is largely
consistent—it’s tragicomic, highlighting colorful details, like the wife’s faint mustache, the
vacuum cleaner, and his wife walking off like a pair of shoes. The other elements of the prose—the
content, the sentence structure—are modified to provide novelty from sentence to sentence.
By contrast, if all the sentences feel like they’re running in place,
we lose a lot of that forward momentum. Here’s me badly rewriting Zadie Smith:
Archie Jones attempted suicide because his wife had recently divorced him. He
didn’t love her. He had been with her for thirty years. He had spent
New Year’s morning attempting suicide with a vacuum cleaner because he had lived with her
for so long and hadn’t loved her. His marriage was a shoe that didn’t fit.
The prose feels choppy because it’s repetitive in both content and sentence
structure. Rather than teasing out the details, the paragraph gives us
all the information upfront. It jumps between ideas instead of easing into the transitions,
and a lot of the poeticism and voice is lost in those redundancies.
Changing up your prose on a line-by-line basis ensures your readers hang on to your every word.
Think about one of your stories or a story you admire. At each level—plot, character,
scene, and sentence—identify a place where there’s
significant change. What makes that change interesting? Are there places
that feel less interesting that could be enlivened by some form of change?
Countless other elements contribute to great storytelling, but without change,
a story might not yield meaning—and humans are meaning-seeking creatures. Change makes us think,
gives us a puzzle to solve. We need change in stories because our lives are forever evolving;
we can never exist in stasis. Stories speak to us when they reflect our own
lived experience in some way, when they capture the inevitable ebb and flow of time. We age,
relationships start and end, the world reshapes itself, and we must face everything anew.
It comes back to the purpose of fiction. Mary Kole captures the
idea beautifully in her book Writing Irresistible Kidlit:
“Creators make art in order to give context to life and understand it better. Audiences consume
art in order to see new perspectives, heal, learn, mourn, and celebrate. Humans use art to experience
new things. We use art to feel better when we need to see the light at the end of a long tunnel. We
use art to get back in touch with our humanity. We use art to refill our own creative reservoirs.”
What do you think is the key to great storytelling? I’d love to
hear your thoughts in the comments. Whatever you do, keep writing.
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