Promise
I teach that a storyteller makes a promise about the type of story he or she is telling, and then acts out a story’s promise in a dramatic way. Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz finds her way home; Rocky goes from being a nobody to a somebody; In The Lovely Bones, a recently deceased young woman doesn't want to let go of her family. The story’s audience shares the experiences of these characters.
Story
To create a story, a storyteller takes an issue of human need and acts out that need to fulfillment. Typically, a story’s main character embodies a story’s main issue, and the story’s plot compels this character to resolve and fulfill this issue. Some stories explore ideas about issues of human need, an exploration of modern culture and customs, how some societies deal with death, etc.
Story Line
A story line sets out the steps a story goes through from the introduction to the fulfillment of its promise. In The Sixth Sense, a story about second chances, each step the main character takes toward helping the boy and re-establishing a relationship with his wife advances the story along its story line. A story that lacks a compelling story line risks failing to engage the attention of an audience; it’s action without a story-like purpose.To better understand the dynamics of a story line, read this essay.
Dramatic Truth - Characters
Characters in stories often embody a dramatic truth. For example, Dorothy wants to find her way home. A character with a dramatic truth has something they feel compelled to resolve. When a character embodies a dramatic truth that resonates with a story’s audience, that audience will want to see how that character resolves and fulfills their dramatic truth.
Plot
A story’s plot sets a story into motion by giving characters something to resolve, and by blocking characters as they seek to fulfill a story’s promise. As the complications and obstacles characters must pass through grow larger, a story’s plot creates more tension for both its characters and audience, heightening the effect of a story’s fulfillment of its promise, and putting characters into deeper and deeper states of feeling that make them accessible to an audience.
Plot Line
A plot line sets out the concrete steps characters take to shape the course and outcome of a story. Each scene in a movie or novel can be viewed as a step along a plot line. A plot line can also have a plot question. Plot questions are often concrete and easy to track.Movement
As a story moves toward the fulfillment of its promise, a story’s audience is transported. Movement is the fundamental effect of a story. A story that lacks a purposeful sense of movement from its opening scene risks being an account of events that is unmoving to an audience. Movement is what gives powerful stories and story characters a magical quality.
An Account
A detailed account of a Civil War battle or a failed expedition to climb Mount Everest can give an audience an inside seat to view the action, a powerful experience. But an account risks lacking a story’s sense of purposeful action toward the fulfillment of a story’s promise. For example, an account of the daily lives of Romeo and Juliet (broken down in detail in this essay is not the same as the story of Romeo and Juliet.
Conflict
When characters feel compelled to act to resolve a story’s promise, they come into conflict over shaping the course and outcome of a story. When the characters in a story are not bound together, the story’s audience can wonder why the characters don’t simply avoid each other. Writers who avoid or fear conflict in real life, or who retreat into fantasy worlds to resolve their conflicted feelings, are at risk to write stories where the conflict happens off stage or at the very end of scenes, or characters simply leap over all obstacles and conflict to resolution and fulfillment at the end of a story.
Narrative Tension
When a character is blocked from resolving a compelling issue of human need or goal, that character will feel themselves in a state of tension. When a story’s audience internalizes a character’s tension, that audience will feel compelled to find out how a character resolves this narrative tension. The more powerfully a character’s narrative tension is transferred to an audience, the more powerfully that audience will be caught up in a story, and the more powerfully a story’s audience will feel relief from real-life narrative tension.Read more about narrative tension in his essays about the Narrative Tension in Hamlet.
The Storyteller’s Vision
Many creative people grow up telling themselves stories as a kind of reordering of painful reality/life. This is all inner directed, a conversation from the self to the self, not meant for an audience. In self-talk, stories can be told in a kind of code or shorthand that has meaning to the storyteller but can be meaningless to an audience. The purpose of the concepts above is to help writers recognize the elements of storytelling that make a story and its characters accessible to a story’s audience. Storytelling meant for others is not an internal monologue but a dialog.Many more issues that arise from the a story is a promise concept are explored in essays on this website. Enjoy learning the craft of storytelling!
