If storytelling had rules, they would look like this
The basic story structure that Hollywood movies, literary novels, and the best web content all have in common
“The fundamental idea is that stories have shapes which can be drawn on graph paper, and that the shape of a given society’s stories is at least as interesting as the shape of its pots or spearheads.”
— Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut was a sui generis American writer. Vonnegut was a humorist, a moralist, a screwball dystopian. He was in Dresden when the Americans fire-bombed the city, and wrote one of the best postwar novels about the surreality of war.
He was also writing at a time when writers got paid by the word and could still scrape by writing for magazines.
What that meant is Vonnegut’s stories needed to sell if he wanted to eat. Which means Vonnegut’s stories needed to be readable.
How did Vonnegut deal with that?
He wrote stories people wanted to read.
He even had a theory about what people wanted to read. Stories that followed clear-cut formulas.
Being interested in science, and being a wise guy, Vonnegut went so far as to suggest that there was no reason why, theoretically, a computer couldn’t produce those formulas. He called the formulas “shapes” and mapped them out on an X Y graph.
X was beginning to end (time), Y was the sweep of a character’s fortunes from good to bad or vice-versa. Characters’ fates were maneuvered from the beginning of the story to the end as they fell and rose in their fortunes.
Vonnegut was so into the idea of story shapes that he actually submitted a Master’s thesis to the University of Chicago in 1946. It was, predictably, rejected. Vonnegut suspected it was because it was “so simple and looked like too much fun.”
Here are three of Vonnegut’s shapes.
Look familiar?
That’s because most thrillers, action and horror movies fit the Man in Hole shape, while most romantic comedies fall into the Boy Meets Girl shape.
You can see the ups and downs look like waves. Those waves have peaks and troughs. This is the natural motion of a story. When the protagonist moves up or down the Y axis in pursuit of what they want or need but can’t get, we get tension. When the tension peaks, we get a climax. When that climax dies down and we get a return to order, we get a resolution.
That’s a story.
Listen to Vonnegut describe it here.
No, formulas aren’t always bad
The fact that most stories follow formulas should make you happy, not sad or disillusioned. It doesn’t mean your stories need to read like Dan Brown or E.L. James, or that you have to consciously apply formulas to your writing while you’re writing.
What it means is this.
It’s not that difficult to learn how to structure an engaging story.
Or relearn, as it were. Because story structure is something we were very familiar with as kids, and something adults too often dismiss without fully understanding the implications of what they’re dismissing.
The fact is, story structure underpins most of our social communication in the adult world — from emails to happy hour conversations. Discursive narratives tend to put us to sleep. Narratives with a direction keep us on the edge of our seats.
Think of the friend who can never zero in on the actual point of a story, who highlights the wrong details and never ends up at the “aha” moment. Or the colleague who sends mile-long emails with the important stuff jumbled in with the rest.
If asked to describe how we feel about disjointed or dissonant writing, we’d probably say it bores us. But that’s not what we’re actually experiencing. Incoherent writing confuses our brains, and it does that by failing to structure information in a way that engages us.
What does this mean for your web writing? A bunch of things, but here are the essentials.
Story essentials
Characters with problems
A story stripped down to its nuts and bolts is a character with a problem. How characters deal with their problems (or fail to meet the moment) is what gives stories tension. Without that tension, your stories will have no momentum.
But here’s the interesting thing.
The character/problem formula isn’t just an engine for literary stories. The same basic structure is what propels a well-written lawyer’s website, an article about the latest MacBook Air redesign, or a blog post about how to consolidate your debt.
That’s because a problem doesn’t have to involve a flesh-and-blood character. It could simply be something your readers want to know more about that your text helps them discover. Like if the new MacBook Air actually lives up to the hype or how Amazon Prime wrecked your credit rating.
Problems are an ancient trick talking apes have been using for millennia to captivate audiences. They’re so much a part of how we’ve learned to relate to stories that a story without a problem is simply not a story.
Tension
A good story is like a knotted muscle. It absorbs the stress of the plot until it reaches a breaking point. Those breaking points, where the stress settles temporarily on the way to the climax, are useful for storytellers. Without them, reading would be painful and monotonous.
If you’ve ever seen the movie Open Water, where two abandoned scuba divers float around for days in shark-infested waters, one with a bleeding cut, you’d know what I’m talking about.
Tension is good. It reels audiences in in every time. Just remember, when you’re sustaining narratives over distances, consider that readers need tempo changes and little breaks to catch their breath.
Climax
When the springs of a story get too wound up, readers need a release. The climax is that release. It’s usually the moment in your story when everything you’ve been building to comes to a head.
Climaxes are supposed to change our perspective or awareness, as readers or website visitors. The very best have deep and residual meaning.
So don’t dismiss them, and the next element, resolutions, as the stuff of literary stories. Climaxes are actually the stuff of any good barroom story you’ve ever heard or any copy you’ve ever written that compelled a reader to click.
Resolution
Not every story has a resolution. There are plenty of stories with ambiguous endings that leave you hanging. As a rule, though, web writing isn’t going to leave you hanging. What you write for the web will usually have what we call a “payoff,” and most readers will be looking for one.
In many cases, the payoff will just be the information you promised to give your readers in the headline. That payoff is what readers get in exchange for their valuable time. Most web writing, in other words, will be resolved.
Final thoughts
When you use all of these elements in your writing, you get something called story arc. If that, too, sounds familiar, that’s because story arc is just another way of saying story shape.
Welcome to Man in the Hole and Boy Meets Girl.
If you form that arc in a way that defies our expectations, experiences and prejudices, and fills an empty spot in our brains we didn’t even know was there, you’ve written a really good story.
