How to shape stories?
We are standing on the shoulders of giants. When it comes to shaping stories it’s giants all the way down to Aristotle, who—of course—was standing on top of a pyramid of storytellers predating the written tradition.
Yet, he was the first (that we know of) who wrote down the basics of storytelling. Or at least, his writing survived and made it in European circles.
His approach to structuring a story was simple: a story must have a beginning, a middle, and an end.
Stating the obvious
Let me restate, what the great philosopher said. A story consists of:
- beginning which is the moment when things start happening, and cause more things to happen;
- middle which is the moment when things happen because of things that have happened before, and cause more things to happen;
- end which is the moment when things happen because of things that have happened before, reach a conclusion and nothing more has to happen.
This is obviously true. What is worth noticing is the notion of casualty. In a good story, things happening cause other things to happen. Events are not linked by and then but by and because of that…
If you find this approach a bit simplistic, you can always throw in a twist or two, and get my favorite five-beat story structure.
Complicating things
Many wise people, standing on Aristotle’s shoulders (and a fair share of people who were standing on different pyramids of giants than the Greek philosopher), tried to nail down a more sophisticated structure of a story.
Luckily for us, many other people compiled all the available structures for our education and enjoyment. Let me share with you just two of such compilations.
The first one was made by Ian Boucher https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ian-bousher-373067118_turns-out-a-narrative-chart-that-i-made-for-activity-7225450256182751232-5Eae
The second I tracked back to here, and I’m not sure who the author is https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rWLDKeOZsLOz7Q86X8fub1H46KtzRXLy/view
I hope you find them useful.
Simplifying things
You may notice, that most of the structures need some tweaks when we try to fit them for non-linear, longer than a feature movie stories. Is there a way of finding a balance between the simplicity of beginning-middle-end and the complexity of let’s say John Turby’s approach?
One of the possible approaches is dividing the story into sequences.
Let’s take a look at how Jeremy Bernstein explained the approach in his GDC 20013 talk Reimagining Story Structure: Moving Beyond Three Acts in Narrative Design.
https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1019675/Reimagining-Story-Structure-Moving-Beyond
A similar approach is to plan your narrative by tracking the answer to the dramatic question, which is usually a variation of who wants/needs what and why? Alexander Swords explains it in a talk about The Forest Paths Method for Accessible Narrative Design.
When we combine the two methods, realizing that each sequence poses its own dramatic question, we arrive at the approach described by Emmanuel Oberg in his Screenwriting Unchained.
https://www.screenplayunlimited.com/books/
Based on the nature of the dramatic question (and the opposing forces) the books divide stories into plot-based, character-based, and theme-based, and I find this optic quite useful and would like to see it adapted to video games.
Back at the beginning
So, we are back where we started.
A story starts when the dramatic question is asked, develops over a number of sequences as the question is explored, and ends when it is answered and the consequences of the answer are revealed.
No so bad, Aristotle.