What is Story?

It's time to get a few definitions out of the way.  I've been talking about story structure, and reviewing some easy story examples from popular TV shows, all without laying down a concrete understanding of what a story is.  All that stuff that your sophomore English class made so incredibly boring is actually a little bit interesting when applied to something other than East of Eden, or A Room with a View or another book you were force to read because it was good for you

Also, people who have taught English pedagogy in the last 30 years are all incredible stuffed shirts who got a lot of stuff just wrong.  There's no more charitable way to describe the horrible wreckage that they have made of discussing storytelling, a topic that should be fun and enlightening and invigorating, and should make you want to read more, to see more plays and movies and discuss them with your friends.

So lets get started with a few simple building blocks, on which most discussions rest.

1.  What is a story? 
This should have an easy answer, and it does, but so many people try to torture this into something that fits their pet theories that it becomes hard to understand.  Here it is:  a story takes a character and places it within a setting, from which a conflict emerges that is first developed and then resolved. 

From this definition, you can see that a story is a very particular thing; it's not just an assemblage of words meant to entertain.  Take away the character, for example, and you could have an entertaining piece of prose, but it would no longer be a story.  The same is true for any of the story components; you can't have a story without a resolution, or a conflict.  These could be informative and worthwhile but they aren't a story.

And this is actually the common definition that most people refer to, even unconsciously, when they think of a story.  We're not talking about artificial constructs like rising action or denouement.  When someone says, "Tell me a story." this is what they are most likely referring to.  And this pattern is what will bring them the most satisfaction, whether that is a story shared around the dinner table or an action adventure movie seen in a theater.

 A story incorporates specific elements including tone, theme, plot, crisis, etc.  It uses these tools while filling the fundamental requirements.

2. What is a narrative?
So what do you call something that doesn't meet this simple criteria?  Typically you refer to it simply as a narrative.  A narrative is any passage of text, so its a much broader category.  So for example an author writes a book that turns out to be mostly descriptive passages of the setting.  There's nothing wrong with that, it simply isn't a story.  Moby Dick, for example, spends long passages in describing the workings of a whaling ship, when no actual story is being told.  It is only after this "setting" is carefully described that Melville gets around to his story about the sea captain and the whale.

3. What is a plot?
The plot is the series of events that happen throughout the course of the story.  That's it; nothing more complicated than that.  There was a time when English teachers talked about chronological sequences or how some events could be relayed out of chronological order, but all that is mostly nonsense.  A plot can be constructed in or out of chronological order, it's all the same.  Each is a viable option

In the same vein, we used to talk about a plot as only being an unbroken chain of cause and effect.  But that isn't strictly required, either.  Many events occur that weren't caused by the previous event and yet they are an integral part of the plot.  However, the events are often tied together in some way.

Similarly, we used to talk abut plot in terms of exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution.   But the truth is that this concept is a bit misleading because it makes everything seem to be equally important, and equally long.  The rising action is usually far more important and far longer than the falling action, so the  mountain-like diagram doesn't represent a story very well at all.  But it's another attempt at grappling with what might be an overly difficult concept.

4. Why look at this stuff, anyway?
So I've presented simple definitions, and talked about older concepts that aren't strictly observed anymore.  Why bother?

The answer is that these are the markers we use to analyze a story.  And they can help us figure out why a story might be more or less satisfying, which is the ultimate analysis of why a movie was good or bad.While those "rules" aren't strictly required, the choices that authors make concerning them are all very interesting. 

For example, you might watch a movie and realize that it doesn't contain the basic requirements for a story.  For example, the conflict that arose in the beginning of the story might not be the conflict that is resolved in the end.  Or a story might switch main characters halfway through the narrative.

A very skillful author might get away with this and the story might still be a success, but if you come away with a nagging feeling of dissatisfaction, these are the first places you might check.  And really that's the main reason for considering them at all. If a story likes to play fast and loose with the plot, if it tries to skim over characterization, those are warning signs.  They don't mean that the story is doomed to failure, and authors take chances all the time with structure.  But these are going to be some of the first places that we look.