Story Structure

So, I've talked at length about story types and about how they shape and satisfy audience expectations, which is the craft of all storytelling.  In essence, we are trying to get behind the question of why the audience finds certain stories to be satisfying while others leave them feeling unsatisfied, feeling disappointed.

We all know that feeling.  The feeling you get when walking away from a movie like Suicide Squad and thinking, "I was really looking forward to it, and it was funny and exciting and had some great scenes in it.  I loved Harley Quinn.  Why was it such a lousy movie?"

Each of the individual elements seems strong, seem to be exactly what we want: characters, attitude, pyrotechnics, aerial hyjinks.  By many standards, it was a successful film. But overall, the whole movie was lacking something that isn't revealed by close inspection. It requires a broader view.

What we're missing is what is delivered by the storyteller's art.  The art of the story is about creating narrative elements and weaving them together in a way that creates a larger meaning.  It takes disparate elements and relates them to one another.  Then it makes those relationships meaningful.  Then it takes those meaningful relationships and arranges them in a coherent shape. These relationships, and the resulting shape is what we call story structure.

Trying to explicitly describe coherence is awkward, but its what critics mean when they refer to story arcs, character arcs, story seeds and payoffs.  We talk about flat or two dimensional characters all the time, characters that do one thing and only one, and who never change or improve or expand during the course of the story.  A story cannot consist of a string of random and unrelated events.  By definition, it has to do more than that; it has to engage with a conflict and hammer out a resolution

One such attempt was made by Joseph Campbell in his book Hero with a Thousand Faces.  It is an effort to describe why some stories feel more satisfying, resonate more with the audience than others.  Campbell suggests that the Hero's Journey is a unifying story structure that brings complex elements together in a narrative circle.  Campbell asserted that this structure was universal in that it was found in stories from many different cultures, and often found in the most fundamental culture-defining myths of those cultures.

In a sense, Campbell starts by claiming that these stories are what audiences find satisfying. Whether or not modern critics want them to embrace them, their universal presence, the fact that cultures return to them again and again from Biblical stories of David in 1025 BC to 11th C. Russian folktales to modern Hollywood movies, reflects the fact that there is something about hero's journeys that are compelling and satisfying.  So for example, he doesn't assert that we ought to find these narrative elements meaningful for some reason that he articulates.  Instead he demonstrates that we do find these elements meaningful and then speculates as to why that might be.  Having first demonstrated their omnipresence, Campbell then goes further to try to explain what he thinks is behind their appeal.

However, the Hero's Journey is by no means the only attempt to define this kind of structure.  Hollywood screenwriters have made multiple attempts at codifying a magic structure that will sell movies to producers, and presumably the audience.  For example Save the Cat narrows down all screenwriting to 10 basic story lines, and gives the important elements of each.  Similarly Something Startling Happens reduces all successful movies to 120 moments, or beats that have to happen in order for the audience to remain engaged.

The problem with all such screenwriting aids is that they can often deliver structure without substance, such as with Suicide Squad mentioned above.  When structure is entirely divorced from narrative meaning, you get the equivalent of a Monty Python skit where a clown wanders through a medieval village because we need something startling to happen.  Similarly, the criticism of the Hero's Journey is that it creates stories that are predictable and audiences feel that there is only one way for the story to progress.  Narrative First says that insisting on rigid structure "imposes story-telling conceits upon a writer’s personal expression."  And yet, we very often find that writer's personal expression is itself unsatisfying.  The writer's need to speak doesn't mean that what he has to say is meaningful.

I think the answer is that the Hero's Journey represents one successful pathway to creating a satisfying story, though perhaps not the only pathway.