What is a Good Story?

 

 

You need to be constatly striving to learn the theory and to understand What is it that makes a great story great? 

But isn't a good story entirely subjective?  Doesn't it vary from reader to reader, from audience to audience?  The answer is that while the preferences of each reader can vary widely, there remain both objective and subjective criteria that are characteristic of well written stories.  A well crafted story is likely to result in a great story, while a story that ignores any literary criticism can still be loved by a particular audience while remaining poorly written.

Let's start with our definition of a story.  A story takes a character and places it in a setting, from which a conflict arises, which develops and then resolves.  A story uses arcs and themes to convey a message.

Note right away that there are two parts to this definition of story, the structure and the purpose. First, there is the structure of the story, which consists of identifiable elements, all of which need to be present for a complete story to emerge.  Leave out any of these elements, and the story falls apart. Without each of these elements you have something less than a story; you may have a narrative or vignette or character study, you may call it "an account of events," but you don't actually have a story any more.  

Try to create a story without a character, or without resolution of the conflict and you will see how weak and unsatisfying the resulting writing becomes.  The obverse is often true as well.  Analyze a movie that you found disappointing and you'll often discover that one of these foundational elements was poorly developed or left out entirely.

Second, a story is something that is designed and crafted to convey meaning.  It is not simply a retelling of a series of events.  Instead, you have something that was designed to communicate an idea and leave the audience with a sense of completeness or satisfaction. A story is a construction of elements, brought together in a conscious way so that they relate to one another and work together to deliver the meaning to the audience.

A satisfying story doesn't have to have a happy ending.  Stories can be about the tragedy of loss, the futility of war, the oppression of tyranny, but if these are the meanings behind the story they must be included with intentionality.

A story is built.  It is not the result of happenstance.  The job of the author is to shape and mold each of these elements to serve a particular purpose and convey the meaning that the author intends. And more specifically, to take each of the elements and relate them to each of the other elements so that the work together to communicate.

Plot:  the sequence of events and elements that lead the audience through the story.  Does not have to be chronological if the story contains flashbacks.  An event is something that happens.  An element refers to feelings, emotional states.

Audience Satisfaction

The objective of a story is to convey meaning to an audience in such a way that they feel satisfied with the outcome.  Many things contribute to creating that feeling, but repeatedly when critics talk about their overall impressions they use specific phrases.  They may say, the ending didn't feel supported, didn't feel justified, didn't feel earned.  They talk about laying the groundwork for later developments, or talk about set-ups and payoffs.  Conversely, they may complain that things happened "out of the blue" or felt like a "deux ex machina" because support for later developments was not put in place early.  

All of these concepts are referencing the idea that a story is not a random series of events, but a carefully constructed narrative in which each of the elements must be related to every other element.  Later developments in the story must be placed on a supporting foundation that was written into the story earlier.  With out this supporting foundation, the story loses its feeling of cause and effect. At best, this feels like the world the author has created is inconsistent and unreliable, which means that the audience can't relate to it closely.  In a world of random cosmic magic, it's hard to know which events in the plot are a challenge, or a conflict, or even a win or loss.

A story consists of events and elements that are all interrelated.  The pieces of the story appear to fit together, appear to be building toward a logical and reasonable outcome. We say that early elements support later events.  Writers use tools like foreshadowing and development to create relationships between story elements.  Is there competition between characters, camaraderie, or antagonism?  If that becomes a plot element later in the story, it must be introduced earlier for it to have any meaning.  Audiences place greater weight on elements that are supported in the narrative, that are set up early and paid off later.