Since before the rise of agrarian societies, back when humanity was just a sparse handful of nomadic tribes, there were storytellers. Women and men, standing near the fire, all eyes watching as they wove their words into stories of great hunts and fantastical beasts. Through the millennia, storytellers have entertained us and informed us. They have given us heroes and villains, they have defined our morality and our mortality. The storyteller’s purpose, though, has never been as grand as changing the world. No, the storyteller’s purpose has always simply been to tell a good story. So, I’ve never considered myself a “writer,” I’ve always felt more comfortable calling myself a storyteller. You see, writers get hung up on things like grammar and syntax, but those things have always been secondary to me. I just want to, well, tell a good story.
But what does that actually mean? The answer to that question, even in extremis, is very complicated. Though, at least for this entry, I’ll try to boil it down to what I call the three “C’s”; Characters, Construction, and Conflict. Every great story, be it a film, a book, a comic or even just spoken aloud, rests on the shoulders of these three essentials.
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“…in any fiction, no matter how ambitious its scope or profound its theme, there was only ever room for three players. Between warring kings, a peacemaker; between adoring spouses, a seducer or a child. Between twins, the spirit of the womb. Between lovers, Death. Greater numbers might drift through the drama, of course—thousands in fact—but they could only ever
be phantoms, agents, or, on rare occasions, reflections of the three real and self-willed beings who stood at the center.” - Clive Barker Imajica
The three-character idea probably isn’t incredibly popular but it holds up. You have the protagonist, the antagonist, and the point of conflict. Even in a story with only a single person, lets say a lone survivor in the wilderness, there are still those three characters. The protagonist, the survivor; the antagonist, nature; the point of conflict, survival. While the latter two “characters” aren’t people, a good storyteller can create the illusion of personification with many broad elements, such as loneliness, disease, war, death or fate. Though you may have more than three characters in your story, without those core three the story will lose focus and direction, eventually causing it to fall apart.
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“Story is honorable and trustworthy; plot is shifty, and best kept under house arrest.” - Stephen King On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Construction, the bones of the story, is not just “Beginning-Middle-End” like they may have taught you in school, never has been, never will be. There are, even in the simplest stories, at the very least five phases. First you have the ‘Introduction Phase’. In it you answer the very important questions of Who, When, and Where. Who is the story about? When and where does it take place.
Next is the ‘Motivation Phase’. This phase is especially important because it is here that you give purpose to the story. You answer the questions of How and Why. How are you moving the story forward? Why is it important that it moves forward? Generally, this is where the first seeds of conflict are planted. As they grow and multiply we move to the next phase of the story, the ‘Escalation Phase’. In the ‘Escalation Phase’ things are made more difficult, more challenging.
The conflict continues to grow. The ‘Climax Phase’ is the natural result of the escalation. The conflict comes to a head and the protagonist faces a “Do-or-Die” moment. Finally, there is the ‘Resolution Phase’. Here the conflict is solved, loose-ends are tied up, and the story ends.
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“Draw your chair up close to the edge of the precipice and I’ll tell you a story” – F. Scott Fitzgerald
Conflict is the key to all good stories. Many would say that it is the characters which carry a story and drive it forward, but what drives the characters? Conflict. Conflict is that element which motivates everything. Be it internal or external, or possibly both, well-crafted conflict is what makes a story worth reading, or seeing, or hearing. In the end, a storyteller’s greatest ability is to use the conflict in the story to get the audience to ask the most important question.
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