Story

An Element of Fiction

Perhaps as an element of fiction “Story” is a little bit too simplistic, like saying air is an element of air: obviously story is a part of the story, part of the fiction.

But story, the story, the storified (aka fictionalized) version of life is what we aim for. Life is rarely wholly consistent, wholly of one comprehensible piece, but the story always must be. The well-told story leaves out all the irrelevant bits while underscoring and isolating the vital ones, but this is how we explain a traveling from an initial A to a final B, ending up with a reader who perhaps now understands life a little better, who perhaps now fears it a little less.

The story should be an organic whole, without loose bits clanking about. Above all, it must make sense. “A story has a life of its own,” says John Steinbeck, “It must be allowed to take its own pace. It can’t be pushed too much. If it is, the warp shows through and the story is unnatural and unsafe.”

John Gardner certainly concurs, “A story is like a machine with numerous gears: it should contain no gear that doesn’t turn something.”

Or as St. Augustin puts it (not necessarily about story, but I found this quite too delicious to forego): “Any part not congruent with its whole is an embarrassment.”

How long should your story be? Many writers worry about this issue.

“The question of length can only arise if it does not hold interest,” answers John Steinbeck

My take is that a story is as long as it is compellingly told.

Ayn Rand shares her wisdom (and it is wisdom): “A short story, being of limited length, should properly deal only with a single incident — some single problem set up and resolved, without too many complications…. By contrast, a novel necessarily deals with a series of events.”

As for Flannery O’Connor: “Of course, the more you write, the more you will realize that the form is organic, that it is something that grows out of the material, that the form of each story is unique. A story that is any good can’t be reduced, it can only be expanded. A story is good when you continue to see more and more in it, and when it continues to escape you. In fiction two and two is always more than four.” (My emphasis).

To me, what Robert Frost says about the poem holds just as true for the story: “It is absurd to think that the only way to tell if a poem is lasting is to wait and see if it lasts. The right reader of a good poem can tell the moment it strikes him that he has taken an immortal wound — that he will never get over it. That is to say, permanence in poetry, as in love, is perceived instantly. It hasn’t to await the test of time. The proof of a poem is not that we have never forgotten it, but we knew at sight we could never forget it.”

Virginia Woolf also puts it admirably: “How splendid it is to unfurl one’s sail and blow straight ahead on the gust of great story telling.”

And a final quip from Philip Gerard: “It’s human nature to love a story and hate a lecture.”

Amen to that.

© Wolfstuff

More Elements of Fiction here:

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