Bestselling author David Farland has taught dozens of writers who have gone on to staggering literary success, including such #1 New York Times Bestsellers as Brandon Mull (Fablehaven), Brandon Sanderson (Wheel of Time), James Dashner (The Maze Runn...
You've seen thousands of them on television and in movies. You've probably heard them from the time that you were a toddler on your mother's lap, and you may hear more of them while standing in line at a water cooler at work.
In fact, you've seen so many of them that you recognize them without thinking about their integral parts. They're like ants that way. You spot a bug on the ground down at your feet; it's plodding along with a bit of a leaf, and you go "Ah, an ant!" But you don't have to fall down on your face and peer at it, count its legs and antennae, and ponder for long in order to recognize that this is indeed an ant and not some other vermin with a similar exoskeleton. You know instantly that it's an ant, not a beetle posing as one.
You've seen and heard so many stories that, in fact, you don't just recognize them, you subconsciously judge them.
As you're watching a movie, you evaluate how the story stacks up to all others. If you feel something amiss, you might even begin to critique it consciously. "Ah," you might tell yourself, "this just doesn't work as a romance. The male lead is too creepy. I really want the girl to run away from him, not fall into his arms."
If, in the end, the writer fails to even create a story, you'll know. You might say, "The hero saved the girl way too easily," or "I just didn't feel anything at the end."
So you know a story when you see it.
But what makes a story? What makes a great tale powerful? Why do we care about stories? Why do people want to read them instead of playing video games?
The answers to these questions aren't easy to come by. Many people have tried to define what makes a story—Aristotle, Feralt, Emerson, Budrys, and dozens of others.
The Scope of the Problem
Most people who try to define what a story is are secretly more interested in another question: what makes a great story powerful?
Thus, Aristotle began to define a story in those terms. He reasoned that a great story has a sympathetic hero with a powerful conflict, and as the story progresses, it has a "rising action" which arouses passion in the viewer until the problem is resolved and we either feel elation that the hero has won, or we pity his fallen state.
Feralt's Triangle
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Feralt said that in a successful story, the tale begins with a character in a relaxed state, but soon a problem is introduced. As we progress through the tale, the suspense rises, the problem becomes more complex and has more far-reaching consequences, until we reach the climax of the story, where the hero's fortune changes—either he resolved the problem, is destroyed, or must learn to live with the problem. In any case, the tension diminishes, and the reader is allowed to return to a relaxed state.
