Anatomy of Storytelling: What Is a Story?

Recently, a fellow writer on Twitter asked the following questions: what is a story? What do readers want? How do we know how to tell a story? Does a story require language?

I knew I wanted to address the questions, but I didn't feel like a tweet (or a thread of tweets) would be sufficient. Thus, a multipart blog series!

Today and for the next few weeks, I want to explore these questions a little more in depth and share my thoughts about stories, storytelling, and why I believe stories, more than any other facet of biology or culture, are what make us human.

Defining “story”

As I lay awake last night thinking about these questions, the first was the most intriguing to me. What even is a story? Lots of ideas came to mind. Perhaps a story is a series of events relayed by one person (or group) to another person (or group)? Or, perhaps a story is the communication of thoughts and feelings?

Ultimately I settled on this: a story is the base unit of meaning. 

To help me explain, I need to take a tangent into science.

Base and derived units

In the SI system (AKA metric system) there are 7 units that are considered “base units.” Meters (m), seconds (s), moles (mol), amperes (A), kelvin (K), candela (cd), and kilograms (kg) measure distance, time, quantity, electric current, temperature, luminosity, and mass respectively. 

Originally, these units were the foundation of all metric measurement, each rather arbitrarily defined and then standardized with prototypes. These units were developed to measure ideas that were, at the time, considered to be immutable and fundamental aspects of reality. 

From these base units, all other units can be derived. If you can measure distance in more than one dimension, you can derive volume, thus the liter—though, cubic meters are the SI unit of volume. 

If you can measure mass and distance, you can derive density. If you can measure distance and time you can derive velocity and acceleration. And so force, energy, work, momentum, voltage, resistance, and every other unit needed to quantify the observable universe falls into place, resting on the back of those seven base units. 

Now, in the last five years or so, the SI community has redefined these base units to root their meaning in physical constants, such as c, the speed of light in a vacuum, or h, the Plank constant. In some ways, this does throw a bit of a tautological wrench into my analogy, but I felt it worth mentioning as it’s interesting and I don’t want to be accused of not doing my research.

So, when I define story as the base unit of meaning, my hope is that you’ll understand this to mean that images, sounds, smells, tastes, touches and all the other information we can gather with our senses (and sensors) about the world serve no purpose and have no meaning until they are woven into a story.

(Story)(Story)(Story)= Story

I know that, by now I run the risk of defining a word only to have it immediately lose all meaning through overuse. Nevertheless, I think it’s important to acknowledge that stories come in myriad lengths. When combined together by a skillful storyteller, multiple stories can yield a singular story that, while more complex and perhaps more satisfying, is still one.

Telling a story in as few words as possible has become a useful exercise practiced by many writers. Six words is a common goal, likely popularized by the myth that Ernest Hemingway won a bet with “FOR SALE: Baby shoes, never worn.” And you could tell a kind of story with even fewer. 

“Bitter divorce” seems to convey a lot of meaning, doesn’t it? Or something like “graduated valedictorian”? I assert that a story doesn’t need to be fleshy; these skeletal versions fit my definition fine.

When many different threads, each a sort of self-contained morsel of meaning, come together to create a tapestry of interwoven ideas that convey a single, thoroughly explored idea… you may end up with a masterpiece, or even a series of masterpieces that still count as one big story.

So what?

I’m currently reading Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, and I couldn’t help but chuckle while reading Harari’s explanation of the distinct advantage Homo sapiens had over other ancient species in our genus. He calls it gossip.

I call it story. 

Stories are ether through which all data must pass to gain a foothold in our minds. Stories allow us to unite. Stories inspire us to excel. Stories convince us to love or hate. Stories outlive us. Stories allow us to outlive ourselves. Stories aren’t just part of being human, stories make us human. 

A good story changes everything.