Horribly Confusing Terms That Story Teachers Use
Do you know the difference between an 'Inciting Incident' and 'Crossing the Threshold'? I'm not sure I do.
Ten Shun!
Studying how stories work can make you go completely mad.
At the top of this thread is an example Will Storr found on the Internet and shared with me.
I felt sorry for the person who created it. I imagine as time has gone on they have refined the diagram further and further until it resembles one of those infinitely receding fractals.
I know how the creator got there.
He or she read too many books on story theory.
And story theory is a total mess.
There’s a lot of money to be made out of teaching how to write stories ( so I hear, although I’ve never made much out of it myself). This means that everyone jumping on the bandwagon has his or her own little schema to reduce stories to their fundamental components.
Aristotle started the trend innocently enough with his delineation of a story as having a beginning, a middle and an end. Since then, story writers have complicated this paradigm endlessly in the hope of finding the golden key to storytelling.
Which doesn’t exist.
But people who want to learn how to write stories want to believe it exists and those who teach story have every interest in maintaining that belief.
This isn’t to say that learning about the shape of stories is pointless. It isn’t. But you have to approach it with humility and patience. And keep any paradigm you come up with at the back of your mind rather than at the front. At the front should be your wisdom, your imagination, your creative powers - all the indefinables that cannot be taught.
As story theory has become more complex the terms used to describe the supposed stages of a story have become subject to a naming war. Many different terms are used to describe the same - or nearly the same - thing.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Tim Lott's Writing Boot Camp to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.