Humans are fundamentally storytelling creatures. One of our greatest creations as a species—which is, infact, obsessed with creating—are stories.
The cleverest, most devilishly complex of all our creations. It is the ultimate art form; elaborately overpowering, subtle, formative, captivating. Stories have the ability to give birth to revolutionary, everlasting ideas, to change entire lives.
It’s how you mould the words and how you leave something incomplete—just slightly imperfect, just a bit undone. Little nooks for people to put their heads in and come out with something entirely of their own making. Infact, the beauty of a story is in how much we can’t even grasp of its beauty. The words are the same but every reader reads them differently. If half the story is what the storyteller planned for it to be, half of the story lies in interpretation—of what the reader makes the it out to be. It is the delicate balance of objective words and subjective perception.
And because of this, a story is always multifaceted. It can have as many meanings as there are people to understand those meanings.
If someone tells you what a story is about, they are probably right. If they tell you that that is all the story is about, they are very definitely wrong.
Neil Gaiman
The most captivating feature of any story is how any one person can never know the entirety of it. There in lies the puzzle, the attraction. This is how stories mould us and change us. This is how they force us to break out of the rigidity of our perspective and consider other viewpoints. This is how they lend fluidity to our thoughts.
Table of Contents
The Elements Of Storytelling
Every artist has their tools. Some artists have physical tools that you can see and touch (if they let you). Pencils, brushes, chisels, needles…
Some artists draw their tools from the imaginary toolbox in their mind. The art of storytelling is one such art that had most of its tools packed away somewhere beyond physical reality. The elements which make it so beautiful are the ones you can’t touch and see, but in order to master the art, you have to understand them and know them anyway.
The Characters
Characters are the central elements of any story. There is no story without the character who the story happens to, after all. Creating characters is a highly important and, therefore, highly complicated task. It is more complicated than drawing a character on paper, or making a statute out of clay.
Because apart from the outer physical features, a storyteller also has tho fabricate an entire being and then give it thoughts, ideas, a personality, a history and a future. If you don’t do it right, your character will come out a hollow block of words that no one can relate to.
Many books with no plot whatsoever (complimentary) have been loved purely for their multidimensional, realistic characters. Because in the end, even after hundreds of years, it’s not the plot or the details that stick with us, but the characters. We know and we remember the story through its characters.
We know ‘The Study In Scarlet’ by Arthur Conan Doyle as the story of the genius detective Sherlock Holmes and his friend John Watson as they solve a mysterious murder together.
We know ‘The Lord Of The Rings’ of J.R.R Tolkien by the Fellowship; we know it as title chronicles the journey of Frodo Bagginsand the friends he makes on the way as they battle the forces of evil. We don’t remember it as being anything distinct from Aragorn and Legolas and Gimli and Bilbo and Gollum and Gandalf the Grey. They are forever joined together.
‘The Chronicles of Narnia’ by C.S Lewis is about four siblings as they stumble upon a whole new world full of magic.
‘Anne of Green Gables’ of L.M. Montgomery is about (surprise!) a girl named Anne who lives in Green Gables.
These stories are known by their character, all of which are remembered because of their complexity and deeply fleshed out personalities. They are inseparable from the story which revolves around them. It is impossible for someone to think about the story without also thinking about, unconsciously, about the characters which are apart of it.
“A character is a work of art, a metaphor for human nature. We relate to characters as if they were real, but they’re superior to reality…We know characters better than we know our friends because a character is eternal and unchanging, while people shift—just when we think we understand them, we don’t.”
Robert McKee
The difficulty lies in the fact, that in order to make them realistic, a writer has to them more than realistic. The ordinary human, if you look closely, is not realistic at all. There’s nothing relatable about your neighbours or strangers you meet on the street. Everyone seems like a cardboard cut-out of a person you can probably only see if you look too closely for too long.
Real people wouldn’t look real at all of you were to stamp them on paper. They would seem superficial and underdeveloped. This is because you don’t really understand a person unless you’ve known them for a long time.
But we don’t have a long time in books and films. We have about 20 pages before the reader decides that it’s not worth reading after all and moves on to something better. 20 pages to make a character seem real.
This is why it is more effort to write a realistic character, managing the delicate balance of consistency and fluidity, so that they don’t seem utterly devoid of a stable personality and neither do they seem like statues incapable of emotional development.
Tone and Pacing
When writing fiction, the overall tone and style of the writer makes a great impact on the atmosphere of the story and how the reader imagines and understands it. A writers tone is unique to every writer and somewhat distinct from the story itself. It does not depend on the genre or the plot of the story.
Different from this is the tone of the story. Persona is the term used to denote the specifically chosen for a particular piece of work which is different from the authors voice.
It is a feature of the story itself and not something that is a characteristic of the author. For instance, the tone of a horror story is typically bleak and enigmatic, with just enough details given and just enough details left for the reader to be appropriately unnerved. The tone of suspicion and ‘everything leading to something big and revealing’ is a prominent one adopted for a typical murder mystery. Similarly, most humorous stories have quirky, upbeat dialogues accompanied by an informal and conversational tone of voice.
Let us compare the two most notable works of J.R.R Tolkien. Both the ‘Lord of The Rings’ trilogy and ‘The Hobbit’ are fantasy works west on the same world, occurring only a few decades apart, with very similar conflicts, characters and settings. However, while the complex and epic writing style of Lord of the Rings with its omniscient narration makes it a high fantasy novel with darker themes, the Hobbit is set apart by it’s humorous first person narration and a lighthearted tone of writing.
The pacing and speed at which the events unfold also allows the writer to maintain tension, suspense and thrill in the story. Adventure novels are often fast paced while genres like historical fiction and epic fantasy are typically slow paced as they focus more on character development and worldbuilidng.
Narration
An essential part of the story is how it’s told. The style and structure of narration of any work of fiction or non fiction can enhance and emphasise its theme, setting, genre and the general give the writer aims for.
First person narratives tend to allow the reader a deeper understanding of the protagonist’s personality and motivations. The protagonist becomes an extension of the reader—the subject through which the reader experience the story. Percy Jackson and the Olympians of Rick Riordan is the best example I can think of of this style of writing.
Third person omniscient narratives are told from an impartial, all knowing standpoint and is a braille it way to maintain distance from the characters and focus on the bigger picture. It also allows the writer to concentrate on the characters as and when their point of view becomes important with respect to the plot. Pride and Prejudice of Jane Austen, Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling, The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia of C.S. Lewis, Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Prachett are all examples of this style of writing.
Third person limited narration focuses on just one character while maintaining a distance from the others. It is the perfect way to maintain a delicate balance between knowing everything about the protagonist and being entirely unaware of their motives. It lets the reader hang in the middle of first person and omniscient narratives, and allows the writer to withhold information if necessary while also letting the crucial bits through.
The structure of narration is also a very useful tool which can allow the writer to add an aesthetic sort of complexity and beauty to their work. The story may be written chronologically on in the non linear fashion, going back and forth as the scenes demand, creating an abstract effect of the signifance of different timeframes.
My personal favourite is Unreliable Narrator, where the narrator’s own prejudices and feelings muddle the story, allowing the readers to interpret events through multiple layers of complexity and motivation. This style has the potential to make a work extremely thought provoking and memorable.
All this diversity allows the writer to shuffle through and manipulate the different effects their work creates on the minds of the reader.
