Do you struggle to tell good stories? I do. One thing I’ve learned recently is what a story even is. People think a story has to have plot, or conflict, and that these things are what makes up a story. I don’t think this is true. I think a story is just any sequence of events that a person can learn from. Sometimes this involves conflict and plot. Other times not. Imagine your friend tells you the following story:
“This morning I woke up, brushed my hair, and then brushed my teeth.” Boring! There is no plot. No conflict. No stakes!
Now imagine your friend tells you this instead:
“This morning I woke up, brushed my hair, and then brushed my teeth with barbecue sauce.” Wouldn’t you be immediately interested? Why is she brushing her teeth with barbecue sauce? Does she know something about the ingredients of barbecue sauce that actually makes that a smart idea, and actually you should be brushing your teeth with barbecue sauce too? Or is it a terrible idea, and you’re coming to find out your friend is an even bigger dimwit than you thought they were?
Either way, you’re learning something. You implicitly predicted something about the world (that people brush their teeth with toothpaste), and you never would have predicted your friend would brush her teeth with barbecue sauce. You learned something about the world, and you want to know more. You want to know why.
Many stories people tell in real life are like this. “Guess what I saw at the mall today?” There’s no conflict, and no plot. A novel has to have a plot because a novel is hundreds of pages. You can’t spend hundreds of pages describing what you saw at the mall. Some things have to happen eventually to keep the story moving for that long.
But at their core, stories are just sequences of events — or even a single event — that a person can learn from. That’s whether they’re learning something specific about barbecue sauce, or something vague about the way people work or the way the world is. I’m not talking about grand moral lessons. I’m talking about anything that updates your view of how the world works, particularly as it’s relevant to your life.
A story about someone who has financial troubles and then suddenly they win the lottery and their problems go away is not a good story. You can’t learn anything from randomly getting lucky. We evolved to tell stories to share our knowledge and wisdom with each other. The more your story does that, the better a story it’ll be. Imagine instead you told a story about someone who won the lottery, but only because they put in a bunch of time and effort figuring out the statistical probabilities of different corner stores having the winning ticket, and bringing on investors to fund the purchasing of thousands of tickets to statistically guarantee victory. That could be a good story. Because you can actually learn how to act in the world from it.
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales is a good example of stories that have no story to them. It’s a series of essays about different people who have impaired brains, and what’s wrong with them. Including one man who has visual agnosia, and actually thought his wife was his hat. If you had no idea visual agnosia existed, you will find this very interesting. There is no plot. No conflict. No antagonist. Just some obscure neurology. Yet the “tales” are very interesting. And even though they concern rare neurological disorders you’ll probably never experience, they indirectly teach you something about what it means to be human.
The Slow Regard of Silent Things, on the other hand, is a strange fiction novel by Patrick Rothfuss that he tried to write without any dialogue, significant action, or conflict. This story fails to be interesting. Not because it has no dialogue, action or conflict, as he suggested. But because you can’t learn anything from it. Someone described the book as 100+ pages of the main character picking things up and then putting them back down again. There’s nothing that can do to change your view of the world. It feels utterly irrelevant to your life, so it isn’t interesting.
Stories are sequences of events that contain information the reader feels is important for them to learn. Whether that’s specific knowledge or general wisdom. There is probably a lot more leeway in storytelling than a lot of writers would have you think.