The Story Riddle

Here’s the thing. You want to write a story that, pace the real world, follows a logical set of events. Event A leads to B, and B to C, and so on. But! But, of course, this makes for a boring, a very boring story, since each step begins to telegraph the next one, since there is a buildup of predicability as the story unfolds. Think of a story about an individual who seeks a jewel and plods along, with the first step leading to the second one, and however many more needed to get to the gem.

Of course, the above is a caricature of how a story works. Yes, there are steps; our protagonist starts off due to some push or pull into an adventure. Then the story begins to develop, it isn’t simply one step at a time, but whole leaps that take the story in a different direction. The reader can have an initial feel as to what the story is about only for this to change utterly as events unfold. In that sense, the story isn’t a series of steps, but more leaps and jumps and even tumbles that grip the reader as to ‘what comes next’.

Even so, there is an underlying structure or logic happening, those step-by-step progress in the plot, otherwise the story fails as such. It becomes a disconnected set of scenes like some avant-garde movie, where there doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason for what is happening, and even at the end, the viewer is left wondering what it’s all about. And, as writers, for a reader to ask that question is to fail.

So here is the story riddle. We need a step-by-step storyline that evolves in a particular way, an arc, and various developments as proposed by story theory, such as the hero’s journey, yet we must have those giant leaps that leave the reader wondering, ‘What comes next?’.

As a writer, one must navigate this riddle to create a story that is less fantastic than real life yet more surprising. Quite the challenge!