The Map of Storytelling

Hello Everyone,

I have not been mostly much as I have once again found myself updating and refining my ideas, but I have been on another journey of discovery and returned with a few new diagrams! The first that I want to present is what I am calling the map of storytelling. It links together in an easy to understand way the three views from which storytelling needs to be analyzed. A good story is not just one story, but three interacting stories that push and pull on each other and must be balanced to become something great. These three stories are:

• The story that happens within the world of the story.
• The story the storyteller creates based on the happenings within the story world.
• The story that the audience experiences based on what the storytelling presents to them.

The World’s Story

In the opening scene of Disney’s masterpiece Wreck it Ralph, we view Ralph’s game from the outside of an arcade. The graphics are pixelated and the sound effects are retro, but then the camera moves through the arcade machine screen and we enter the world of Ralph’s game. The apartment building is now three dimensional. Each of the nameless renters in that building now have a home, a name, a backstory, a personally. This is not the world that the audience sees; it is not the world that the author choose to share with them… it is the at it truly exists for the denizens of that world.

In theory, everything we read about a story is just a pin hole glimpse into an entire universe and reality. It has its own places, people, and things. It has its own rules and natural laws that govern it. Maybe that means magic, advanced technologies, or that it contains new branches of reality that are created with every roll of probability.

Most important to a great story is having the characters be as real and authentic as possible. Character’s are the heart of every great story. It is their journey’s that form the heart of a story. A story can be entertaining without them, but it will never reach its potential without them. This more than anything is what I want to share, the keys to creating authentic characters. Then showing you how to weave the journey’s of those characters within their world to create compelling themes. This was the secret I found most absent from my own study of storytelling.

One of the main purposes of all of this is to fulfill the most fundamental of a Storyteller’s jobs. That is to help the audience believe that this world really does exist. The audience should be able to suspend their disbelief at the incongruity of the story’s world and their own. They don’t need to apply our world’s logic or laws because this is a different world. The author must allow them to believe everything in a story is just a small view into a vast world. That is the role of continuity. Continuity is the property of having the audience believe that somewhere, somehow if they could only crawl into the page or through the screen, like in Wreck it Ralph, they really would find a living, breathing world there.

The Storyteller’s Story

In the world of the story, there are hundreds or millions of things going on… walking the dog or pet dragon, meals to be made, work to do, millions of mundane lives being lived. The role of the storyteller is to figure out which of those things they want to share with their audience. Not only do they have to figure out what they want to share but how they want to share it. They have to figure out which details are important and which don’t contribute to the story they want to tell. When do they need to share which detail? How do I pick which details I can share? (Preview for future content: This is the role of Point of View.)

There are the questions facing the Storyteller and which they have to navigate to tell their story. But most of the things I have shared so for are not why the storyteller is telling their story. Those are questions of how to create a story that the audience will enjoy. But in listening to and talking with storytellers I have discovered that a majority of the reason people tell stories comes down to a something in the author themself. There is a core that they want to convey to their audience. It might be a Character they want to bring to life, or a cool moment that they know will grab the reader’s heart by its collar and stare into their soul. Writer’s are strange people. But maybe that description might also apply to the thematic writer’s who want to share an important message in what they tell.

Every storyteller wants their audience to enjoy and positively engage with their story, but deep down they have an idea that drives that desire. That is what makes it their story, the Storyteller’s Story.

The Audience’s Story

The third and hardest story to write, is the one that goes on inside the mind and heart of the audience.

Any serious storyteller longs for their audience to meaningfully engage with their work. They want them to have fun, feel, and forget their problems as for a time the story absorbs their thoughts. There is a catch though. The audience can’t just be paid to enjoy a story. Even if they spend money to enjoy a story, they can’t enjoy it is the story isn’t enjoyable. It is this problem more than anything that troubles the minds of storytellers. It is within most author’s grasps to create a logical sequence of events in a consistent world, they can put into their story the things that they want, but what is truly difficult, is to subliminally persuade the audience to have the experience you want them to.

Through my research, I have identified what I believe are the 7 potential avenues that lead to the audience’s hearts. These are the routes that a story must travel to find its mark. Any efforts that don’t contribute to increasing the audience’s ability to engage with these types of engagement are ultimately wasted efforts and better left in the garbage bin.

It would be too much to go into any level of detail here. But I hope that the names provide a good peak into what they represent.

1. Character Investment
2. Thematic Engagement
3. World Immersion
4. Plot Buy-in
5. Aesthetic Enjoyment
6. Tonal Resonance
7. Peripheral Influences

Each of these is a topic that deserves time and space to review. So stick around that I will get to them in future posts!

Conclusion

What I describe here is a theoretical view of how the author picks the details from some etherial place and presents them to the audience to enjoy. That is however not how most people practically go about the process of telling a story. Unless they are in fact drawing from an existing history or if you are like Tolkien and write an entire history and then draw from that to share with your audience. Every author will have their own methods for creating their story. What I describe here is what every great story should resemble, even if it reached this place by a circuitous route. One of my goals in this research is to help aspiring storytellers tell their masterpiece without having to wander and waste as much time.

Thanks for reading and until next time:

Live the story life