Absolute Unit
Understanding the Concrete Units of Storytelling
First: If you did not read Amber Bennett-Groves’s guest column, Substance and Substantiation, earlier this week make sure you do so. I owe Amber many thanks for stepping in and writing a Shelf Life during a super busy time for me. My company’s annual meeting starts tomorrow. Spoiler alert: Once again, we did not cure cancer this year. That said, there have been many amazing advances in oncology this year and I’m grateful to have the tiniest part in bringing them to the scientific community at large but wow doing it all at once over a single long weekend in June is rough.
Today’s Shelf Life is on units of storytelling, and how to use them, and how to maximize them. And how to analyze them I guess cause that’s how we’re going to get there.
I had to bookend this topic somehow so I asked myself: What are the largest and the smallest units of storytelling? The smallest unit of storytelling is the sentence. Or, if you prefer, the clause. The largest unit of storytelling? I guess that is the “extended universe,” for instance the Marvel Cinematic Universe or Tolkien’s body of work, including the Legendarium, that takes place in Middle Earth. Middle Earth Extended Literary Universe.
For the purpose of today’s Shelf Life we’re going to call the novel the largest unit of storytelling. It’s not technically the largest unit. Even for the normal writer—that is, not Tolkien and not a giant multibillion-dollar media conglomerate with half the world’s writers on retainer—the series (of novels) is a very achievable unit of storytelling that is created by stringing novels together just like a novel strings chapters together. I may or may not talk about series of novels at the end of this Shelf Life as a concrete unit of storytelling, depending on how many words there are when I’m done talking about everything else.
Not everything is easier to understand once broken down into its smallest component parts. For instance, I understand an apple or a rock much better than I understand a quark or an atom. However, someone who understands the atomic makeup of an apple understands the apple much better than I do, because they understand it on at least one additional level to the way I understand it (the atomic level). A person who understands an apple on an atomic level can also eat an apple and enjoy it, which is the level at which I understand apples.
Everyone can understand an apple the way I do. It’s a red, green, or sometimes yellow fruit with a peel and a core and it tastes sweet. You can make it into cider. It is the superior fall flavor, compared to pumpkin. Likewise, everyone can understand story on this level: It’s a method of communicating information that entertains or educates. You can tell the story of Jack and the Beanstalk to a toddler and they will enjoy hearing it, just like I would enjoy hearing that same story. That said, I venture to say I understand story on a deeper and more granular level than a toddler does—I can understand it at its atomic and molecular level. I don’t think this is necessary for story enjoying. I do think it helps a great deal with storytelling.
A story is an account of incidents or events—that’s according to Merriam-Webster, my favorite dictionary. That’s the broadest possible definition, I think. It could be written or spoken, read or heard, fiction or nonfiction, historic or contemporary, romantic or scientific, fantastic or mundane—as long as it’s an account of incidents or events.
Every unit of storytelling I’m going to talk about today is—or can be—discrete. That is, each unit, although it is a building block of the next-larger unit in the hierarchy, has the capacity to tell an entire story. Even the humble sentence.
The king died and then the queen died from grief.
That is a single sentence that gives an account of two incidents or events and even links them together so that readers may see the causality. Thank you EM Forster for letting me borrow this sentence twice lately.
How about this single-sentence story:
For sale: Baby shoes, never worn.
Sometimes incorrectly attributed to Ernest Hemmingway, this six-word story gives an account of events through abstraction: The reader understands that the narrator has acquired baby shoes and now no longer needs them, a situation that may occur through any number of tragic events but probably no joyful ones.
A sentence at its very minimum contains a subject and a verb. But you actually don’t need both. The subject may be implied, or the verb may be implied.
“Stop!”
This exclamation can be a complete sentence if the subject (as in, “You, stop!”) is implied. Likewise,
“You!”
When the predicate is implied (as in, “You, give me your attention.”). A single-word sentence in dialogue may also answer a question, which might imply both the subject and the verb.
“Are you going?”
“Yes.”
Short for, “yes, I am going.”
The sentence, then, may be as short as one word, must contain a subject and verb but actually may contain one or neither, and is the most granular unit of storytelling. A single word alone can’t tell a story, not without context from other words or visuals anyway.
I’m going to skip over the paragraph as a unit of storytelling. In nonfiction, the paragraph carries a lot of weight—each paragraph should cover one concrete idea before moving on to the next paragraph. This is not so in fiction, where dialogue throws paragraph breaks in all over the place, and where sometimes a long paragraph is broken up into smaller ones for ease of reading. In fiction, I posit that the next smallest unit of storytelling is the scene.
A scene is a sequence of continuous action that takes place in a continuous setting. Scenes begin and end with transitions that clue the reader into how we got from one scene to the next, how these scenes are—or are not—related, how much time has passed between scenes, and so on. A scene is a series of events, actions, and dialogue that happen at a certain time and in a certain place. If the time or the place changes—new scene.
Like a sentence, a scene is a discrete unit of storytelling. It has a distinct beginning (transition in), middle, and end (transition out). It contains actions and dialogue that move the plot forward. Any scene that doesn’t move the plot forward, or that doesn’t tell a story (remember, an account of incidents or events) does not serve the larger story unit and should be removed.
Yes, removed. Put another way—if a scene could be removed and the larger story could still be told without any critical gaps in the reader’s knowledge (gaps that would prevent them understanding the story), then that scene is literary bloat. Maybe you have seen scenes like this in published works, even famous and well-respected ones, because scenes like this make it through editing all the time. That doesn’t mean they’re not bloat. It just means they survived the chopping block.
Most stories can probably withstand some bloat. Few stories can withstand much.
The next unit of storytelling is the chapter. Not all books, not even all fiction books, have them. Terry Pratchett’s novels often forgo chapters, for instance. When used, a chapter gives the reader a chance to pause and reset. New chapters often indicate a major change of place or time, and a new chapter is the ideal place to change point-of-view in a book that contains multiple points of view. Changing points of view within a single chapter is sometimes called head hopping, and many readers find it confusing to follow.
A book’s chapters may contain several scenes, or just one long scene, and should be approximately similar in length (chapters of significantly different length can be used for various effects). The scenes in a chapter should all hang together in a similar place and time. For instance, scenes may break from one to the next as characters move around a locale or pass a few days or weeks, but when there is a major change of scene: For instance, when the narrative skips ahead (or back) in time, moves to another place entirely, or shifts gears to follow another character or set of characters, then it’s time for a new chapter.
The purpose of a chapter is to tackle a substantial part of the plot, telling a concrete story within the overarching story that moves the plot forward. Each chapter, like each scene, has a distinct beginning, wherein the setting, time, and characters are introduced; middle, during which the action rises; and end, wherein the status quo has changed.
If the status quo is the same at the end of the chapter as it was at the beginning, then this chapter has not met its burden of usefulness to exist. If Frodo and the Fellowship are walking to Mordor at the beginning of the chapter and then at the end of the chapter they’re still walking to Mordor, with all the same people, and still in possession of the One Ring, then this chapter failed at being a chapter. If the Fellowship is still heading for Mordor but Gandalf died, or they’re still walking to Mordor but now in three separate groups instead of one, or they’re still walking to Mordor but now they’ve lost possession of the football the One Ring, then you have a chapter. The chapter must contain a state change, otherwise it would be better omitted.
The final unit of storytelling I’m discussing today is the novel which might also be, depending, the novella or the short story—the complete, concrete, discrete narrative that tells this entire story, start to end. I say this entire story as opposed to the entire story—a novel, novella, or short story might be part of a longer series of works that expand on the story and add more after this story has ended or before it began. But the novel, as a unit of storytelling, should tell this whole story, from the beginning (where the protagonist’s [or protagonists’] life is interrupted), through the rising action, the climax, the falling action, and the conclusion (wherein the protagonist [or protagonists] returns to normal life, profoundly changed).
Even if a story will be part of a larger series or literary universe, the novel should finish with a satisfying conclusion that ties up all the main threads from that story and leaves no loose ends. This is not to say it doesn’t leave side questions unanswered for future installments to answer—but rather that none of the primary questions asked during the course of the story remain unanswered to leave the reader feeling dissatisfied.
There’s a fine line between teasing too much of your future stories so that the reader wonders if your novel just forgot to address some questions that were versus teasing just enough that the reader feels the story has satisfactorily concluded while wishing there were more to read.
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