We're pretty good at identifying stories, noticing that something looks like a story, sounds like a story. Often it's obvious, the format telegraphs it to us — we pick up a novel, say, or maybe flick to a magazine article or watch a movie. Easy — they're stories, right. Cinch.

Other times, we figure it out from the context — a friend's recounting a childhood memory or telling you about something odd that happened on the way home from work, for example. We know they're stories without it ever being signalled with a 'once upon a time' prompt, or even 'in a galaxy far, far away.'

But what is it that makes a story? Well, here's an interesting place to start.

Towards the beginning of his book on creative writing, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, George Saunders says:

A story is a linear-temporal phenomenon. It proceeds, and charms us (or doesn’t), a line at a time.

George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022, pg. 11

The quote is taken from a section where Saunders is looking at what makes a reader keep reading (his next sentence goes: "We have to keep being pulled into a story in order for it to do anything to us."), and he develops the 'linear-temporal phenomenon' idea more later on in the book. However, this is an important first step for understanding what distinguishes a story from any other form of speech or writing:

A story is a sequence of things that happen, one after another.

The same is true of most art forms, of course. A piece of music, the choreography of a dance, an encounter with an artwork in a gallery, and so on, all are careful sequence that's experienced as a linear-temporal phenomenon.

A story is more than just that, though, more than just a sequence of things that happen. In a story, there's a couple of elements occurring at the same time.

A selection of things #

First, in a story the set of things that happen has been selected.

In the time-world of the story, Saunders's linear-temporal phenomenon, many things have happen. Indeed, many other things did happen, but a load of them are missed out. They happened but we don't know about them because they're not included in the story, omitted from the tale as told. For some reason, the story's author chose not to include them.

Those things are left out because, one way or another, they're not relevant. Cleaning teeth. Folding down boxes for the recycling. Mowing the lawn. Having left-overs for lunch. Noticing a blackbird mimicking a car alarm. They're too boring, probably, or too inconsequential, too tangential or surreal, or maybe even they're too irritating and prevent the story from getting where it's going. Whatever the reason, they're left out.

That's a vital insight, though:

A story undergoes a process of selection, a filtering that determines what's 'in' the story and what's 'out'.

That's important for both authors and readers:

• As an author, you're making choices about what events need to be recounted in the story you're telling, about what's significant (or not) in the lives and times of the characters who experience those events.
• As a reader, the specific set of things you're presented with are given to you as the things you should know about — this is what matters, these are the things that are relevant, and the other stuff has been left out because they don't matter.
  • Note: As a reader, you can't (ordinarily) ask the author for clarifications — the author is just a dimension of the text as far as the reader is concerned, and all you've got to go with is the story itself.

So, as either a writer or a reader, for each story you should be thinking: in this story, these are the things that matter. Forget the other stuff. In other words, if those events are not left out (a character mowing the lawn, having left-overs for lunch, noticing a blackbird mimicking a car alarm, etc.) then they're important for the story — they're significant, somehow, for some reason.

Meaningful action #

Second, in a story the set of things have a connection between them.

A story is not just a random collection of events put into some kind of order. The story's events have been selected for a reason, for the way that they are connected to each other. One thing follows from another. Another thing follows on after.

Sure, that means that they form a sequence, that the events happen in an order. Here we're back to George Saunders's phrase, a 'linear-temporal phenomenon' — that an author has arranged things into a sequence, and a reader reads things in that sequence, one line at a time.

But it also means more than that, and it's a 'more than' that makes all the difference.

Events in a story are causally connected. In a story one thing is caused by another, and is itself the cause of something else. That causality is vital, it's what turns something that happens from a meaningless occurrence, an insignificant speck that's lost in the vastness of the cosmos, into something that has meaning and value and weight.

In other words, this thing causes that thing to happen … and that matters.

The sequence of events in a story is what's normally called 'the plot', but here Saunders flinches, and he suggests that we "replace it with 'meaningful action.'" (p. 16).

I like that. Meaningful actions.