Tag: rags to riches

When I started thinking about this blog, I considered the ways in which a psychologist could contribute to our understanding of storytelling. My initial thought was that most topics would relate to characters and characterisation, after all, psychology is all about people, isn’t it? But then it occurred to me that the psychology of a reader may be just as important to a successful story as the story itself. A five year old would be unimpressed by a 100 000 word tome; an avid science fiction reader likely won’t find much to engage with in a chick lit novel.

I also realised that my first blog post started with the premise that everyone already understood what a story was. And perhaps we do. Perhaps we grow up so surrounded by stories that the concept doesn’t need to be explained. But consider the example of language fluency – it is possible to be fluent in English but to not understand the difference between past perfect and past continuous, and to not be able to put into words why it doesn’t sound right for someone to be wearing a “red, old, big coat”. You might know English, but you would perhaps struggle to teach its nuances to a class of English learners. So I thought I would share some thoughts about what stories are.

How do stories begin (and end)

Generally stories are a description of people and the events that happen to them, whether real or imaginary. Stories always have a purpose. Often they are told in order to share some understanding of the world we live in. Even stories that seem to have no strong purpose, light hearted and funny, tell us something about the storyteller or the characters within the story.

But none of this tells you anything really about what a story will look like. And the thing is, we do have expectations around the form that a story will take. Generally a reader (or listener) starts a story expecting it to contain a beginning, middle and an end, although not necessarily in that order, if the storyteller is feeling particularly avant garde.

We want to know who the main character is, what the setting is, and what problem the character is facing. And most of all, we want to know how they solve the problem. We want to be taken on a journey that gives the character resolution and teaches us something along the way.

When we start a story, if there’s no real conclusion, it generally feels like we’ve wasted our time. I’m sure many Netflix subscribers have grown used to that disappointment lately and started to turn away from them as a media source – because what’s the point if they never give you a completed story?

The importance of the ending

A story without an end is a story without meaning or purpose. How can we know what lesson we were supposed to take from a narrative if the writer doesn’t give us the ending? How can we better understand who the writer is if we don’t know how they wanted their story to go? Our lives are not as easily separated into discrete entities, but we expect the stories that we tell about these lives to be compartmentalised regardless. Because in doing so, our experiences become something that we can learn from, move on from, and then share as a warning to others who might follow the same path.  

The lack of ending, or lack of closure, is often a reason that people struggle after a negative life experience. We want there to be a reason. We want to know what the lesson is. We want to know how to avoid it happening again. We want our life to be a story, broken into neat chapters, each with its own purpose. The girl who’s father left her wants to be an independent woman who doesn’t need men to define her. The man who lost his job wants this to be an opportunity to build a new career. And if our lives can’t be as clearly delineated as that, the lives of our fictional protagonists should be.

Or, to think about it another way, perhaps we use these fictional narratives in order to work out how to compartmentalise the sections of our own lives. If the only narrative sense our lives really have is the one we make up in our own heads, then the more experience that we have with narratives, the better we will be at sustaining the one that defines us.

Story Archetypes

And that leads to another aspect of reader expectation – story archetypes. Literary theorist Christopher Booker posited seven story archetypes which appear across the history of human storytelling:

• Rags to riches – the underdog gaining power or privilege temporarily, then finding a way to gain it back for good
• The quest – a journey to obtain a certain outcome or object
• Rebirth – the hero experiences an event that leads them to change their ways
• Overcoming the monster – where the hero has to defeat the antagonist that threatens them
• Comedy – a triumph over adverse circumstances, leading to a happy ending
• Tragedy – the downfall of a hero who either has a character flaw or makes a mistake so large it leads to their undoing
• Voyage and return – a journey to an unfamiliar land, where the hero learns something then comes home more knowledgeable than before

Not all stories fit neatly into these categories. Probably because trying to categorise the human experience of storytelling is akin to telling a story in itself.  We bring our own unique view points to our interpretation and may not come up with the same outcome. But, this theory highlights the important point that readers have expectations. If a hero goes on a quest, we expect to know how it ends – we would be pretty annoyed if he gave up halfway through and just went home. Unless of course we were reading a Rebirth story, where the protagonist sets off, determined to kill a monster, then realises killing isn’t for him. But if you don’t set the reader’s expectations towards the right archetype, they’re still going to be disappointed with how it plays out or may disengage from the story entirely.

Stories are conversations

This leads us to the most important part of what a story is. A story is a shared experience, one that means nothing without a reader or listener to appreciate it. We tell stories to teach lessons; we tell stories to warn of danger; we tell stories to share a piece of who we are with the people around us. But none of that means anything if our story isn’t entertaining enough for someone to listen to it in the first place.

A story, ultimately, is a conversation. It is an attempt by a writer to communicate something that they believe is important, to someone that they believe might benefit from what they have to say. Without a willing reader or listener, the story might as well be screamed into the void or tossed on a fire to burn. And in return, as a reader, we want to be exposed to the narratives we expect, that give us a sense of closure and help us to in some way make sense of our own journey through life. If we cannot in some way incorporate the meaning or structure of a story into our own experience, then what was the point of the story?

Of course, there are far more facets to storytelling than just this, that could be analysed at the micro and macro level. But none of those factors mean anything if you don’t have two people, the reader and the writer, willing to communicate with each other.

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If you’re interested in any previous Storytelling posts, you can find them here

Or why don’t you check out my young adult fantasy novel, George Square, or my published short fiction.

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