Karl Whitney: A story is a deal but a book is not an aubergine

Lately I’ve been reading about the shape of stories. There are so many books about structure that emphasise the three-act or perhaps five-act structure of what the authors believe makes a good story. 

They’re all, to a greater or lesser degree, derived from Aristotle’s Poetics, a pre-Jesus work of literary criticism that somehow eventually became a touchstone of Hollywood. 

It’s echoed, for example, in the beginning, middle, and end of a good action film or romantic comedy.

Will Storr, in his new book A Story is a Deal (Piatkus), characterises Aristotle’s model in this way: “Something happens to a character that disrupts their life; the character then struggles against this disruption until they restore equilibrium. This struggle against disruption teaches them something.” 

Characters in stories are always struggling to overcome obstacles to achieve their goal, in a similar way that, to take the wider story structure of the film in microcosm, Tom Cruise and his crew of airmen dodge enemy missiles to bomb an underground nuclear site in an unnamed country in Top Gun: Maverick.

These models primarily concentrate on story-as-action, and it suits film because it’s a visual medium. 

Movement is everything. The story structure is a relentless machine that delivers a payload of feels to blow the mind of the reader or viewer. Us jaded saps watch it just to feel something.

Inaction is verboten. If a character sits there not saying anything for 30 seconds, we’re going to feel bored; if, rather than striding purposefully across the screen, an actor mindlessly bops off the scenery it’s quite disturbing really, in contrast to when we witness the mild comedy of a Dalek doing it.

But I think that relentless onward movement can feel like a trap. 

When a story is constantly asking us to identify with characters and situations, the effect can be off-putting rather than reassuring. 

Identification may become overidentification, and the world of stories shrinks to one in which only characters that mirror your own socioeconomic situation or emotional life are of interest.

Storr writes about this aspect of story — in essence how humans are always telling stories about themselves, how in fact all human culture is a story-world made up of narratives that can cohere (you meet someone who’s a fellow Scunthorpe United fan and has experienced the same pain and joy you felt following Scunny all those years) or diverge significantly (an Everton fan listening to a Liverpool fan recount their club’s triumphs).

Such shared narratives can take on a dark hue. Storr identifies the tribalism of the story-world with the warm glow of mutual reassurance in the culture wars of politics: not just Trumpism and Brexit but also in the cultural opposition to both.

There is, to borrow Benedict Anderson’s term about nationalisms, an imagined community that’s sustained by the stories that community chooses to tell itself. 

Storr brings up Ridley Scott’s desperately unsubtle and therefore successful Apple ‘1984’ advert as a way into both the playground anti-authoritarianism of advertising — which spoke to baby-boomers who had parked the subversive notions of their youth in favour of an embrace of capitalism but still, you know, wanted to feel cool — and the active segmentation of the personal computer market.

The suggestion that there were Apple and PC people, and that the former were cooler than the latter, surely continues to account for a significant portion of Apple’s sales.

In his book, Storr is pitching in part to a business readership, where the story of a product or a service seems to matter as much if not more than the product itself.

Think of the number of small businesses that are promoted through an origin story that typically goes this way: Dave was working as an accountant and feeling quite bad about life when, on holidays, he visited [a picturesque town hitherto unknown but soon to become famous for its aubergines] and realised he had been eating aubergines wrong for his entire life. 

He immediately quit his job. From then on, he devoted himself to perfecting the aubergine and becoming an advocate for the health-giving properties of aubergines.

Even if you don’t like aubergines there are elements you might identify with in that origin story: the idea that one’s dissatisfaction with work can be overcome by a simple holiday during which you experience something that changes the direction of your life. 

You quit your hated job and pursue your wacky vision that turns out to be more satisfying than your day-job and, eventually, more profitable. 

You could be Dave — you just have to find your aubergine.

And if Dave is a writer and his aubergine, instead of being an aubergine, is a book? Well, it’s the same general story.

We’re interested in beginnings, in personal stories of how someone got from X to Y, because we yearn for change in our own lives — or want cautionary tales that reassure us that our decision not to change is the correct one.

And we’re interested in applying those stories to writing because we want to identify with the writer and their struggles — such an investment in the writer’s story might give a dull bit of realist fiction an emotional charge that the words on the page lack. And we might want to be a writer ourselves.

In terms of origin story, then, the book might be merely a substitute aubergine for those who harbour creative ambitions.

When promoting your book, it’s easy to echo these origin stories too closely, packaging the one-step forwards, two-steps back of the writing life as the kind of propulsive and inevitable movement towards an end that we might expect of three-act structure. Instead, we’re more like Daleks bumping into things.

Perhaps because of the way we’re sold, the figure of the writer appears to be a particularly seductive one for anyone who wishes to at least imagine escape and self-expression.

Certainly, I did so while sitting at a desk in a government building whiling away time between tasks by dipping into a book and thinking about what it might be like to write one someday. 

I decided to become a writer, but it was a slow dawning rather than a single moment that changed everything.

We’re sold so many things that we don’t need because we identify with the way they’re advertised. It’s not necessarily about solving a practical problem, but rather about reshaping the way we see ourselves.

Changing things in our lives is a difficult process and identifying with wider movements, or even stylishly-sold products, can be an important element in that change — or a black hole we disappear into.

Gerald Murnane’s Barley Patch (published by And Other Stories), begins with the tale of how he gave up writing fiction, having at that point been a writer for 30 years. 

The book itself, first published in his native Australia, was his return from this self-imposed exile from writing, and constitutes a fascinating reflection on the relationship between writing and life.

Ultimately, writing intersects with the wider story-world — in which writers are packaged similarly to aubergine-hunters — but doesn’t have to wholly belong to it.

Writing is a practice that we can keep to ourselves if we choose, that can go in circles for as long as we want it to, that we can stop doing whenever we want and pick up again whenever we feel like it.