From the book «True Structure»

Stories, however we define them, are constructions that we make with our words every day of our lives. We could say that every time we speak, we want to tell a good story. Think about your daily life, your basic needs. Let’s say you are thirsty, hungry, or sleepy, and there is a trusted person next to you. If you are thirsty and tired and want the person near you to go to the refrigerator and get you a glass of water, what do you do? You invent a little story, very simple, very direct, but it must have all the components of a good story, and you tell it. The result must be effective, it must move, it must create emotional reactions and move the listener to take action. If your story works, then your trusted person returns with a glass of ice water and gladly hands it to you, you quench your thirst, you achieve the satisfaction of having convinced your listener, and that person feels that he or she has done a good job. All this has been achieved by your story.

Let’s consider the opposite hypothesis: suppose that your story is not convincing and that the story you told failed, that your listener listened with little interest to your request, qualified your request as an act of laziness, suggested that you pour yourself a glass of water, and turned his back on you. So it seems you either created a bad story or told it badly (or both). Purely in terms of the story you concocted, what happened in the first case, what happened in the second? What differentiates a story that is capable of convincing, moving, and even moving people to take action, from stories that are unconvincing and that sink without the person who creates them achieving their intentions? There are a few questions that can guide us to the possible answer. The first question we can ask in relation to what a story is is to whom the story happens, whose story it is. This question is pertinent because behind every story there is someone affected by it. A technical way to ask this question is who is the main character in your story. Going back to our hypothetical account of your “thirsty self,” if you are writing for someone to bring you a glass of water, the first thing you do is build the main character of the story who, in this case, is inspired by yourself.

Let’s say that your main character is a version of yourself, or more accurately, that the main character is your “thirsty self.” Realize that this character is very important to your story: if his thirst convinces, if this character manages to move, then sooner rather than later you will have in your hands the coveted glass of cold water you need so much. Let’s leave aside for a moment what your interlocutor, or the receiver of your story may know about you as a “person” (“persons” are also constructs, so they are not much different from characters, but we won’t talk about that for the moment either). The point is that if you have a well-constructed persona and you know how to introduce some aspects of your character into the story, your story will probably be on the right track. What are these elements? I mention some of them. For example, how important it is for the character to quench his thirst and how much is at risk for him if his interlocutor does not help him to drink water. And also, what is the vital need that hides behind the urgency to hydrate to which the story refers. It is quite likely that, if you incorporate in your story elements that make these two aspects visible—that the character has deficiencies that hide behind his thirst of the moment and that if he does not manage to supply that hidden need he will suffer the consequences—then you have probably already won more than half of the glass of water.

If your story is convincing, it is because it has a universal character and speaks to a human need. In fact, everyone has experienced thirst, we all know the consequences that any living thing experiences if it is not hydrated. What you have done, most likely without being aware of it, is to structure the basis of your story to give it the greatest strength. Otherwise, we are all experts at constructing stories, our brains are built for that, especially for everyday survival stories. But we’re only halfway there. You’ve designed the main character and the conflict of the story in the best possible way, but there’s still one very important thing missing: a story works not only because of what you tell, but also because of how you tell it. This is what is called storytelling, which is so much in vogue. When it comes to telling the story, one usually asks oneself other questions, for example: How am I going to tell my story? Where am I going to start telling it? What are the strengths and weaknesses? How do I capture the interest of the listener or reader? What surprises do I have in store? There are many options, and each follows a strategy: this also has to do with the art of crafting stories.

Now we are going to raise all these issues about stories and the art of storytelling to another level. We will do so by asking a question that seems obvious but is not so obvious: What do we talk about when we talk about “story”? In other words, do we all mean the same thing when we use this term that we tend to take for granted? First of all, we can say that the word history comes into Spanish through the Latin historia, which in turn takes it from the Greek ἱστορία (historía), a term that refers to knowledge acquired through research, account, or testimony. In its current meaning, however, it may well refer, according to the Dictionary of the Spanish language of the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE), to a narration and exposition of past events and worthy of memory, whether public or private, to an invented narrative, or also, to a set of events that occurred to someone throughout his life or in a period of it. In French, according to the Dictionnaire de français Larousse, a story (histoire) is a story about real or imaginary events or characters that does not follow fixed rules; an anecdote intended to amuse or entertain. It is important to note, due to the influence that English has on us Spanish speakers, that that language distinguishes between two words that in Spanish are translated as “historia”: story (a story about imaginary or real people and events for entertainment purposes) and history (all the events that happened in the past). Beyond any etymological or semantic complications, the definition of history in the field of writing is problematic. The first reason is of a historical nature: the word “history” has designated, in the field of literary analysis and narratology, over the years, diverse concepts. Also, the term story has shared partial aspects of its meaning with terms such as “fable”, “story as plot”, “plot” and others. The second reason is of a theoretical nature; the semiotic and narratological perspective, for example, is inclined to call “story” the content of what we tell, and considers that the story somehow pre-exists the narrative, while the cognitive perspective, followed by authors such as Sternberg and Bordwell, sees the “story” (to which they reserve the name “fable”) as the subsequent product resulting from the reconstruction made by readers or spectators based on the data provided by the plot (which they call “subject” or “Syuzhet”). In order not to delve into this matter, which is more laborious than complicated and in which Russian formalists to some renowned writers have participated, in this book and in my approach we will understand the story as the chronologically ordered construction, and understood in its logical causal chaining that the writer presupposes as previous content from which he builds a “plot” by means of which he tells the story. Or, in very simple words: the story is what is told (with its intrinsic logic and a chronological ordering in accordance with the notion of time that is postulated in the world of history), and the story, discourse or plot is the construct used to tell it.

From this definition, we will specify the type of story that we will consider in the model of our approach. We will be interested in the type of story that revolves around a character, whom we will call the main character, to whom something significant happens, both for the character and for the readers or viewers. We will call this type of story, which for us has a notable presence in human civilizations, “dramatized story”, but we will refer to it simply as “story”. Our working definition will be:

A story is an event that happens to someone and carries significance.

A dramatized story occurs when an essence is put on trial by a circumstance.

  • Stories discuss identity crises that occur within circumstantial crises.

  • Stories put an identity (that of the main character) on trial as circumstances progressively worsen.

In what follows, we will employ this notion of story within our model and support it both practically (this concept will enable you to develop the best scripts and the most profound and compelling novels) and theoretically (in part 2 of this book, you will find the theoretical model that underpins our method, based on an equivalence between the stories as we conceive them and thought experiments). But first, to fully unleash the potential of this notion, we will thoroughly review the concept of structure and proceed to explain our method.