This week: What Does Story Want? Edited by: Max Griffin 🏳️🌈  
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Louis Kahn tells this story about asking Brick what it wants. He learned deep lessons from Brick's simple answer.
You say to brick, “What do you want, brick?” Brick says to you, “I like an arch.” If you say to brick, “arches are expensive and I can use a concrete lintel over an opening. What do you think of that, brick?” Brick says: “I like an arch.”
—Louis Kahn
What might authors learn if they interogated Story the way that Louis Kahn interogated Brick? |
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What Louis Kahn learned from Brick
Louis Kahn was a brilliant architect. He was also a brilliant teacher. When his students confronted a design problem, he would tell them to think about their materials. The famous quote above is taken from a video of Kahn discussing of what a "brick" wants to be, and we can imagine him telling this story to his students.
Of course, the brick doesn't really have volition and want to be anything. But Kahn was a keen observer of classical architecture, and in particular of structures like the Parthenon or other monumental works. He thought of monumentality as "a quality, a spiritual quality inherent in a structure which conveys the feeling of its eternity, that it cannot be added to or changed.” His intent was not to imitate the works of the past, but find new expressions that resonated with this heritage. His best works, like the Salk Institute or the Kimball Art Museum, have a monumental character that is entirely modern but echoes the lines and forms of the past.
What Kahn learned from the brick, what the brick "wants," is what resonates with our cultural heritage, especially the use of bricks from antiquity to the present in constructing arches. The arch conjures images of Roman aqueducts, the Flavian Colosseum, or brick cathedrals like the one in Lubeck, Germany. Even the Arc de Triomphe is a brick arch. Kahn is saying to use the brick in a way that evokes that history as he did, in his masterpiece, the National Assembly of Bangladesh.
So, what does this have to do with what a story wants?
What does a story want?
You say to story, "What do you want, story?" Story says to you, "I like arc." You say to story, "Arcs are hard to write, and I can use action, characters, and tension to engage my readers. What do you say to that, story?" Story says, "I like arc."
The point here is not that using action, characters, and tension is wrong, but rather to hearken back to the oldest advice on storytelling, advice from Aristotle: every story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end. That simple arc, with the beginning and end the pillars that support the middle which bridges the two, gives the story structure. It's structure that gets to the heart of why we tell stories.
Why do we tell stories?
Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.
--Picasso
We have art in order not to die of the truth.
--Nietzsche
The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.
--Tom Clancy
Picasso and Nietzshe were more poetic while Clancy was more direct, but the message is the same. We tell stories to better understand and cope with the world. In the modern world, where the rate of change is accelerating exponentially, this need is especially urgent. It's no accident that a foundational idea in physics, the uncertainty principle, arose in modern times. The universe, like life and living, is uncertain. Chaos threatens to devour us.
We tell stories to understand the world in which we live, to tame the chaos and bring order to an uncertain world. Stories have never been more important than today precisely because of the frame--the structure--they provide for the story tell about ourselves.
Stories reveal truths that lurk in the shadows of a dangerous world. Humans have been telling stories for as long as we have a written records. Cave paintings reveal that humans have been telling stories for even longer, for at least fifty thousand years. Stories give meaning and structure to an uncertain world.
What the story wants is what the reader wants. What the reader wants is what Kahn wanted from architecture: that spiritual quality of eternity, the feeling of truth that can't be added to or changed. The reader wants order from chaos. The reader wants structure. The reader wants arc.
What gives a story an arc?
A story can have one arc or many arcs. A story with no arc will feel incomplete and leave the reader dissatisfied. A story should have at least one arc.
Arcs can arise in multiple ways. They can harmonize or conflict. They can create or resolve tension. They can complete a story by looking ahead or by looking backward. They can even invite the readers to complete the arc in their won way, choosing a path that has for them the most personal meaning.
Characters can change during the course of a story. How they change over time is the character arc.
Stories have action. Rising and falling action creates its own inner arc in the story.
The engine that drives stories is tension, but it waxes and wanes as the story progresses, creating another arc.
Stories have conflict that, like action, rises and falls. Sometimes conflict resolves, sometimes not, but regardless, conflict is another arc a story might have.
The plot, whether it's Aristotle's simple arc, the three-act play, or something more complex like the Hero's journey, provides an arc that invokes other stories in the reader's cultural memory.
The fortunes of the characters can rise or fall in the story, giving yet another arc.
Longer stories, like novels, will have these arcs and more. Short stories have fewer arcs. Some stories might have only one arc. But arcs and how they work together to reinforce or clash with each other, give the story structure, the way the arch supports the opening in a building.
What We Can Learn from Story
What the story wants is what readers want. What readers want is that spiritual quality of eternity that makes life and living bearable, even beautiful.
The reader wants structure, so the story wants arc. |
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For Authors: August 28, 2024 Issue [#12707]
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