THE SECOND OLDEST PROFESSION – What Makes a Good Story?

Tell me a story. It turns out telling stories is the only thing I sort of know how to do. I can’t make heads or tails of a contract or an invoice but give me Once upon a time and I can follow along, no problem. When asked what I do for a living, I ran through a number of hyphenated job descriptions: writer-director, novelist-screenwriter-filmmaker and so on, but eventually boiled my profession down and settled on one word: storyteller.

Henry James said the least demand you can make of work of art is that it be interesting; the most demand is that it be moving. For the sake of this conversation let’s grant James’s implied assumption that there’s an art to telling a story.

What about my stories? It has never much mattered to me whether my stories were historical, pastoral, science fictional, comical, tragical, any or all of Polonius’s interminable variations. It has never much mattered to me whether my stories were created for the page, the stage, or any kind of screen. (Though I’ll grant that the content of some stories may suggest where certain narratives might best be experienced. The first film I wrote and directed, “Time After Time,” (the film starred Malcolm McDowell as H. G. Wells), featured two time-traveling Victorians adrift in present day San Francisco. Two guys in Victorian outfits confronted by miniskirts and jet planes? This is self-evidently an inherently visual idea. You SEE it.

So if it doesn’t matter to me what kind or stories they are, or in which venue they take place, what do my story choices have in common? (Anything?) My answer to this question, honed over more years than I care to think about, is this: I like good stories.

The inevitable question that follows hard on this declaration is: “what is your definition of a ‘good story’?” to which my answer, again, standardized by repetition, is: my definition of a good story is one that once I tell it to you (in whatever form), you understand by the end, WHY I wanted to tell it.

What makes a story interesting? Well, for starters, it can revolve around something that seems …interesting. Falling in love. Getting into trouble (are they the same??) Being in unfamiliar circumstances or territory? Encountering unusual people? A strange experience? Needing something? Or someone? Having an obligation, a mission. Variants of the ticking clock, the burning fuse, etc. These are possibly interesting starting points. They may draw us (the reader, the viewer, etc.) in, that is to say, INTO THE WORLD OF THE STORY. This is the story-teller’s art.

But going to James’s other point, we want stories to MOVE us, meaning, simply, stories that make us laugh or cry. And how does the storyteller manage this? He or She involves us in the fate or fates of the people the story is about. In his POETICS, Aristotle talks about action being the test of character. Not what I say but what I do; or say in contrast to what I do. Stories are not necessarily the same as dramas but, like all art, they do have certain things in common. In a story, we’d like the reader/viewer/listener to stay interested, which again, may mean something as simple as wanting to know what happens next. In a story – any kind of story, I would argue – we want the reader to keep turning pages. If it’s a story on television we want the viewer not to reach for the remote or abandon watching “verticals” , (those three minute soap opera epics from China) on his cell in favor of making a mere phone call.

In order to achieve this level of interest I’d suggest some sort of stakes are in play. Again, put crudely, will the story be a happy or a sad one? What do we want or fear will happen? (Orson Welles once said that whether a story is happy to sad depends on where you end it). Will the lovers live happily ever after? Will Hamlet kill the king?

This isn’t rocket science. The director Howard Hawks described stories by saying, “Put the cat in the tree and then try to figure out how to get him down.” Are these the only kind of stories? Of course not; there are many kinds. Maybe, to cite one of the most famous of all storytellers, there are a thousand and one kinds of story. I am alluding of course to Scheherazade, the clever wife of a bloodthirsty sultan, who having been cuckolded by a previous spouse, vowed vengeance on all womankind by taking a new bride every night and executing her at dawn. When the sultan came to Scheherazade on their wedding night, he found her in the midst of telling a story to her maidservant. Interested (remember that word?) in the tale of Aladdin – or was it Sinbad? - the sultan stuck around all night as Scheherazade spun her tale until, just as the sun rose she had reached the climax of the tale. “Oh, sorry, I can’t finish,” Scheherazade explained, “it’s time for me to die.” “Hang on,” the sultan said, “finish the story and you can live another day.”

Well you can see where this is going. Scheherazade invented the episodic series, complete with cliff-hanger endings to keep the viewer (in this case, his majesty) tuning in for the aforementioned 1,001 nights, by which time his thirst for vengeance was slaked in favor of… good stories.

Scheherazade, incidentally, may not have invented long-form. That honor arguably belongs to Homer, whoever he may have been, and his double-feature, The Iliad and The Odyssey. “Papa,” my oldest daughter said to me as I nightly I related the ongoing fall-out from the rage of Achilles, “I love this story because it goes on and on!” Yes, the more twists and turns the story has, the more we “stay tuned”. Scheherazade was onto something. In The Odyssey, recall that the faithful Penelope, like Scheherazade, was a weaver of a never-finished tapestry. Wait! Could that be a metaphor? We speak of a story-teller weaving a tale. Both these women would have made great television executives. At the very least, both women are artists. Turns out story-telling is an art.

So what makes a BAD story? I think a BAD story is a story that somehow disappoints. The payoff (denouement in lit parlance), is a let-down. You got the cat up the tree (so far so good), but how did you manage to get him down? Well, for starters, if you don’t get him down at all, the story is a bummer. If the cat dies in the tree, we feel cheated. Why did we bother with this story anyway? If the cat DOES die in the tree that must – again “somehow” – be the POINT of the story. Tall order. If you can pull that off, that is Or if the way you retrieve the cat strikes us as implausible or unlikely, we have the same reaction. (The cat cannot build a ladder). The cat stuck in the tree is a good situation. We are interested. Interested in the fate of the cat. Possibly in the feelings – Fear? Fury? – on the part of the cat’s owner or guardian. To say nothing of the feelings of the cat. But the cat-in-the-tree falls into the category of a This-Better-Be-Good-Story. We want the cat’s retrieval to come as an ingenious surprise, something we hadn’t expected but which – preferably – had been there all the time but lain unnoticed. When the cat’s rescue is satisfactorily resolved we are happy. Our interest in the animal’s fate has been justified. That was a good story. Possibly worth repeating.

You get the idea. So where do we go from here? I see that I’ve loosely thrown around the word ART throughout this essay. What IS art, anyway? Or, to put it another way (and there’s always another way), WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF ART?

Stay tuned everybody. Scheherazade’s just getting warmed up.