What Are Stories?

Eighteenth in the New Commons series.

Several generations ago, my pal Jerry and I were cutting a hole between the ceiling studs of a rented house in Durham, North Carolina. This was our first step toward installing a drop-down stairway to an attic space that had been closed since the house, a defunct parsonage for a dead church, was built early that century. We were eager to open the space, and to see what, if anything, might be in the time capsule it contained. In the midst of this, while both of us were choking on plaster dust, Jerry asked this profound question:

What is the base unit of human consciousness?

Without thinking, I answered,

The story.

I said that because I was a journalist. And no journalist who ever worked for a newspaper has gone long without hearing some editor say, What’s the story?

Editors ask that because stories are the only things that interest people. Simple as that.

I was 22 years old and in my first reporting job when the managing editor at my paper made clear that all stories have just three requirements. Not parts. Not sections. Requirements. Here they are:

Character(s)Problem(s)Movement

That’s it.

This visual might help:

The character can be a person, a team, a cause, a political party, or any noun in which you can invest an emotion. Love and hate work best, but anything other than indifference will do. You can also have more than one of them, including yourself, since you are the main protagonist in every one of your life’s stories.

The problem can be anything that involves conflict or struggle. Problems keep you tuned in, turning the page, returning to see what happened, what will happen next, or what might happen. There can be any number of problems as well. You can soften these by calling them a challenge, but the point is the same. Stories don’t start with Happily Ever After.

Movement has to be forward. Thats it. You don’t need a conclusion unless the story ends.

Take away any of those requirements, and you don’t have a story. Or a life. Or anything interesting.

Look at everyone you care about, everything you want, every game you play, every project you work on, every test you take, every class you attend, every course you study, every language you learn. All are stories or parts of them, or pregnant with the promise of them. Because stories are what we care about.

Think of those requirements as three elements that make the molecule we call a story.

Now think of every news medium as a source of almost nothing but story molecules.

Is that all journalism should be?

I submit that stories are pretty much all journalism is.

I harp on this because journalism (the good and honest kind) works in the larger environment we call facts.

We can have better stories if we have more and better facts.

And, if we preserve both stories and facts, we’ll have better journalism.

My next post on this, tomorrow, will be about facts.

Can we make those more interesting as characters?

Only if we can make clear what their problems are, and how we—the story-tellers—can make the most interesting use of them.

Are you still wondering what Jerry and I found in that attic?

Alas, nothing. But it did make a useful space.

Decades later, it looks pretty good, and I see there’s a nice window in the front dormer:

The address is 1810 Lakewood Avenue. I also see the dead church behind it, at 1811 Palmer, is now a live community center:

I have more stories about both of them… How there was once a shoot-out in the back yard. How our cat (named Motorcat, because you could hear him purr in another room) was such an alpha predator that he took out countless large rats, and once ate a rabbit in the kitchen while we were gone, leaving just one little bone. How the least pesty mouse, called Old Half-tail, asked me with gestures to move him to the woods somewhere, so he’d be more safe. How we could still heat the place with anthracite coal in the original fireplaces that were built for it. The list goes on.

All of that is not much as history, but there are facts involved that might be interesting to the current owners, who (we can see) are working on expanding the place.

The world is full of such stuff. Let’s make better use of as much as we can find.

I’d like to start in Los Angeles, where the need for good facts is extremely high right now, and so many places where facts were kept—over twelve thousand homes, at last count—are gone.

We have the Internet now. We have AI. In these early decades of our new Digital Age, our collective tabula is still mostly rasa. Writing facts on it, and not just stories, should be Job One for journalism.