The Trifecta of Storytelling, or the Whole Pie

I came across this diagram and decided to put it back up here, because it's useful. I, at any rate, find it useful when I'm thinking about what I'm writing.   The star in the middle represents the holy grail in fiction: a book that is loved by critics and devoured by readers. There are a few such beasts out there. Lonesome Dove always comes to mind when I think about this, a masterpiece of storytelling with characters who are going to outlive all of us, with pitch perfect prose and dialogue. The critics adored it, the public did too. It rode the top of the best seller lists for a good while, and made a lot of money. Most novels fail in one or more of these three key areas. What's interesting to me is that the litcrit crowd is vocally dismissive of one piece of this pie, but it's the one piece you can't do without if you want a novel to really take off, because here's the universal truth: people need stories. Human beings think and perceive and understand in terms of narrative and story. The story is what makes the reader turn the page. Strong supporting evidence for this can be found on almost any day's best seller list. There are books out there which have made fortunes for their authors, which are (bluntly stated) badly written at every level. Off the top of my head, two titles: The DaVinci Code, and Fifty Shades of Grey (and yes, I've read them both). What these novels have going for them are their stories, and some of the wildcard elements (marketing in particular can do a lot for sales). They are both built […]