this is a new one

I get story ideas from dreams fairly often ("Straw" is a readily available example, if you're curious), but this is the first time I've had an insight into narrative craft.

The idea that a narrative is a series of questions is not a new one. It's another way to think of genre, if you're approaching it from the academic rather than the marketing angle: a genre can be defined as the list of questions a story chooses to answer. (Notice that it isn't the story's answers that necessarily define its ge