Story Components

I have been thinking about what makes up a story. By that I mean what is the most fundamental story one can create. There was once a challenge posed to Ernest Hemmingway to write a six word story. He replied “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” That story has lots of punctuation, is probably apocryphal, and is debatable whether it's a story or not. I say it is because it tells a bigger story and the reader gets to fill in the rest, but there are still many stories that it could be.

The most basic definition of a story is probably “Something happens to something.” It is easy to come up with a two word story based on that definition like “Angels fell” since you just need a noun and verb. From there the other components of a story can be added to build the narrative. Setting, characters, purpose all can be tagged onto the fundamental. Other stories can also be woven in to form scenes, acts, and resolutions.

A man of indeterminate age and the sea.

Outside of the basic academic components of a story the way the story is told is critical. The voice and words within the story is what makes a lot of the reasoning for winning a Nobel prize. Hemingway’s six word story is such a good example, the word choice of “never” brings so many questions about what happened, and the adjective “baby” is also a whole character. Needless to say, my two word story isn’t as great.

In the near term I will start including light dives into the academic components of what can make up a story and also go into the art of storytelling. Hopefully we will bring it all back to Hemmingway but we will see where it goes.