A Story is an Argument

The Development of Stories

This Fall I began teaching Story Development at the California Institute of the Arts in their much-vaunted Character Animation program (from which I am a proud alum).  Personally it has been a blast for me as I get the opportunity to talk about my life’s obsession to a relatively captive audience.  One of the things I’ve really been trying to communicate to them is this idea of the difference between a story and a tale.

Story Trumps the Tale

In sharp contrast to a tale, a story is an argument; a course of logical and emotional reasoning aimed at proving that a particular approach is either a good one, or a bad one. Because it is an argument it can be applied to all kinds of similar and not-so-similar situations.  Whereas a tale can quickly be disregarded and ultimately forgotten because of the proliferance of exceptions, a well argued-story must be accepted by an audience member as one possible truth.

An argument’s ultimate goal after all is tell some truth, of relaying some meaning to an audience.

This is where the power of stories lies.

Stories as Arguments

As way of example, I put together a string of movie clips proving this notion that truly wonderful films are a result of the filmmaker trying to argue a particular meaning.  Spoiler Alerts abound for the films Fight Club and The Sixth Sense - if you haven’t seen these films and still want to be surprised, don’t click play and please stop reading!

You cannot possibly come away from The Shawshank Redemption without the understanding that no matter what your situation, there is always hope.  It is what Stephen King and Frank Darabont were trying to communicate to you through the method of storytelling - there was intention behind their creation.

Likewise you can’t watch Fight Club and not believe that sometimes anarchy and self-destruction is the only answer.  David Fincher certainly has a point of view about the hopeless reality of life and more often than not executes it brilliantly.  Walt Disney’s Pinnochio is less subtle about the meaning behind it all—just do the right thing.

But it is in that climactic clip from The Sixth Sense that we can clearly see how meaningful stories work on all levels.

Malcom had been fooling himself (as many Main Characters do) into believing that what he saw and what he perceived as being reality was in fact, real.  It was only by working his way through the story and allowing the influence of Cole into his life that he finally understood what was really going on.  The truly great thing about this story was that this understanding was reflected not only in Malcom’s personal throughline but in the larger story as a whole.  Many of the characters in the film (Malcom included) perceived Cole’s outlandish actions as symptomatic of a heavily disturbed mental psychosis.  Cole must be a victim of some sort of child abuse or he’s acting out because his father is gone…he couldn’t possibly be seeing real ghosts.

As it turns out, they were dead wrong.

Both throughlines of perception were shown to be deception, deliberate or otherwise.

See, when people talk about the importance of story, of creating narrative that matters, what they are looking for is some way of bringing meaning into the piece.  It has to be in there from the beginning as the parts necessary to bring about that meaning need to be carefully designed.  The Sixth Sense was such a film.  And it made a wonderfully powerful argument that maybe we should look beyond what we see to what really is.

SOURCE:  This concept of a difference between a story and a tale comes from the Dramatica theory of story.  If you are interested in reading more about it, you can visit the original definition of this concept there.