What Makes a Story a Story? Learn more to be a better writer.
Once we define "story," we can better draft, craft, and evaluate our personal narratives.
A few years ago, someone reached out about coaching and asked if I could help her write better stories.
“Of course!” I replied. “Stories are a specialty starting back in college and continuing throughout my writing career, especially during my years as an editor.”
Trust the Story
In my editing years, my managing editor stressed the power of story to contain the truth we want to convey.
“Trust the story,” she said. “And trust the reader to ‘get it.’”
With this principle driving my editing philosophy, I coached writers to lean into their stories and resist the urge to wrap up their personal narratives with a tidy conclusion.
If they write a story about personal transformation with skill, the reader should be able to see the transformation without the writer spelling it out.
“Even better,” I would say (quoting my managing editor), “the reader will never forget it.”
Why?
Because . . . story.
If we explain our transformation with exposition, the reader may nod her head in agreement.
If we show our transformation through story, she’ll be with us in the scene, seeing what we see, hearing what we hear, feeling what we feel.
That, she’ll remember.
With that as my coaching and editing background, I felt confident offering coaching input on this person’s writing.
Where’s the Story?
The plan was for me to review the client’s submission of about 1,000 words, then meet to discuss my notes and guidance on writing strong stories.
I downloaded the submission.
The piece was professional, but I didn’t see a story of any kind.
Maybe she’s wanting a case study, I thought. I’ll create an example to model storytelling techniques.
I drafted a story about a company she might work with, and annotated it.
Show the struggle. Show the win. Use story to show excellent outcomes. Be specific. Add detail.
“This is just placeholder text,” I said in a comment, “to show you one way you could approach storytelling in this case study. Obviously you’ll replace this with an actual client transformation.”
I clicked send on the email with the annotated document attached. We met a few days later.
Is This Story?
We greeted each other on Zoom and within minutes I realized this client didn’t want to learn the classic style of storytelling. But what did she want?
That evening I asked my husband, a project manager with a computer science background, what kind of “story” someone in a company setting might be trying to write.
To maintain the client’s confidentiality, I avoided any specifics and simply explained, “I tried to help a client write better stories, but I don’t know. It felt like we were using the same vocabulary but speaking a foreign language.”
He grinned. He knew exactly what the client meant by “story.”
User Stories
Even though this client only used the word “story,” she wanted help writing “customer stories” or “user stories.”
In Agile methodology, a “story” is a way to describe how a feature in a software design will solve a client’s problem or meet their requirements.
Atlassian describes the “user story” as:
the smallest unit of work in an agile framework. It’s an end goal, not a feature, expressed from the software user’s perspective…User stories are a few sentences in simple language that outline the desired outcome. They don't go into detail. Requirements are added later, once agreed upon by the team.1
Welp. I can help a person write a story, but I can’t help with that.
The client and I worked on other writing skills, instead, and I assume she found support for writing “user stories” from an Agile-trained professional.
What Is Traditional Story?
What is story in the traditional, literary, classic sense?
I’d studied, composed, and edited countless stories but never bothered to define it. To craft my own personal narratives and help coaching clients with theirs, I’d better get it straight.
Here are three definitions:
1. Robert McKee, who literally wrote the book Story, explains in a YouTube video, “What all stories say is how and why life changes in terms of whatever value is at stake in the character’s life.”2
2. In her book Story Genius, Lisa Cron says, “In a nutshell: A story is about how the things that happen affect someone in pursuit of a difficult goal, and how that person changes internally as a result.”3
3. Master storyteller Matthew Dicks trains people to notice the story worthy moments in their daily lives. In his book Storyworthy, Dicks writes:
Your story must reflect change over time. A story cannot simply be a series of remarkable events. You must start out as one version of yourself and end as something new. The change can be infinitesimal. It need not reflect an improvement in yourself or your character, but change must happen.4
Transformation.
That’s the key: The main character has to change.
Dicks argues that if you tell a story that doesn’t “reflect change over time,” you’re not telling a story—you’re telling an anecdote.
Anecdotes might illustrate a point or entertain someone at the dinner table, but they aren’t stories by definition. Instead, “[t]hey recount humorous, harrowing, and even heartfelt moments from our lives that burned brightly but left no lasting mark on our souls.”5
Was My Story a Story?
Given these definitions, we can begin to draft, craft, and evaluate our personal narratives.
I started to wonder if the first story I told here on Story Hatchery was, in fact, a story?
In Creating Worlds from Words: The Unremarkable Beginnings of a Writing Life, I told about my high school English teacher giving the freshman class an assignment to write a story. I wrote, illustrated, and bound together with yarn a book about ladybugs. I gazed at it with pride.
In the beginning of the story I didn’t think of myself as a writer. By the end, I was energized, electrified by creating a world from words. I wanted to write.
I think that stands up, if modestly, to the idea that “[y]ou must start out as one version of yourself and end as something new,” even though the change was “infinitesimal.”
Strengthening Our Stories
Looking back, however, I could have brought out conflict to strengthen the story.
I could have positioned it as a more difficult goal by pointing out that no one in my family viewed me as a writer. My parents were journalists. My older brother—a gifted writer already proving his creative abilities at that time as a college freshman—would become an award-winning advertising executive.
In their eyes, I was not a writer.
Yet I wanted it.
But the way I wrote it, I left out the external and internal obstacles I faced. I failed to indicate the stakes, like maybe the family would insult or discourage me even more; maybe students would make fun of how infantile the story read and how silly my fluffy hair ribbon looked.
I missed the opportunity to create tension and show a more profound before/after—a more significant change.
Find the Stories
Tracing our writing origins back to the first spark takes time. We let our minds travel back on ribbon-thin strips of memory to recall those events, those moments, those scenes that transformed us, the conflict that changed us.
I’ve written about these origins in my life before. Part one doesn’t even mention the ladybug book because when I wrote part one of my writing origin story back in 2013, I didn’t remember the assignment or the feeling. I started when I was humiliated in a college English class by the professor, who compared me with my brilliant brother.6
If I keep following those memory-ribbons back, will I recall more and more early scenes from childhood when I dreamed of writing—and more and more moments when I was discouraged?
I’ll bet they’re sitting in the far reaches of my noggin, waiting to be revisited.
If I’m serious about discovering my Story, I must discover my stories.
Take the Time You Need to Find Your Stories
It takes time to find stories.
It takes time to craft stories in the classic sense, with tension, desire, conflict, transformation.
Story Hatchery is about the process as much as the product.
I need to trace the ribbons back in time through journaling.
If I find more, I’ll revise to get closer to the truth—to the meaning.
For now, I’ll look for change, even if it’s infinitesimal.
When you look back, where do you see change?
Take your time remembering.
You’ll find your stories. Now that you know what to look for, you’ll see the change and find the meaning.
The best way to do it is through writing them down.
Rehkopf, Max. “User Stories | Examples and Template | Atlassian.” Atlassian, 2023, www.atlassian.com/agile/project-management/user-stories. Accessed 30 Apr. 2023.
McKee, Robert. “Q&A: How to Define Your Story in One Sentence.” YouTube, YouTube Video, 28 Jan. 2020, www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4RfpMHQHQE. Accessed 30 Apr. 2023.
Cron, Lisa. Story Genius: How to Use Brain Science to Go beyond Outlining and Write a Riveting Novel (before You Waste Three Years Writing 327 Pages That Go Nowhere). Ten Speed Press, 2016. (Kindle ebook, 16)
Dicks, Matthew, and Dan Kennedy. Storyworthy: Engage, Teach, Persuade, and Change Your Life through the Power of Storytelling. New World Library, 2018. (Kindle ebook, 26)
Ibid.
Kroeker, Ann. “Ep 144: My Writing Life Beginnings, Pt. 1 - Ann Kroeker, Writing Coach.” Ann Kroeker, Writing Coach, 20 Mar. 2018, annkroeker.com/2018/03/20/ep-144-my-writing-life-beginnings-pt-1/. Accessed 1 May 2023.
“Tracing our writing origins back to the first spark takes time. We let our minds travel back on ribbon-thin strips of memory to recall those events, those moments, those scenes that transformed us, the conflict that changed us.”
I love the emphasis on process and taking time in your piece. I sometimes feel like I write so slowly, but it takes time to process when you are writing about your own stories, especially the harder ones.
I loved this, Ann - in your post you have explored things I hadn't ever thought to recognise or think about. Thank you so very much! 😊