Story Time

‘Everything is story – story is everything’

Today’s lecture was on narrative, which was quite exciting for me. Story telling is what I originally came here to do, and something I’ve tried to do in some form for a while now. For my year 12 media SAT, I wrote 10 different scripts before I got to something that I was happy with, and even then I felt like I was missing the mark in so many ways. Like all things, it’s something that you get better at with practice and knowledge, so learning more about how a narrative is constructed is valuable information in both creating and analysing media.

The pervasiveness of stories in our culture is something worth commenting on. Stories are a way of structuring existence, commenting on it, giving meaning to it and retelling events, themes or ideas.  People will internalise stories from even the most basic elements in order to create narrative.

The most common form of structuring story is called causality, or cause and effect. This creates a logical progression of events. The three key elements of this are character development, plot and resolution.

Character is often cited as one of the most important elements of any narrative, as even without plot or resolution, a story can be told with an interesting character to develop. An important aspect of this is introducing a character to an audience and defining their personality in a natural or interesting way. To do this, characters are usually presented in a wide range of situations or everyday activities, and we as an audience must read their reactions. Writers and directors often struggle to immediately define these characteristics, and define their motivations. This is also dependant on the format of storytelling used, television for example providing much longer story arcs and enabling writers to present their characters in a much wider set of scenarios. For this reason, television is becoming a much more popular format for those wanting to tell intricate stories like this. The running time of films should not be considered a limitation on narrative though.

The plot can be defined as a chronological sequence of events within the narrative, presented in the same order to the audience, but not necessarily to the characters. A films story is the exact chronological events of the films world. This difference is important when a film manipulates time through flashbacks or flash forwards, as the plot reveals this information to the audience, but the characters may not have the same level of information. Plot points can also be told through three separate ideas to summarise what is occurring. These are actor, action and recipient. For example, ‘a man fights back against an attacking robot army’ includes the actor (the man), the action (fights) and the recipient (the robot army). This can be a simple way of structuring plot in a way to easily analyse the events that occur.

Resolution is a crucial aspect of the plot, but is also one which can come in many formats, and might even be absent from the narrative. As a plot point, the resolution will often not include the ‘recipient’ of the actions, as by this point they are often absent or irrelevant in the plot.

Genre is another important part of narrative, and involves the use of familiar narrative devices to an audience to effectively present a narrative. This can be a fine line though, as the use of too many tropes or clichés can break an audience’s belief in the world of the film. This can be used intentionally in some cases, in order to make an audience more aware that they are watching a film and to pay attention to what is being shown. Delivery of the genre is key here, as it changes the tone or theme of the plot device.

The final idea that we discussed in the lecture was the idea of non-narrative. It can be argued that film media does not always have to present a narrative, but people have a tendency to create stories when there may not be one. People internalise narratives based on their own thoughts and experiences that any number of directing choices may remind them of. Even the structuring of non-narrative films may tell a story, as it may be split into distinct sections, the title may create importance or the placement of imagery may create meaning. There’s also the meta-So in a world where narrative prevails in our everyday lives, is there a possibility of non-narrative?