A silly question: What’s a story?

Here’s something that we all probably know already: A story has to have a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Seems pretty straightforward.

My dog has fleas.

This, this is not a story. It just reports a fact. It just tells me something that is. And maybe I want to know that. Maybe I’m going to dog-sit for you, and I want to know if your dog has fleas.

But it isn’t a story.

So how about this:

My mother asked me to get some milk from the store.

I went to the store and bought some milk.

I brought the milk home.

It really does have a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Technically, it’s a story. It’s just that it’s not very interesting.

But at least we’ve got the first part down. It has to have those three bits to it. A beginning, a middle, and an end.

So how do we make it interesting, then?

Many people have said that a story’s one purpose, the one and only thing it has to do in order to be a good story, is to make the audience want to know what happens next.

That’s it.

And any story’s worst mistake is to make the audience not want to know what happens next.

(I saw a video once where Margaret Atwood talks about a play her kid made when they were little. It was a play about breakfast. It was just breakfast. And nothing else happened.)

A story might have a beginning, middle, and end.

Sorry. A story has to have a beginning, middle, and end.

But that doesn’t mean it will be a good one. Somewhere in that beginning, middle, and end, something has to happen. So, think of a story as having two key parts.

The first is that bit about it having a beginning, middle, and end.

The second thing is something called ‘drama’.

But that’s a topic for the next post.

Happy writing, young writer.