tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7493587.post568909600040788885..comments2019-06-07T01:01:50.532-07:00Comments on John Clarkson's Commonplace Book: The Engine of StoryUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7493587.post-91575275474674775542008-11-11T22:55:00.000-08:002008-11-11T22:55:00.000-08:00Great work.Great work.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7493587.post-66479403978650655252007-09-26T06:19:00.000-07:002007-09-26T06:19:00.000-07:00looks like you're scratching at the door of litera...looks like you're scratching at the door of literary theory. While seemingly fundamental, questions of definition get very complex: What is a story? What is drama? What is literature? Generations of academics and theoreticians have spent their lives chasing these questions and are constantly refining and reformulating various answers. That said, I'll do my best to keep to fundamentals:<BR/><BR/>Your discussion of "story" falls a bit short of the mark. You start with an event (good), but conclude with "story" defined as a sequence of events - which is a step short of the mark. A sequence of events forms a narrative, but not all narratives are stories.<BR/><BR/>In its most fundamental sense, a story is a narrative in which there is an objective (someone wants something) but there is an obstacle (sometimes many, all at once or in sequence) preventing him from easy success. The story follows the protagonist as he discovers these obstacles and devises a way to overcome them to achieve his objective. Those are the key features of story - objective and obstacle - and they can manifest themselves in various ways, but they are virtually always there. I'd go so far as to say that if they are not there, then it's just a narrative and not a story.<BR/><BR/>From there, it's possible to get pretty tangled up in minutia: I could go on for pages, but I think that addresses the fundamental question you're trying to answer - what is a story? In further examining the sequence of events in a story, your post may be straying toward a subtopic - "what is a plot" and how a plot should be structured - plot being the sequence of events, isolated from character, theme, and the other elements of fiction - but that's more of a follow-on discussion.<BR/><BR/>On your second topic, what is drama: I think you hit that squarely on the head in the first paragraph. "Drama" is the quality of emotionally engaging the audience in the story being told. But your follow-up to that begins to meander off course, in suggesting that drama can be intellectual in nature - "we are caused to wonder what the young man will do." <BR/><BR/>It's not so much that we wonder what he will do, but that we *care* about what he will do, and we want things to work out well for him (or in some cases, we want to see him fail), and we are engaged to read further to see our hopes fulfilled. Intellectual curiosity and suspense can be qualities of a dramatic experience, but emotional engagement is its defining characteristic.<BR/><BR/>One minor bug: I don't believe that Aristotle originated the conflict resolution theory. Aristotle's treatise on the subject is the Poetics - which is a bit simplistic by current standards (fiction has evolved and become far more complex over the years), but just about every theorist has either expanded upon or argued with the core theory Aristotle set out in that book. If you haven't read it, grab a copy. If you haven't read it lately, it's worth revisiting. I recycle it through my reading list every few years.<BR/><BR/>I'm not positive about the origin of the conflict resolution theory (I lent out the reference I'd check for a definitive answer, and can't seem to find the information online), but if memory serves me correctly, that theory was a component of Structuralism, which came about in the 19th century. A key figure on that topic is Georges Polti, famous for "The 36 Dramatic Situations" (also a good read, albeit dated and simplistic by current standards).Jim Shamlinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04432749467572436517noreply@blogger.com