As an undergraduate studying creative writing, I remember a writing professor beginning a class by telling us, excitedly, some information she’d encountered about story—or about what makes a story—or about how to make a story. She’d recently heard it somewhere, or read it somewhere, and she likely shared the source, though, admittedly, I can’t recall it all these years later.
What she shared were three points—three “whats” of a story:
- Okay, what?
- Then what?
- So what?
There’s comfort in threes. There’s balance. On a recent episode of the podcast Living Myth, the mythologist Michael Meade reminds the listener that myth speaks in threes: the three fates, the three furies, three planes of existence, three distinctions of time, the third day on which the dead arise... There’s the good, the bad, and the ugly. The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. There’s always this, that, and the third; always the two ending points of a spectrum and what’s in between—the level on a fulcrum. There’s the drama of a three act play: the setup (exposition), the confrontation (climax), and the restoration (denouement). The triptych follows us into fiction, pre-exists our engagement with fiction, our modern day myth-making. (What are we as writers doing if not mythologizing our lives, our living?)
These three points are, or seems to be, presented in terms of the story’s reception:
- What happens?
- Then what happens?
- Why should I care?
The “I” of the third point belonging to the reader, or perhaps to the editor or publisher evaluating the work for potential distribution. A writer looking to package their story for a third party (that third-point-“I”) should consider noting:
- The starting condition,
- The wrench that disrupts it
- And why it matters
If we think about the triptych feature of plot, though—that is, of cause and effect—we might consider the following frame:
- From the ordinary
- the extraordinary comes
- to bring about a change.
The story is what happens; the plot is why it happens. The “why” of the plot doesn't explain itself (because if it explained itself, then the plot would become forced and self-evident and disingenuous, and the perceptive reader would reject it and shelve the book). The change of the third point signals the greater purpose, the “why it matters.” Change leaves the investigative work to the reader, which is the work of the reader. The reader contemplates the details of that change, and uses those details to draw out the work’s theme.
These points, so far, have been on the text’s macro-level—what if we zoomed in, too? We can use this three-point framework, both in terms of story and in terms of plot, at the scene level. After all, a macro shift is the result of micro shifts accumulated—you change your diet, for example, one choice at a time. You see the overall effects clear as day only after an extended time; first, you begin to feel better, begin to look brighter, day-by-day—then, one day a few months or even years later it appears as if you’ve changed suddenly, overnight.
In considering the scene’s story, we can think about what an involved character might go back to tell a friend about the event that’s taken place. They’d explain:
- What the initial conditions were when the scene began,
- what disrupted those conditions and broke the continuity, and
- what exactly about the experience compels the character to divulge it?
In considering the scene’s plot, the author-narrator should consider noting:
- What was the shift in continuity? (What was the proverbial wrench thrown in the plan of “business as usual”?)
- What caused the shift? (Who threw the wrench and more importantly: why?)
- What’s the effect? (How does the shift affect what happens moving forward? How does it shift forthcoming scenes?)