Why do we retell some stories, while others are lost like tumbleweeds in time? What is it about great stories that compels us to tell them over and over again?
Pondering these questions, I turned to fiction writers as I believe they have the most intimate knowledge of what makes stories work — what makes them twist and turn the delicate machinery of our minds into new and unfamiliar shapes. At its core, my question is, “What makes a good story?” Now, equipped with a little more knowledge and a lot more curiosity, I have identified five key elements that make up a great story.
I first investigated Donna Tartt, author of “The Goldfinch,” “The Secret History” and “The Little Friend,” among other works. In an interview from 2014, Tartt described the weight of compelling characters, those who stay with us long after we have finished a book, and who feel true to life in their very human struggles within themselves and their communities.
“I’m always interested in the gap between appearance and reality — the difference between how characters present themselves, or try to present themselves, and the reality that lies beneath the carefully constructed social surfaces,” Tartt said. “Most people have a public self that they are anxious to display, and a secret self that they’re just as anxious to hide. The tension between the two selves is always interesting. So too is the never-ending tension between what people want and what they’re capable of attaining.”
The eternal tension between a person and themselves, I believe, is what makes characters truly compelling. I want to read more about the person who struggles with themselves, who resolves and unresolves the same issues, who is split by divided desires, who has competing allegiances, who wants two things at once. Where would we be without this beautiful exasperation?
I then consulted Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, whose works include “Americanah,” “Half of a Yellow Sun,” “Purple Hibiscus” and “We Should All Be Feminists.” In an interview with UNESCO, she described the value of complete immersion in another world.
“[Fiction] has a unique power to take us into the lives and motivations of other people. It can help us understand those who are different from us. In a world where violence and conflict are becoming the norm, fiction has a role to play in bringing people together,” Adichie said.
This power of immersion is key to a compelling story, one that has real power beyond the confines of it’s cover. Good stories have the capacity to transport the reader into a vast array of circumstances, experiences and states of mind, cultivating a more perceptive and worldly reader who can better understand and empathize with a wider group of people. Any work that impresses understanding and empathy upon the heart of its reader is surely a work of great value.
Tennessee Williams, author of works including “A Streetcar Named Desire,” “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” and “The Glass Menagerie,” was my next case study; he teaches us the lesson that we must embrace the personal.
With respect to his characters in “The Glass Menagerie,” he once said in an interview, “You must know or read that play came straight from my heart. The characters were shaped from my family. Amanda was my mother. And Laura — my beloved sister Rose. And Tom … well, Tom was me.”
Taking moments, characters, feelings from real life is often the most effective way of building a story that feels moving, that somehow touches the mind of the reader in a way that keeps them engaged and embraces the beautiful, idiosyncratic interconnectedness of the world. The characters that stick with us most are those that are unresolved, distinctive and irregular in that distinctively human way.
Next up: Vladimir Nabokov, author of “Lolita,” “Pale Fire” and “Laughter in the Dark,” among other novels, exalts the fictitiousness of fiction.
“Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth. Every great writer is a great deceiver, but so is that arch-cheat Nature. Nature always deceives. From the simple deception of propagation to the prodigiously sophisticated illusion of protective colors in butterflies or birds, there is in Nature a marvelous system of spells and wiles. The writer of fiction only follows Nature’s lead,” Nabokov writes in “Good Readers and Good Writers.”
There is something in Nature’s illusion that compels us to return again and again to fiction. As storytellers, we retell the same tales, each time discovering the story anew, experiencing and conveying once again the emotions and thoughts that accompanied our first reading, imagining ourselves as both the creator and the recipient.
As readers, too, we know that we are reading fiction, that the personas and voices and characters are constructed, and yet this falseness thrills us because we know that there is a puppeteer, an artist who has crafted the whole work down to the finest details. It is perhaps a manifestation of our desire to believe in the utter intentionality of our world. The best stories compel us to examine the originator, the form and the very constructedness of the work.
Last, I turned to Chinua Achebe, whose novels include “Things Fall Apart,” “No Longer at Ease” and “Arrow of God.” His take on fiction prioritizes multiplicity and abundance.
“If one didn’t realize the world was complex, vast and diverse, one would write as if the world were one little county and this would make us poor and we would have impoverished the novel. The reality of today … is and can be important if we have the energy and the inclination to challenge it, to go out and look for it. The real danger is the tendency to retreat into the obvious, the tendency to be frightened by the richness of the world and to clutch what we always have understood,” Achebe said in an interview with Conjunctions.
The eternal vastness of existence must be translated into fiction if we are to write stories that endure, that move us, that are fascinating and touching enough to be retold for centuries. By isolating elements, we necessarily cut ourselves off from the infinite possibilities and recombinations; the interconnectedness of the world renders it a thing that cannot be pried apart, and any work that tries to do so inevitably falls flat, like a cardboard cutout of life.
As Achebe warns against a fear of the world’s richness, uncertainty also makes for a great story. Grappling with things that are vast and unknown, I think, is what makes authors compelling to read.
Readers, too, grapple with these things, because writers are necessarily readers. This struggle with the confusing, grave and often inestimable nature of our world is so deeply human; seeing our own wrestling expressed in the words of another, in the voice and persona of another being, is like seeing a mirror in nature. It’s like walking through a forest and suddenly spotting a perfect reflection of yourself looking directly back at you.
Ava Chambers PO ’28 believes that these five essential elements should be taken with a grain of salt because literature is complex and multifaceted!