Narratives and Stories

A Map of the Brain

Tuesday, 25. June 2002

mccomas, June 25, 2002 at 1:28:38 AM CEST

Jon Franklin, in Structuring Stories for Meaning (Nieman Reports, Spring 2002, p. 43) reminds me that meaning is...

...not something you bring to a story. It's something you find in the story and extract from the story.

Narrative is a chronicle: this, then that, then this other thing. There's no meaning there. A story grows from narrative when it is reworked to have a different shape so that it now carries meaning. A story answers these questions:

What does this mean?
What does that mean?
What does this other thing mean?

The shape of a story is this: in the beginning, there is a character; at the end of the beginning of your story, this character runs into a complication (Franklin emphatically states that this does NOT have to be conflict; complications are sufficient as they will make the character "exert an effort"); then the story develops according to the plot which involves your character's effort to deal with the complications that arose earlier.

In the development, Franklin suggests that three things happen:

the person digs in deeper
the person digs in deeper yet
the person has some kind of insight (this occurs at the end of the middle/beginning of the end -- often referred to as the "point of insight")

Not long after the point of insight is revealed, the story ends.

analysis of narrative: begins with stories told and moves toward common themes
narrative analysis: uses stories told to construct a larger story
protagonist/antagonist???

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