The story is primitive, it reaches back to the origins of literature, before reading was discovered, and it appeals to what is primitive in us.
E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (1927, p. 40)
The emotions we experience, when under the power of story, don’t happen by accident. Humans have evolved to respond in certain ways to tales of heroism and villainy because doing so has been critical for our survival.
Will Storr, The Science of Storytelling (2020, p. 136)
The world now consumes films, novels, theatre, and television in such quantities and with such ravenous hunger that the story arts have become humanity’s prime source of inspiration, as it seeks to order chaos and gain insight into life. Our appetite for story is a reflection of the profound human need to grasp the patterns of living, not merely as an intellectual exercise, but within a very personal, emotional experience.
Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting (2010, p. 12)
A story is a series of acts that build to a last act climax which brings about absolute and irreversible change.
Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting (2010, p. 42)
A story, like a sentence, can end in only four ways: with a period, an exclamation point, a question mark, or an ellipsis.
Christopher Vogler, The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers (2020, p. 261)
The brunt of my argument in the opening chapters was that the ‘reality’ of most of us is constituted roughly into two spheres: that of nature and that of human affairs, the former more likely to be structured in the paradigmatic mode of logic and science, the latter in the mode of story and narrative.
Jerome Bruner, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (1986, p. 88)
Stories do social work. They not only help account for puzzling, unexpected, dramatic, problematic, or exemplary events, but also help confirm, redefine, or challenge social relations.
Charles Tilly, Why? (2006, p. 93)
Story is a form of play that allows us to feel we’ve lost control without actually placing us in danger. …Story is a thrill-ride of control.
Will Storr, The Science of Storytelling (2020, p. 206)
But stories, in Paul Ricoeur’s phrase, are ‘models for the redescription of the world.’ But the story is not by itself the model. It is, so to speak, an instantiation of models we carry in our own minds.
Jerome Bruner, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (1986, p. 7)
Stories exclude inconvenient complications.
Charles Tilly, Why? (2006, p. 65)
…at some level stories offer a model for overcoming faults…
John Yorke, Into the Woods: How Stories Work and Why We Tell Them (2013, p. 206)
When most people take reasons seriously, those reasons arrive in the form of stories.
Charles Tilly, Why? (2006, p. 95)
Stories are built from acts, acts are built from scenes and scenes are built from even small[er] units called beats. All these units are constructed in three parts: fractal versions of the three-act whole.
John Yorke, Into the Woods: How Stories Work and Why We Tell Them (2013, p. 78)
Remember, a play is not an imitation of life, but the essence of life.
Lajos Egri, The Art of Dramatic Writing: Its Basis in the Creative Interpretation of Human Motives (1942, p. 158)
There are two major kinds of story: the kind where you tell what happened, and the kind where you tell what didn’t. The first kind is history, journalism, biography, autobiography, and memoir. The second kind is fiction—the stories you make up. We Americans tend to be more comfortable with the first kind. We distrust people who make things up.
Ursula K. Le Guin, “Making Up Stories” (2013) in Words Are My Matter (2019, p. 107)
Like everyday stories, superior stories simplify their causes and effects. They maintain unity of time and place, deal with a limited number of actors and actions, as they concentrate on how those actions cause other actions. They omit or minimize errors, unanticipated consequences, indirect effects, incremental effects, simultaneous effects, feedback effects, and environmental effects. But within their limited frames they get the actors, actions, causes, and effects right. By the standards of a relevant and credible technical account, they simplify radically, but everything they say is true.
Charles Tilly, Why? (2006, pp. 172–173)
Good stories make you feel you’ve been through a satisfying, complete experience. You’ve cried or laughed or both. You finish the story feeling you’ve learned something about life or about yourself.
Christopher Vogler, The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers (2020, p. xv)
What we want, and the ups and downs of our struggle to get it, is the story of us all. It gives our existence the illusion of meaning and turns our gaze from the dread. There’s simply no way to understand the human world without stories.
Will Storr, The Science of Storytelling (2020, p. 1–2)