Why Does a Story Need to Be Told?
Studio Editorial | The Craft of Fiction
“ Before the chapters, the characters and the plot, a writer meets one quiet question: why this story? This essay explores why stories deserve to be told, and how writers discover the disturbance, the question and the hidden subject that make a story worth following. ”
Before a writer begins thinking about chapters, scenes, characters or plot, there is a more fundamental question: why this story? Every story begins somewhere. Sometimes it begins with a person, sometimes with an image, a place, a sentence, a memory or a question that refuses to go away. But beneath all these beginnings lies another question, one that is easy to overlook: Why does this story need to be told?
This does not mean that every story must teach a lesson or explain something important about the world. Fiction is not a classroom exercise. A story can be funny, strange, romantic, frightening, quiet or entirely absurd. It can simply give us the pleasure of entering another life.
Yet a story usually has something at its centre that makes the writer want to return to it.
A Story Begins with a Disturbance
Often, the beginning of a story is not an event but a disturbance. Something is wrong. Something has been lost. Someone wants something they cannot easily obtain. A character discovers a truth they were not prepared to know. Two people who once understood each other no longer do. A familiar place suddenly looks different.
This disturbance creates a reason for the story to exist. Consider a simple example. A man returns to the town where he grew up after twenty years away. On the surface, very little has happened. He visits the old street, sees the house where he lived and meets someone he once knew.
That alone is not necessarily a story. But suppose he discovers that the house has been empty for years, although he remembers his father living there after he left. Or suppose an old friend tells him something about the night he disappeared. Now the past has entered the present. The character cannot simply look around and leave.
The story has found its question.
Plot Follows the Question
Writers sometimes begin with plot by asking, “What happens next?” That can be useful, but it is rarely enough to sustain a novel. A stronger question is: What does this character now need to discover, decide or confront?
Once that question exists, events begin to acquire meaning. A character does not merely receive a letter. The letter changes what the character believes. Someone does not simply leave the house. Their departure changes a relationship. A secret is not revealed merely because the writer needs an exciting scene. It is revealed because knowing the truth will force someone to see the past differently.
Plot, in this sense, is not simply a chain of events. It is a chain of consequences.
Characters Give the Story Its Reason
The deeper reason for a story is often found inside its characters. A writer may begin by thinking about a murder mystery, a family conflict or a journey across a country. But readers usually stay because they care about the people experiencing those events.
What does the character fear? What do they want? What are they unwilling to admit? What would they lose if they failed? And perhaps most importantly: what might they have to become in order to get through the story?
A character who begins a novel believing that they can trust nobody may finish it by learning to trust another person. Another character may begin believing that success will solve everything, only to discover that the thing they wanted has cost them something they valued more. The external story gives us movement. The internal story gives that movement meaning.
The Writer Does Not Need All the Answers
Knowing why a story matters does not mean knowing everything before writing it. Some of the best discoveries happen during the writing itself. A minor character may suddenly become important. A scene may reveal something the writer had not planned. A character may refuse to behave as expected. A seemingly simple decision may lead the story somewhere unexpected.
This is one of the pleasures of writing. The writer begins with a question and writes towards an answer, but the answer may change along the way. What matters is not having complete control over the story. What matters is having something worth following.
Finding the Story Beneath the Story
There is often a difference between what a story is about and what it is really about. A novel may be about a woman trying to find her missing brother. Beneath that, it may be about guilt. A story may be about two people falling in love. Beneath that, it may be about loneliness. A political novel may be about a revolution. Beneath that, it may be about power and fear. A coming-of-age story may be about a young person leaving home. Beneath that, it may be about the painful discovery that childhood cannot be recovered.
These deeper subjects do not need to be announced. In fact, they are often more powerful when they remain beneath the surface. The reader should be allowed to discover them.
Before You Begin
Before starting a novel, it can be useful to put the plot aside for a moment and ask yourself a few simple questions:
You do not need beautiful answers. You do not even need complete answers.
Sometimes one honest sentence is enough.
The Story Worth Writing
Not every story needs to be large. A story does not become important because it contains wars, murders, journeys or dramatic revelations. Sometimes the most lasting stories are built around an ordinary life and a small change that makes the ordinary impossible to see in quite the same way again.
The important thing is that the writer has found something worth exploring. So before asking how long the novel should be, how many chapters it needs or what should happen in Chapter One, begin with the quieter question:
You may not know the answer yet. That is all right. Start writing. The story may tell you.
Studio Editorial | The Craft of Fiction
Craft, storytelling and the beginning of a novel
Editorial Note
References and further study
Cron, Lisa. Wired for Story: The Writer’s Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Sentence. Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 2012.
Gardner, John. The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984.
King, Stephen. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. New York: Scribner, 2000.
Le Guin, Ursula K. Steering the Craft: Exercises and Discussions on Story Writing for the Lone Navigator or the Mutinous Crew. Portland, OR: Eighth Mountain Press, 1998.
O’Connor, Flannery. Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose. Edited by Sally and Robert Fitzgerald. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969.
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