I can still picture my grade-school teacher drawing the curve on the chalkboard as she explained that every story has a hero who is working toward a goal or a dream, an antagonist who gets in the way, and a conflict between two forces that builds to a climax and leads to a resolution, transforming the protagonist for better or worse.
Even if you slept through this particular class, the format should seem familiar. For all of us, the narrative arc is imprinted into our developing brains from the moment we hear our first bedtime story and watch our first cartoon on television, following a favorite character through some madcap or fearsome adventure while hoping for a happy outcome. We become conditioned to this simple story arc, which emerges whenever we, ourselves, tell a story. We might tell slightly different versions of the same story — whether we are speaking to our friends, our shrink, or the passenger sitting next to us on an overseas flight. But whether we are explaining how we overcame shyness to become a newscaster, or found love again after a horrible divorce, we typically cast ourselves as a protagonist who has overcome obstacles and grown through challenges.
These plot elements are like the architecture of a story. Just as architects need to know structural design, we need to understand the specific ways that each of these elements directs and supports our growth as an ever-evolving protagonist so that we can reconstruct a strong and powerful new narrative from the raw materials of our one precious life.
Chances are you’ve had a graduation, a wedding, or maybe even a kid or two since your last English class. If you need to get acquainted, or reacquainted, with the elements of storytelling, don’t worry; the next chapter will teach you all about them. The diagram below gives you some of the key elements you’ll be working with. For now, keep these general descriptions in mind:
EXPOSITION: Introduces characters, setting, and background information, usually at the beginning of a story.
PROTAGONIST: The main character of the story. In most storylines, the protagonist is trying to accomplish something, win something, find something, or defeat something.2
SETTING: The time and place where a story is situated.
PLOT: The sequence of events that make up a story. This includes the outer story, or what actually happened, and the inner story, or how the character experienced it.
ANTAGONIST: Usually the protagonist’s nemesis. The antagonist might be a person (boss, parent, ex-spouse) or an obstacle that must be overcome or reconciled with (prejudice, poverty, aging, addiction).
CONFLICT: The central problem in a story, usually between the protagonist and antagonist. Stories can have multiple conflicts (and multiple antagonists), but one typically plays itself out through rising action that leads to the story’s climax.
CLIMAX: The turning point of the story, when suspense over how the conflict will be resolved reaches its peak.
FALLING ACTION: The events that transpire following the climax as the story winds down, approaching resolution.
RESOLUTION: The conclusion of the conflict, when stock is taken and the story ends.
MORAL OR THEME: The underlying message of a story.
EPILOGUE: After the resolution of the conflict, a description of following events that often ties up loose ends.
Applying the Novel Perspective
When you superimpose this “novel perspective” onto the story of your life, you change the way you value and find meaning in experiences.
After all, the human mind is wired to search for patterns, to organize what it notices in its environment into a digestible coherent form. This is how we extract meaning from what could seem like random events. Our minds can be like messy desks, and we may struggle to process all the information we absorb — to know which fragments are worth holding on to and how to properly file them so that the categories make intuitive sense and help us flourish. While there are as many organizing systems as there are frameworks for understanding the world, few are as familiar or ingrained as the story structure. The story is “a natural package for many different kinds of information,” explains Dr. Daniel P. McAdams, a professor of psychology at Northwestern University and the director of the Foley Center for the Study of Lives. “When we comprehend our actions over time, we see what we do in terms of a story. We see obstacles confronted, and intentions realized and frustrated over time. As we move forward from yesterday to tomorrow, we move through tensions building to climaxes, climaxes giving way to denouements, and tensions building again as we continue to move and change. Human time is a storied affair.”3
We might even say that suffering can sometimes partly be due to a storytelling deficit, a failure to find a good filing system that organizes the details of one’s life into a meaningful cause-and-effect narrative, which results in an incoherent or distorted story.
For example, let’s say you’re unemployed, and you tell yourself the story that this is just another crappy situation that defines your very difficult life. You ask yourself, “Why does this always happen to me?” Then you finally land a job interview. What happens? This negative story may lead you to wonder, “What’s the point?” And this negative vibe may lead you to botch the job interview, which causes more suffering and only confirms your negative story.
However, what if you saw the antagonist (in this case, unemployment) of the current chapter in your life (a chapter you might entitle “A Thousand Resumes”) as the necessary force that is pushing you to resolve your main conflict: perhaps that you are in fact ambivalent about this career path or that you tend to get easily discouraged. In a way, this antagonist is like a personal trainer, and this conflict is the force challenging you to develop your confidence or to become clear about your career direction. Suddenly, as you exercise control over how you view your situation, the time between jobs becomes an invitation to work on yourself and build your muscles. Through this lens, you might say to yourself, “If I were reading this chapter in a book about the story of my life, I might appreciate that unemployment is nudging me — the protagonist — to get more organized and keep persevering in the face of adversity. I can choose to embrace that challenge, and forge ahead, or drain myself of valuable energy by sinking into discouragement.”
Cast in this light, the power of interpretation via the story lens on life offers a powerful elixir for heartbreaks, disappointments, and existential angst.
Jill’s Story: Defining Happily Ever After
Take Jill’s story. From the time Jill met Tom in her senior year of college, they were practically inseparable. The native New Englanders seemed like the perfect match — they were both politically active and shared many interests, including the outdoors, vegan cooking, science fiction, and a dream of living out west. Following graduation, they moved to San Francisco, where they landed decent entry-level jobs in their respective fields. Three years later, as their friends began getting engaged, Jill broached the subject of marriage and children with Tom. While Tom seemed receptive to marriage, he told Jill that he didn’t want to have children.
Jill, who always dreamed of being a mother, was devastated. She had sensed a certain apprehension from Tom whenever she mentioned children, but she had never pushed him, partly because she feared confirming her suspicions. They tried counseling, but Tom, who had been somewhat neglected as a child and had strong political views about global overpopulation, was adamant about his position.
Jill
