IBM Research: Knowledge Socialization: Ideas: Feature-Structure

The Story Feature definition suggests that a story is a communication that comprises (A) goal-directed behavior to resolve a problem, (B) a series of causal changes, and (C) descriptions that explicate the following sequential elements:

information about the setting
initiating event
protagonist’s internal response
protagonist’s external response (i.e., attempt to attain a goal)
consequence of outcome of protagonist’s attempt
protagonist’s reaction to outcome

The Structural-Affect definition argues that audience must impute significance for a communication to be a story. Hence, for a communication to be a story, it must have:

a goal meaningful to the audience
a theme of significance to the audience
audience empathy for the protagonist(s)
suspense, curiosity, and/or surprise for its audience

These are the two major academic approaches to defining story. My personal inclination is the first definition, as the latter components are simply ways to make an existing story more interesting (what sometimes are called in Hollywood as "story-strength elements"). To my mind they are extremely important for constructing a compelling story, but irrelevant to the definition of story itself.

END OF EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Notes for those interested in reading more about these two "narrative camps."

Following are abridged excerpts from "Effects of Perceived Choice and Narrative Elements on Interest In and Liking of Story," doctoral dissertation of Peter Orton, Stanford University Department of Communication, 1995

How to define "story"? Stein and Policastro (1984) note over 20 different definitions of "story" found throughout the academic literature. The only consistent thread among them is that story is perceived as having a unique identifiable structure (Stein, 1982). However, despite this commonality, the definitions lack either a common description of a story’s essential features or criteria for deciding what those features are.

Among the many definitions of story, two major groups arise, each with its own particular focus: (A) the story-features definition, and (B) the structural-affect definition.

A. Story-features definition
The story features approach (Stein, 1982; Stein & Policastro, 1984) identifies story-structure characteristics that are used in judgment of story quality. Within the story features camp are splinter groups, each arguing for a different set of features to test a story’s descriptive adequacy:

State-event-state changes. Prince (1973) argues that what is necessary for a story is a state of change in the physical environment or in the emotional state of the protagonist. To this, Todorov (1971, 1977) adds that story is a causal transformation of a situation through 5 stages:
- a state of equilibrium at the outset
- a disruption of the equilibrium by some action
- a recognition of the disruption
- an attempt to repair the disruption, and
- a reinstatement of equilibrium
Such stages are produced according to the principles of cause and effect. E.M. Forster’s (1927) famous insight about mere narrative versus plot is an example of further distinctions. For Forster, narrative requires only events in time sequence; "plot," however, also requires cause. "The king died and then the queen died" is chronology and is thus narrative. "The king died and then the queen died of grief" is narrative with causality, and thus is also a plot. Mere story answers the question, "What happened?" whereas plot adds the answer to the question, "Why?" (Holman, 1980, cited in Stern, 1994).
Aristotle’s (1961, p. 65) view of story was that causality is crucial to its unity: "A whole is that which has a beginning, a middle, and an end. A beginning is that which does not itself follow anything by causal necessity, but after which something naturally is or comes to be..."
Goal-directed behavior to resolve a problem. Rummelhart (1975), Mandler and Johnson (1977), among others, posit that a narrative describing the instigation, course, and outcome of a character’s plan constitutes a story. Other theorists of this approach add that a story must also contain a specific protagonist capable of intentional behavior with motivation or goals, carrying out actions in service of the goals, and information relating the outcome (attainment or non-attainment) of the goal. Stein and Glenn (1979) define these elements, in temporal order, as:
- information about the setting
- initiating event
- protagonist’s internal response
- protagonist’s external response, i.e., attempt to attain a goal
- consequence or outcome of a protagonist’s attempt
- protagonist’s reaction to outcome
Mandler and Johnson (1977) argue that a story need not be completely goal directed, but that its ending must convey some moral or otherwise show consequences of the protagonist’s effort. To the list of story features above, Branigan (1992) adds a seventh feature, "complicating actions," between (4) and (5).
Detailed descriptions. Propp (1968) was an early exponent of a detailed definition of story as contained in folk tales, which he described in terms of seven basic "spheres of action," 31 functions, "moves" and "auxiliaries". Levi-Strauss, Bremond, and Greimas endeavored to extend and refine Propp’s insights. In brief, all posited a rich and descriptive exposition as an essential to a story.
Note how the "story-features" definition describes and defines story in terms of its unifying elements, but quite apart from audience. The "structural-affect" definition, however, embraces audiences response as an imperative in its definition.

B. Structural-affect definition.
This definition focuses on how stories are structured to elicit an affective response from its audience (Brewer & Lichtenstein, 1981, 1982; Jose, 1988; Jose & Brewer, 1984). In efforts to define the criteria by which data are recognized as stories, Leitch (1986) articulates the structuralist assumption that "no story exists outside or independent of a narrative discourse":

"The whole concept of story depends on a context which involves not only a particular discursive mode and selection of states of affairs but also the particular circumstances governing the storytelling transaction... Narratology must begin by recognizing the fundamentally transactional nature of stories and proceed by defining them in terms of transactional status."

Leitch extends the structural-affect notion of story by asserting that the audience members bring to a text knowledge of a narrative framework, by virtue of which they can supply connections among the material and perceive events as significantly related. "What makes a story tellable is something the audience imputes" and therefore the "narrativity of a work is, in a radical sense, the enabling narrativity of its audience." Indeed, the Russian formalist term, fabula, sometimes translated as story, is "the narrative events in causal chronological sequence as constructed by the spectator" (Bordwell, 1986).

So while the story-features approach to narrative may list "protagonist goal" as a necessary element of story, the structural-affect theory stipulates that it must be a goal which is also important to the audience (Jose, 1988), or else the audience is likely to be uninterested in the trivial desire to achieve that goal. "A narrative which features a desire to obtain sugar for a cup of coffee, for example, would constitute a boring scenario which would nonetheless still conform to the story grammar schema" (p. 359, Jose & Brewer, 1990) These proponents claim that if a story fails to stimulate an emotional response of suspense, curiosity, or surprise in the audience, the audience is unlikely to say that it is much of a story, if at all.

Hence, features of a story which heighten audience attention and interest contribute to the definition of story. Elements used by storytellers and writers to enhance their stories ("story-strength elements, " e.g., empathetic protagonist, meaningful goal, underlying theme, suspense, curiosity, surprise, etc.) are, in the structural-affect theorist’s view, the whole cloth from which "story" is woven.