A Story Is Just Someone Wanting Something

Every night at bedtime, a kid asks for a story. Nobody ever asks for "a sequence of events."

There's a reason for that.

A pile of events is not a story. Your grocery list is a pile of events.

A story is just someone wanting something.

That's it. That's the whole machine.

A person... a want... and something getting in the way.

The three moving parts

Part One: Somebody wants something.

Not "is interested in." Wants. A girl wants the last bike in the shop. A plumber wants Friday off.

Part Two: Something blocks them.

The bike costs $200. She has $15 and a jar of buttons. Now we care. (Buttons are not legal tender. Cruel world.)

Part Three: Something changes.

She gets the bike, or she doesn't, and either way she is not the same girl who walked in.

Want, obstacle, change. Remove one and it's not a story anymore.

Vonnegut drew it on graph paper

Kurt Vonnegut studied anthropology at the University of Chicago after the war. His master's thesis said every story has a shape you can draw on graph paper.

The department rejected it. His guess, from his own telling: "it was so simple and looked like too much fun."

(Years later the school accepted his novel Cat's Cradle as the thesis and gave him the degree in 1971. Academia has a sense of humor. It is just very slow.)

His favorite shape was "man in hole." Somebody gets into trouble and gets out of it again.

That's the want and the obstacle, with the change as the climb out.

The Pixar version is a fill-in-the-blank

In 2011 a Pixar story artist named Emma Coats tweeted a list of story basics she'd picked up from senior colleagues. Number four became famous:

"Once upon a time there was ___.
Every day, ___.
One day ___.
Because of that, ___.
Until finally ___."

Notice what the blanks ask for. A person. A normal day. A problem. A change. Same machine, friendlier outfit.

It became known as "the pixar story spine", though Pixar never gave it official status. And the spine itself is older. An improv teacher named Kenn Adams built the exercise in New York around 1991. Go figure, storytelling isn't new.

Why this matters for your copy

But "we opened this shop because every razor in the store cost like a car payment." Now somebody wants something.

(Made-up razor shop. The want is real in every good origin story you've ever read.)

And if your own story has no want, borrow the customer's. They want the hole gone. You're the rope.

Find the want in your own story

Drill one: take your homepage and underline the want.
If you can't find one, write the sentence "Our customer wants ___." Build from there.

Drill two: name the obstacle out loud.
Price, fear, time, a boring old way of doing things. A story with no obstacle is a weather report.

Drill three: fill in the spine.
Once upon a time ___. Every day ___. One day ___. Because of that ___. Until finally ___. Five minutes, done badly, still works.

Drill four: test the machine on a friend.
Tell your story in three lines: want, obstacle, change. If they say "and then?", you buried a part.