On Beginning a Story

For the past few months, we’ve been tinkering with what I call the three-body problem of beginning a story.

The idea is that a three-body problem in classical mechanics is difficult to solve.  The more you read about these problems the more reasons for their difficulty become apparent, but the metaphor suggested itself to me because in the three-body problem of, say, calculating the orbits of three stars of roughly equal mass around each other, the co-interactions of the three bodies and their accompanying forces make pinning down precise and predictable velocities nearly impossible.  The movements of each of the three parts of the system effect the other two constantly, and the way that they are effected effects in turn the way they move, and so forth.  Chaos seems to reign.

The three parts to starting any story, I say, are trouble, setting, and character.  A story exists only when there is a identifiable character in some comprehensible place and time who encounters a difficulty of some kind and has to resolve it.

Unlike the example of three orbiting stars above, I think the three components of the start of a story are unequal in mass, that is they each play a different role in importance to the story itself.  

Character I think is the most important of the three, at least in almost any good story I can think of.  Trouble is the second most important, and the setting third.

This might seem counter intuitive at first, since almost never is this the order of appearance of information, or the order in which these three are ranked in terms of making it easy for us to picture what’s going on.

Setting is usually the first thing we need to know in order to get a clear picture of what’s going on, and until we have it at least partially settled, I think the reader’s mind is generally yearning for the missing information.  We can’t really fully visualize the action of a story until we have at least a partial sketch of the background,  and until then our minds aren’t really able to fully engage with what’s going on.  

So usually an oral storyteller, for instance, addressing a group of kids let’s say, will use setting as the opening exposition of a story, the first few sentences given while bottoms are settled on the carpet and the necessary coughs and clearing of throats, all preliminary to the paying of full attention beginning.

Setting plays such an important role in our believing in a story, and remembering it afterward, that there are almost a countless number of works that have exist by virtue of taking an existing, possibly well-known set of characters and their conflicts, and re-making them in a new setting as a new work.  

And setting goes so far towards influencing what we think of a story that this generally works; in our minds the works stand as separate, although really only setting and the odd particulars of delivery separates them.  The Magnificent Seven springs to mind as well-known example of this; a re-telling of Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai that has been transplanted from feudal Japan to the old American west.  Other examples include Clueless and Jane Austen’s Emma, Apocalypse Now and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and (to a limited extent) The Lion King and Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

Adaptations all, to be sure, but what is adapting a work if not changing the language and setting to fit the times?  A great deal of creativity and originality goes into the kind of work needed to make this translation work, and have the end product be as engaging and satisfying as the source material, but that doesn’t make setting-changing any less the main thing that’s being done.  And if the setting can change completely and not effect the story significantly at all, how important is it to the essence of what’s there?  And don’t get me started on remakes.  How many of these are set in the time the original story was told?

In the past I’ve described many (if not most) works of science fiction and fantasy as not essentially belonging to their respective genre, since the stories they have to tell is usually a story which could be easily translated into our present time or others.  The only thing about their wars, wanderers, bank heists, or break-ups is that they happen to be in space or in the future.  There’s very often nothing in the characters or the plot that sets the world of the story truly apart from our own.  

I feel like true science fiction has to have at least something to do with the strange, with something that we’re not able to easily deal with or explain away.  No matter what setting it’s in, the characters would be trying to frankly and believably integrate some strange new (or new to us) aspect of their lives brought on by a twist in technology, nature, society, or themselves.

Good stories can be made without an essential setting, make no mistake.  I’ve enjoyed many of the kind of stories described above, nominally set in space but capable of being acted out anywhere.  I’m just saying that what makes such stories good is generally either a plot or characters, or both, that could play equally well in any other setting you like.

For this reason, setting is to me is the least essential of the three elements in getting a narrative started.  If most stories can be translated from one setting to another and still retain whatever it is about them that makes them what they are, what we could call (if we wanted to be highfalutin) their essential characteristics, then setting must be the least essential part of what makes them themselves, so to speak.

But what about character, then?  Isn’t this contradictory?  If we take the case of adapting one story into another seriously, aren’t the characters being changed just as much as the setting?  And if they can be changed, how can they be as important to the story as the plot, and more important than the setting as you say above?

I think probably not, though the counter-point’s implications are interesting.  I’d like to go into the issue of adaptation and what parts of character survive the change, and whether this makes them essential to the story or not, but that will have to wait for another post, as for now we’re out of time.