How The Great Story Does Its Work

by James Bonnet


The great story -- by which I mean the great myths, legends, fairy tales, classics, critical and box office successes -- does its work in several important ways:



Having lured us into the adventure by fantasies and a taste, the great story then provides us with a road map, which is to say, it outlines all of the actions and tasks of the hero's and anti-hero's journey which we have to accomplish in order to complete one of these passages. Plus, it provides a tool kit for solving all of the problems that have to be solved to accomplish the actions and tasks. The tool kit, of course, is the problem solving story structures of which Aristotle's classical structure is a significant part.

Every great story will divulge a little more of this truth, and bit by bit each step of the passage is revealed. Again, all of this is going on without the story recipients' conscious knowledge that it's happening.

How does it do that? By meaningful connections. If it's a great story, we will remember it, and, over time, we will make meaningful associations and connections with our real life situations.

The more hidden truth the story contains, the more appealing it will be; the more relevant it will be to our lives and the more likely we are to remember it. We'll cherish and work with it all of our lives, then we'll pass it on to our children.



Being a writer, I would often fall asleep at night worrying about certain difficult story problems I hadn't been able to solve during that work day. And just as often, a marvelous solution to those problems would pop into my head as I was waking up the following morning. Naturally, I wondered who or what was solving those problems. Suddenly, one day I made the connection. My God, I exclaimed. It's Rumpelstiltskin!




At the beginning of the story, we meet Michael J. Fox and his family. His mother is an alcoholic and his rather pathetic father a serious wimp and a miserable failure. They're living in a hovel of mediocrity and despair. When Michael J. Fox gets involved in his time machine adventure, he gets entangled in the lives of his parents when they are still in high school, on the very day that they met. And they met in a curious way. His clumsy, painfully shy father was hit by a car in front of his mother's house while lurking there, trying to catch a glimpse of her. The boy's mother took him into her house to nurse him back to health and fell in love with him out of pity. When Michael J. Fox arrives a moment before the father, he is hit by the car, and his mother falls in love with him instead.


Now, that in itself is profound because it says that a love inspired by heroic deeds is stronger than a love brought on by pity. But there's more. When Fox gets back to the present, everything about the lives of his family has miraculously changed. His mother is no longer an alcoholic, his father is a big success and a real dude, and they're living in a magnificent, creatively appointed house -- all because of that one change in the father's character.

The important bit of wisdom has to do with the incredible difference one courageous act can make on our lives. Standing up to that bully had an extraordinary and profound effect far into the future. We encounter numerous such challenges and opportunities to show our courage every day. The phone call we're afraid to make to ask for a date or a job -- little acts of courage that could be profoundly and irrevocably changing the rest of our lives. That's also very useful to know.

One final example. In a fairy tale called Aga Baba, a young hero on an important adventure stops to rest at a witch's house. The witch tries to delay him by asking him some intriguing but difficult questions, like, What is truth? -- Does the universe ever end? and so on. The wise young hero looks at her and says, Shut up and get me something to eat.

The wisdom in this story is simple enough: Beware of imponderables when action is necessary. Don't wile away your days worrying about infinity or other unanswerable questions when you should be out looking for a job.


And here again it's cumulative, each story contributing a little bit more of the hidden truth. When you've got hundreds such bits of wisdom working for you, all you have to do is get up in the morning and you'll know exactly what to do and how to do it.



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