Three Flavours of Narrative

Narrative is shaped by one of three positions. Either:

1. Change is possible, but difficult. And comes at a cost.
2. Change is ultimately impossible.
3. Change is inevitable.

Those three possibilities are the guts of most stories, and you need to be clear about which model your story follows. In the end, each of them is about agency – how much agency does anyone have?

The choice you make here determines the core philosophical position of your story, which eventually dictates the best genre to tell your story.

For a deeper dive into this, see Truth, Reality and the Story World and Cinema: Truth or Reality?

Underneath this, almost all screen stories explore three further questions — questions introduced in Act One, complicated in Act Two, and answered in Act Three.

The first choice (is change possible?) determines the core philosophical position of the story.

The next three questions give the story its elements, its shape and substance, and the sense that it had to end where it did and how it did.

Satisfying stories feel retrospectively inevitable. Paradoxically, for most of the story, the ending must feel anything but inevitable.

How you apply these three questions can help you achieve that.

The Three Key Questions

Nearly all stories ask three intertwined questions:

1. The Narrative Question – What’s going to happen?
2. The Social/Psychological Question – Who or what needs to change for that to be possible?
3. The Philosophical Question – What does it mean for how we should live?

Each question has an answer the audience hopes for, an answer they fear, and a deep uncertainty about which one they’re going to get, and how they’re going to get there.

Here’s a well-known example.

The Shawshank Redemption:

1. Narrative Question: Will Andy escape?
2. Social/Psychological Question: Can Andy maintain his humanity, and find human connection, in a brutal institution designed to dehumanise?
3. Philosophical Question: When things are dire, and seem impossible, is hope what saves you, or what kills you?

Let’s explore these in more depth. In this analysis, I’ve deliberately left it to you to identify the films. Some will be obvious. Some, perhaps, less so.

For a more direct and explicit step-by-step application of this process in more films, see Six Illustrations of the Social and Philosophical Story Questions.

The Narrative Question (Surface Layer)

What’s going to happen? The concrete, external outcome the audience is waiting to see resolved.

In three stages: right now, soon, and in the end.

• Will Luke drop the bomb into the heart of the Dark Star and get out alive?
• Will the Empire win, or the Federation?
• Will Harry and Sally ever get together?
• Will the family unit survive the father abandoning them during the avalanche?
• Will Pádraic ever win back the friendship of Colm?

This question is the engine of forward momentum — the source of immediate dramatic interest.

The Social / Psychological Question (Character Layer)

Who in society or what in society needs to change before the narrative outcome is possible? Is that change actually possible?

• Can Harry ever overcome his self-protective blindness that it is impossible for men and women to be both friends and lovers?
• Can a small group of dedicated believers overturn a morally rotting institution that underpins the power and wealth of society’s leaders?

This question sits under the narrative one: it explores the emotional or social obstacles standing between the characters and the outcome we hope for.

The Philosophical Question (Meaning Layer)

What does this all mean for how we should live our lives?

• Should we treat people as they are, or as they could be (for good or bad)?
• Does the end justify the means, or is that simply adding to the problem?
• Can we determine our identity, or is it forced on us?
• Can good survive in a world without hope?
• Can forgiveness be earned, or it only ever a gift?
• Is changing your mind betrayal, or growth?

This layer is the deepest layer.

Together, these questions give the second act substance and shape, and allow us to feel that the ending is genuinely satisfying, because the story has addressed all three.

And for each of these questions, the audience needs:

• An answer they hope for strongly,
• An answer they fear deeply,
• And uncertainty about which one they’re going to get.

Without the opposing possibilities, and the uncertainty about which they’re going to get, there is no dramatic tension.

What this means, especially for the modern writer, is that you probably have to put more effort into building up the answer you’re not going to give, than the answer you will give.

The Challenge for Modern Writers

It’s become increasingly difficult for a writer to deliver genuine uncertainty of outcome because the audience has become increasingly sophisticated about the writer’s tools.

Modern audiences carry a mental database of tropes and story structures. They’re evaluating your story in real time, anticipating your next move. Creating genuine uncertainty is harder than ever. And more valuable than ever.

Once upon a time in Hollywood, you could rely on the audience’s narrative naïveté to keep them worried for a whole week about whether Pauline would be freed from the railway tracks.

Not anymore.

Today’s audience assumes that, of course, the hero will arrive to untie Pauline seconds before the train arrives. What would genuinely shock them is him failing to do so.

Your job, as a contemporary writer, should you choose to accept it, is to create powerful and plausible reasons for the hero failing to rescue Pauline, and across all three layers:

• The Narrative Question: his horse goes lame, and he has to run three miles in riding boots to beat the Yucatan Express to Pauline.
• The Social/Psychological Question: Pauline is his ex-wife, who left him for another man. He must overcome his anger and sorrow.
• The Philosophical Question: Tying Pauline to the tracks was just a diversion so that the villain can slaughter a whole family to get access to the silver mine on their land — our hero must choose whom he saves (the trolley problem).

What makes an end satisfying?

For each of the three questions, an ending is only satisfying if it delivers on three fronts:

• it’s what we want,
• we can believe that it’s possible,
• but for most of the story, it seems very unlikely.

If it feels impossible, we won’t invest — we don’t want to be disappointed.

If it feels inevitable, we also won’t invest — why care?

So a satisfying ending requires that you:

1. Get the audience to want a particular outcome,
2. Convince them it could realistically happen,
3. Then persuade them it probably won’t.

In other words: to varying degrees, you have to mislead them.

Two Ways to Achieve this

There are two legitimate paths:

1. Deliver the expected, hoped-for ending, but build a strong and credible possibility that the feared ending might occur instead.
   
2. Deliver an unexpected ending, one that is more satisfying than the expected ending would have been.

However, if you choose the second path, the ending must feel retrospectively possible. The pieces must have been there all along; we simply didn’t see what they implied.

This principle applies to each of the three key questions. How?

Applying the Principle

The Philosophical Question.

If your story ultimately argues that a small group of dedicated people can take on powerful forces in society and effect moral change, then most of the second act should leave the audience feeling that the struggle is futile, that the powerful forces and the moral horror they rely on are invincible.

Note: most of the time. You have to keep hope alive. But only just.

You want to put the audience on the brink of despair, hanging on by a slender thread of hope.

The Social/Psychological Question.

If your story is about a character learning to trust other people, then all through the second act we need to see them get the opportunity to put trust in people, but have it backfire. You might get them to:

• Reluctantly try, but fearfully back out at the last minute,
• Try again with the same person with greater commitment, but be rejected because of what happened last time,
• Try again with someone else, and be betrayed because they trusted the wrong person,
• Be given another opportunity (probably with person one), but reject it, even though we can see the other person is trustworthy and genuine.

Create an escalating chain of choices and outcomes that up the stakes, and make the audience feel that you have genuinely covered all the options.

The Narrative Question

As anyone who loves romcoms knows, the essence of the genre is our desire for the couple to get together, constantly thwarted by obstacles that make that outcome feel impossible.

You need both:

• the desire, and
• the obstacles,

to earn that final “Aahh!”

Key Takeaway

• Great stories are built on layers of uncertainty. Not just about what will happen, but how it will happen, and what it means.
• Audiences are increasingly story-smart. To keep them engaged, you need to create narrative and thematic misdirection just as smartly.
• Satisfying stories are uncertain in the moment, and inevitable in retrospect. You achieve this by creating powerful, credible opposites.