The King Died, and Then the Queen Died

Fieldnote 01: My personal storytelling curriculum.

Okay, I have something else to talk about.

I’ve been building myself a deep, self-directed course on the history and structure of storytelling, working through it module by module. This Fieldnote is the first of these long-form supplements: one essay per question, written to stand on their own. This is the first, from the orientation module, and it starts with the most basic question there is:

What actually makes something a story?

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Here are four short texts. Read them in order.

The first: Milk, eggs, bread, a single black candle. The second: The sky over the harbour was the colour of old pewter, and the gulls would not settle. The third: Because the bridge was condemned, and because no inspector had signed the order, the council was liable. The fourth: I had not known the dead could be so loud.

Only one of those is a story, and it is probably not the one you expected. The shopping list is not a story, though the black candle makes you lean toward it. The harbour sentence is description, beautiful and inert. The bridge sentence is an argument, all logic and no time. The fourth, the line about the loud dead, feels like the opening of something, but on its own it is a single held note, a moment of consciousness, closer to a lyric than to a tale.

So where is the story? It is hiding in the difference between two sentences you have heard a thousand times, and once you can see why one is a story and the other is not, you have the foundation of everything that follows in this curriculum.

The smallest possible story

E. M. Forster, lecturing at Cambridge in 1927, gave us the cleanest demonstration in the whole literature. The king died, and then the queen died. That, he said, is a story. The king died, and then the queen died of grief. That is a plot.

Sit with how little separates them. Two words, of grief, and a sequence of two facts becomes a chain of cause and effect. In the first version, two things happen, one after another, and we are left to wonder whether they have anything to do with each other. In the second, the second death is because of the first. The queen does not merely outlive her husband by a sentence; she is killed by his absence. The events have been welded together by causality, and the weld is what we feel as plot.

Forster was drawing a line inside narrative, between bare chronology and motivated chronology. Narratologists since have argued about exactly where he put it, and many would say that even the king died, and then the queen died already qualifies as a minimal narrative, because it has the two things a narrative cannot do without. It has events, and it has time. But Forster’s instinct was sound, and it points us at the deeper truth. A story is not a collection of facts. A story is a transformation.

This is the irreducible core, and it is worth stating plainly because the rest of the field rests on it. A narrative is the representation of at least one event, and an event is a change of state. Something was one way; now it is another way; and the text shows us the passage between. The room was warm, and then the room was cold. The man trusted his brother, and then he did not. The town stood, and then the water took it. You can strip a story of character, of setting, of style, of theme, and if a change of state across time survives the stripping, a story survives. Remove the change, and whatever is left, however gorgeous, is no longer a story.

Why description is not a story

Look again at the harbour. The sky over the harbour was the colour of old pewter, and the gulls would not settle. Nothing changes. The sky is pewter at the start of the sentence and pewter at the end. The gulls are unsettled throughout. We are given a state of affairs, rendered with care, and held still for our inspection. That is description, and description is the art of the frozen moment.

Description is not the enemy of narrative; it is one of narrative’s most important materials. Novels are full of it, and a scene without it can feel like a stage with no set. But description on its own is a photograph, not a film. It presents; it does not transform. The moment you let the pewter sky darken, the moment the gulls finally settle or scatter, you have smuggled in a change of state, and the photograph starts to move. That tiny verb of change is the seam where description becomes narrative, and learning to feel that seam is one of the first real skills of a writer. When a scene of yours goes dead on the page, the diagnosis is very often the same. Nothing in it changed. You wrote a beautiful photograph and called it a chapter.

H. Porter Abbott, whose Cambridge Introduction to Narrative is the scaffold of this module, makes the point with admirable economy. Narrative is the representation of events, and a single static condition is not an event. A list of conditions, however vivid, is still not an event. You need the verb that moves.

Why an argument is not a story

The bridge sentence is built from a different kind of connective tissue. Because the bridge was condemned, and because no inspector had signed the order, the council was liable. This moves, but it does not move through time. It moves through logic. Its joints are because and therefore, not and then. An argument arranges propositions so that one compels another. A narrative arranges events so that one follows, and ideally causes, another.

The confusion is understandable, because both forms use causality. But the causality of argument is logical, atemporal, reversible in principle. The liability follows from the facts no matter when you state them. The causality of narrative is bound to the arrow of time. The queen has to die after the king, and because of him, and you cannot reverse the order without breaking the sense. Reverse the order of an argument’s premises and the conclusion still holds. Reverse the order of a story’s events and you have a different story, or no story at all.

This matters for writers because the two forms are constantly trying to wear each other’s clothes. An essay can narrativise itself, walking you through an idea as though it were an adventure, and it feels more alive for it. A novel can argue, marshalling its events to prove a proposition about the world, and it risks feeling like a lecture in costume. The skill is to know which engine you are actually running. When a story stalls into a series of therefores, it has quietly become an argument, and readers feel the temperature drop even if they cannot name the cause.

Why a list is not a story

The shopping list is the purest counter-example of all, which is why I led with it. Milk, eggs, bread, a single black candle. It is sequence without transformation. Items sit beside one another, and their order carries almost no weight. You could reshuffle them and lose nothing. There is no change of state, no agent passing through time, no before that becomes an after.

And yet you felt something at a single black candle, did you not? You began, against your will, to build a story around it. Who buys milk and eggs and bread, the ordinary freight of an ordinary week, and then one black candle? What is the candle for? That involuntary leaning-forward is one of the most important phenomena in all of narrative, and we will return to it again and again. The list itself is not a story. But a list can imply one, and the reader will rush to supply what the text withholds. The narrative was never on the page. It was assembled in your head out of a gap the writer left open.

Hold that thought, because it is the seed of an idea, reader-supplied meaning, that an entire later module is built on. For now, the point is narrower. Parataxis, the placing of things side by side without subordination, is the grammar of the list. Hypotaxis, the binding of things into relations of cause and consequence, is the grammar of the story. The black candle works precisely because we cannot tolerate pure parataxis. We are compelled to subordinate, to ask why this, after that, and in asking we make a story the list did not contain.

The lyric, the hardest case

Which brings us to the loud dead. I had not known the dead could be so loud. This is the most interesting of the four, because it sits right on the border, and border cases are where understanding lives.

A lyric, in the old sense, is the utterance of a single consciousness in a single charged moment. It foregrounds a state of feeling rather than a transformation of situation. It can hover, circle, repeat, and resist time altogether. The line about the dead is doing something a story does not quite do. It is not chiefly telling us that one situation became another. It is opening a window onto a mind in the grip of a realisation, and the realisation is the whole event.

But notice how unstable that boundary is. There is a buried micro-narrative even here. I had not known implies a before, a state of ignorance, and could be so loud implies an after, a state of terrible new knowledge. A change of state has occurred inside a single consciousness. This is why lyric and narrative are not opposites but neighbours, and why so much of the most haunting writing lives exactly on their shared fence. A lyric can carry the seed of a story; a story can pause to become, for a sentence, almost a lyric. The difference is one of emphasis and proportion. Does the text mainly transform a situation, or mainly hold a state of mind up to the light? Lean one way and you have narrative. Lean the other and you have lyric. Most powerful writing knows exactly how much it is leaning, and why.

Narrativity comes in degrees

By now you may have noticed that the clean line I promised has turned into a gradient, and that is the second great idea of this week. Narrative is not a box that a text is either inside or outside. It is a quality that a text possesses in greater or lesser measure. The theorists call this quality narrativity, and Gerald Prince, whose Dictionary of Narratology is the field’s reference shelf, treats it as a property a text can have more or less of. Marie-Laure Ryan goes further and describes narrative as a fuzzy set, something we recognise by family resemblance rather than by a single defining trait.

This is liberating once you accept it. A police incident report is a narrative, low on the scale, all events and time with the causality and consequence drained out for the sake of the court. A great novel is a narrative high on the scale, its events welded by motive, its transformations reaching into character and meaning. The same events can be told with high or low narrativity depending on how tightly the teller binds them and how much consequence the teller draws out. The king died, and then the queen died is low. Add of grief and the narrativity rises, because now the second event is the consequence of the first. Write the novel that earns that of grief across four hundred pages and the narrativity is higher still.

So the question is not only is this a story but how much of a story is it, and could it be more of one. That is a craft question, and it has a craft answer. You raise narrativity by strengthening the chain of consequence, by ensuring each state genuinely gives rise to the next, by making the transformation matter to someone. You lower it, deliberately, when you want the flatness of a chronicle or the cool of a report.

The oldest and most universal thing we do

Step back far enough and the reason all of this matters comes into view. Roland Barthes opened his great 1966 essay on narrative by observing that narrative is simply everywhere. It is in myth and legend and fable, in painting and stained glass and cinema and conversation, in every nation and every period of human history, told by people of every condition. There has never been a society without its stories. Narrative, he suggested, is international, transhistorical, and transcultural, present like life itself.

If something is that universal, its core cannot be anything decorative. It cannot be plot mechanics or three acts or any of the conventions we will spend later modules dismantling. It has to be something built into how the human mind works. And it is. The representation of change through time, organised by something like cause, is how a mind models the most important fact about the world, that things become other things, that actions have consequences, that the warm room can go cold and the trusted brother can turn. A story is a simulation of transformation, and we are the animal that cannot stop running them. We will spend Week 4 on why.

A working definition, to be tested and broken

Let me give you the definition this whole module hands you, not as a law to memorise but as a tool to use and, eventually, to improve.

That is enough to separate the four texts we began with. The harbour is description, a held state. The bridge is argument, logic out of time. The shopping list is parataxis, sequence without transformation, though it tempts us to build a story in the gaps. The loud dead is a lyric leaning hard toward narrative, a change of state inside a single mind. None of the four is wrong. They are simply different tools, and the writer who knows which is which can fold all of them into a story without mistaking any of them for one.

Your task this week is to take that definition out and try to break it. Find the recipe that reads like a tragedy, the list that breaks your heart, the lyric that turns out to be a whole life in nine lines, the news headline that is somehow more story than the article beneath it. Where the definition strains is exactly where the field gets interesting, and where, next week, we make the single cut that the entire study of narrative is built on. The cut between what happened and how it is told.

(The six-word “for sale, baby shoes, never worn” is often offered as the smallest possible story and often attributed to Hemingway. The attribution is almost certainly a legend, but the example is honest. It works by implication alone, a whole change of state delivered in the white space, and it is a useful thing to keep in your pocket when someone tells you a story needs to be long to be complete.)