What Are the Rules? Part 1
by Alan Irvine

t is a question I have been asked a number of times. Usually the question comes up in a class or workshop where I can tell that what the questioner really wants to ask is "how do I do this?" and so my usual answer is to launch into a discussion of how to learn and develop a story, how to develop the basic skills of storytelling.

But recently the question has come up in situations where the questioner obviously does not want to know how to tell, but, in fact, "what are the rules?" What are the rules for telling a good story? What distinguishes a good story, a good telling from bad? What things should be avoided? Why?

My first inclination is to respond "it all depends." To insist that there are no rules, no one right way to tell a story, no single approach or style or voice that is correct. Art, after all, is about creativity, about freeing the artist’s vision and voice, about transcending limits.

"So you are saying that anything goes?" one questioner responded skeptically. That brought me up short. I know the answer to that question is a resounding "NO." Anything does not go. Every story, every performance is not just as good as any other. Everything does not work. I have no problem distinguishing good, bad, mediocre storytelling, nor even expanding at length as to why a telling was good, bad, or mediocre. So there must be rules guiding this.

Of course there must be rules. All artforms have an underlying structure of rules that guide and inform artistic decisions. Painting is structured by geometry and the interplay of shapes, forms, and angles that guide the eye, by the characteristics of light, color, perspective. Music by the physics of sound and the mathematics underlying that, by rules governing how sounds get put together, what notes to use, rules of harmony, melody, rhythm.

But what of creativity, of innovation, of unique vision and approaches? Isn’t art about breaking rules? Of course it is, or, at least; can be. But to break the rules one must first know the rules. Indeed, one must know the rules intimately in order to know what, how, when and why to break them. A good artist does not randomly break the rules, but does so deliberately and carefully, knowing exactly what effect they hope to achieve by doing so.

In high school, I spent three years on the fencing team. Most of our time was spent in drills, practicing basic moves over and over again until we got them right. My friend Fred hated drills and preferred to do things his own way, making up his own versions of the moves. When our coach scolded him for this, Fred pointed out the top-level fencers we saw in tournaments did not step, lunge, thrust as we did in class. They did things their own way; they had their own style. Fred claimed that he was developing his own style as well, and so did not need to bother learning the standard way of doing things. Our coach pointed out that those top fencers had spent years doing things by the book, practicing the proper moves again and again. Only when they knew the standard moves in their bones did they start to vary them, knowing exactly how and why they were doing so. To deliberately break the rules once you know them is style; to skip learning them in the first place is simply sloppy.

So, of course, storytelling has rules and principles, reasons why some things work and some do not. So what are they? Unfortunately, I can not say; at least, not in any organized, here-they-are-1-2-3... fashion. Storytellers have only just started to look at our artform and examine its foundations. We do not have the rules yet. However, we can lay out some general guidelines of what they should cover and what they should be rooted in.

Most importantly, we need to look for not one set of rules, but several different sets corresponding to different levels or aspects of the storytelling artform. In particular, we need to sketch out rules governing the craft, the genres, and the form of storytelling.(1)

The first of these categories, craft, concerns the basic skill of storytelling. These are those rules that first come to mind, the "how do you do this?" rules. These rules storytellers have explored and diligently laid out. In recent years we have seen a number of excellent books come out addressing these "how-to" rules.

Beyond this first set of questions, we need to carefully distinguish the message from the medium, the tale from the telling. Not all stories work the same. When the book Who Says? came out a couple of years ago, heralded as the first serious attempt at examining the foundations of storytelling, I eagerly snapped it up. As I read it; however, I grew increasingly disappointed. The majority of the articles in it dealt only with the telling of folktales, not telling in general, and much of what the authors said, while useful and intriguing concerning folktales, had little to say about the telling of other tales, or the simple act of telling per se as if telling folktales and telling stories were one and the same.(2) They are not. We have all sorts of very different stories: ghost stories, personal stories, historical stories and more. All of these genres have their own sets of rules of what works and what does not.

I rarely buy tapes of ghost stories any more. I love ghost stories, but I am almost always disappointed in ghost story tapes. The stories do not scare me. They entertain. They amuse. But they do not scare, even though scaring us is one of the things we expect from ghost stories. After puzzling over this for a while, I realized that the problem was that these stories are told like folktales with ghosts in them, not like ghost stories. Similarly, I once listened to someone tell a personal story in a dramatic, lively fashion - complete with character voices and vivid acting out of motions. The telling would have greatly enhanced a folktale, but completely ruined this story. The entire story felt artificial and fake. All I could think throughout the telling was " no one talks about their own life like this." The teller did not understand the critical distinction between genres of stories. Folktales, ghost stories, personal stories all have their own, unique sets of rules which we must learn if we want to tell them.

Yet, at a deeper level, all genres share the same rules. All genres are, after all, variations of the same artform. They are all types of storytelling. And storytelling, as an artform, must be governed by rules; rules that structure the process of telling a story, regardless of the content of that story. These rules are rooted in the fundamental nature of the artform. Storytelling is telling; it is communicating (specifically communicating a narrative) through the spoken word.(3) That suggests some basic conditions. Speech, for example, is linear. We can not perceive an entire story at once the way we can perceive an entire painting at once. We can only perceive a story one idea (perhaps even one word?) at a time. Only in retrospect can we put all the ideas together to perceive the whole.

Similarly, we can only perceive a story in a set order, the order in which it is told. In contrast, when we look at a painting, we are free to examine the details in any order we wish. Much of this derives from the ephemeral nature of speech. The spoken word exists only at the instant of speaking, and then is gone.

Perhaps one of the most defining characteristics of the spoken word is that the act of speaking implies a reciprocal act of listening, an act that further shapes and constrains the artform. Listening is fundamentally different from looking or reading. These two acts - speaking and listening - define our artform. It is within their nature that we should begin to search for the rules. Perhaps the best way to approach them is to compare speaking and listening to the other set of manipulations of words: writing and reading. It is that comparison that I will pick up next time.

(1) These categories are discussed at length in "The Six Steps: A Storytellers Journey," in Works In Progress, Winter 1997, which expands upon ideas first discussed in Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics (Kitchen Sink Press, 1993)
(2) I do not mean to single out Who Says? for particular criticism. I find the same problem cropping up in many discussions of storytelling.
(3) I am using the term "spoken word" relatively loosely here, including all aspects of what we think of as speech: words, intonation, gesture, movement, etc.

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