Story Basics #2: Situation

why your story shouldn't be arbitrary

Hello friends—

As promised, this entry in Story Basics is about “Situation.”

If you revisit the entry on “Openings,” and examine it closely, you will detect the true objective of that post, which is to demonstrate the effectiveness of articulating the narrative context (by which I mean the starting conditions, knowns, and givens) of your story.

Without this context, the events and happenings and actions that comprise the narrative of the story will appear arbitrary to the reader. I think that sometimes people mistake arbitrariness for “lifelikeness,” and they pursue the arbitrary in an effort to come closer to life. The effect is vagueness, disorder, and confusion. A story ought to gather and intensify certain tendencies in life and through that intensification, come closer to life without replacing life itself. The arbitrary is only a recreation of the surface without understanding or trying to portray any of the interrelations that comprise life. In effect, what I’m trying to say is that you will never achieve a good story if all you can do is string together unrelated data and actions. That is not a story. That is hardly even a sketch. It’s a scan of reality that lacks any potential of representing the totality of actual life.

I consider the “arbitrary” to be the great enemy of significant or meaningful literature, in particular, meaningful stories or even interesting stories. Related to this is the notion of “Situation,” which is what I consider to be the source of all dramatic potential in a story and the thing that transforms mere plot from a series of arbitrary events and happenings into rich, interesting human drama. In their scholarly article, “Situation: A Narrative Concept,” Marcie Frank, Kevin Pask, and Ned Schantz offer a definition of situation worth quoting:

Narrative situations generally require at least two elements in relation with something at stake. A desert is a setting, but a hiker lost in a desert is a situation.

As far as definitions go, I think it is a good one because it emphasizes that “situation” refers to a relation or set of relations. They also emphasize the relationship between their conception of “situation” and “elevator pitches” for films by locating “situation” within a genealogy starting with the French theorist Polti’s work Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations which was recontextualized by Mike Figgis’s screenwriting manual of the same name. Situations often hinge on conflicts: A couple want to overthrow the king of Scotland. Two teenagers from feuding families fall in love. An aging king contrives a contest to decide how to divide his kingdom. A prince undertakes to avenge his cuckolded father. A man wakes up as a bug. A woman with a boyfriend receives an invitation from her ex-husband.

Situation and plot are related, but not interchangeable. In their analysis of the work of the novelist Christina Stead, Frank et al., observe, “Situation is the foundational point of plot, but in a secondary formulation, plot and situation(s) establish a kind of rhythmic movement or dance.” It’s my reading of this that character response to a situation gives rise to a new situation, and this new situation draws out further response. This dynamic breaking and re-establishment of situational equilibria is what we might call plot.

Let’s have an example. Let us return to the hiker lost in the desert. We know that this is a situation in part because it describes a relation between a character and their setting with something at stake, the something at stake being, well, survival. But it is not a plot because, well, there’s nothing happening, is there? There’s no dynamism. How might it become a plot?

A hiker lost in the desert walks for five miles and discovers a small pond. As they drink, a stranger stumbles upon them. There is only enough water left for one of them. The stranger takes out a knife. The two grapple. The stranger is stabbed. The hiker suffers a cut that won’t stop bleeding. The hiker walks on. They discover a small shelter with a young family inside. They do not speak the hiker’s language. The hiker, covered in blood, holding a knife, tries to make themselves understood. A man arrives at the shelter, carrying supplies. It becomes clear to the hiker that this man is the father of the family. The hiker tries to communicate but is chased off. Eventually, the hiker is discovered by a traveling troupe. They help the hiker and over a meal, someone recognizes the knife as belonging to their missing friend. The hiker is questioned, but is evasive. The hiker beds down for the night with the troupe. As the hiker drifts off to sleep, they hear nearby twigs snapping, seemingly coming closer to them.

In this example, the hiker responds to their initial situation of being lost by walking five miles. This leads them to another situation (a pond and the stranger), their response is to fight, but this gives rise to another situation (the bleeding wound, necessitating help), so they respond by walking on. This leads to another situation (the shelter and the misapprehension by the family), so they respond by fleeing, which leads to another situation, (they are discovered by the troupe), etc, etc. The succession of situations can be integrated into a larger structure, that larger structure being a plot. It is easy also to see how the plot is suggested by the opening situation. A person in a desert has only so many options available to them. Do they wait (which is one kind of story) or do they go out in search of water (which is yet still another kind of story). But both possibilities are latent in the situation, and it is the drawing out and selection of these latent potentialities that we call plot.

Notice what we have not talked about here: character, backstory, background, motivation. The above situation could happen to any sort of character. Except, perhaps, a fish or a mermaid. They would probably not be in a desert. But this emphasizes the degree of abstraction at play here because a desert is both a specific kind of landscape but also, well, a catchall for any desolate and isolated place that puts an individual’s survival at stake. It could be a desert or a hypoxic area at the bottom of the sea or a mountain top or a windswept plain. It could be outer space or an empty ship drifting out at sea. The specifics of the setting don’t matter a great deal. Neither do the specifics of character. Not in this kind of formulation, where we’re just stating the situation.

A situation is not necessarily a narrative, either, as Frank et al explain by describing Beckett’s highly repetitious play Quad:

Quad ’s situation confronts us with our own will to narrative and demands thinking of it differently. Reduced to pattern, bodily action is separated from plot as well as from character, yet the sequence has an intrinsic momentum to reach completion—one signaled, however paradoxical this may seem, by the reprise of the patterned movements a second time. Lest the need to exhaust all possibilities escape us, Beckett’s script repeatedly insists, “All possible . . . combinations given.” A situation but not a narrative, Quad reveals situation’s high involvement with repetition, which helps to distinguish it from plot and indicates situation’s centrality to modern culture, where it serves as a source of creative reworking across an ever-expanding media landscape.

Situations give rise to new situations only when there is a change in the relationship between the elements that comprise the situation. A change in situation is what gives us narrative and, furthermore, story.

We know about plot-driven stories and character-driven stories. But Frank et al posit the existence of “situation-heavy” stories. They give as an example, the aptly named “situational comedy” or sitcom, where the situation predominates over any particular plot of any particular episode. This emphasis on situation—the board resetting and the world wiping at the end of every episode—is what produces the repetitive aspect of the sitcom. Essentially, for the sitcom to proceed, the situation must be re-established, which means that there can be no change in the fundamental condition of the world and its relationships. This is especially evident in cartoons, which literalize this idea right down to the character wardrobes.

This does create, I know, a sense of artificiality. In part because the characters do not accrue knowledge either of themselves or the world, and they are forced to act in ways that will allow the situation to be re-established by the end of the story. Procedurals are another great example of this. We know that the case must wrap up by the end of the hour or half-hour. Whatever conflict occurs in the living-room sets of Disney shows and CBS sitcoms, there will always be a reconstitution of the initial conditions of the whole thing. We know this, and while it is comforting, the artificiality of it does grate. It bothers us. The pleasure of the pattern, once recognized, wears off, and we start to look for subversions or meta-commentary.

It can seem old-fashioned or hack-like, smacking of “genre” writing, to lean too much into a situation. Writers think that the way to recreate the malaise they feel in contemporary life is to denude their stories of anything that might even remotely resemble a structure or a form. They try to eschew structures of meaning in their work because they feel this will make their story more lifelike. After all, there are no structures in life.

I would like to remind writers that stories are not life. Fiction is not life. Unless you are directly commenting the collapse of meaning and the insufficiency of grand-narratives in the face of climate catastrophe, the evils of colonialism, and capitalism, or on the narratively annihilating aspect of the internet on both analog and digital life, I would like to suggest that you think about the situations in your stories more.

I am going to return to the reasonable question from the “Openings” post. The question I am sometimes asked about composition: “When should I be thinking about these things?” in the writing process. First, I would like to say that when you, the author, realize something is not necessarily the same moment when the reader needs to realize something. So, in this case, you might have an understanding of the situation of your story early on, but you do not want to reveal it to the reader or even to the character right away. So you take your time to unfold the situation over the duration of the story as you write it, and it is only in the end that the reader and perhaps the character, come to realize what situation they are in.

Sometimes, you do not know the situation and you are just following your character along a string of events that might, to you the author, feel arbitrary as you write them. And then, in the end, you realize what the whole thing was about or what the unifying situation is for all of the events of the story. And you might find that it’s better to move that realization to the front of the story, so that the events that unfold do not feel arbitrary to the reader and so as to intensify the significance of events as they happen rather than waiting for a big reveal all at once at the end.

I think it is important not to confuse the draft of the story for the final form of the story. Too often people think they need to know everything about the story and the characters in order to write it, or that they need to know what something means when they put into the story. I don’t think that’s true. Sometimes, when I am writing, I think I know what the story is about and why a particular scene has meaning, but in the course of writing that scene or the subsequent scene, I realize, oh, there’s something deeper here, something I was not aware of before. I think the mistake in this case is thinking that where you the author realize something is exactly where that piece of information should fall in the story.

This is obvious to people who do not write in chronological order and who are accustomed to moving things around to find the right placement. For other kinds of writers, this might be a new idea for you. But let me break it to you gently: sometimes, you move paragraphs, scenes, and information around in order to achieve certain narrative effects. And sometimes being clear adds to mystery. Sometimes a revelation comes late because the character themselves comes late to that information. Sometimes, a reader knows more than the character. But regardless of the facts on the ground so to speak, placement in a story is a matter of judgement and careful consideration, particularly if you’re someone who explores as you write.

In my own writing process, I think about situation a lot. Part of my understanding of character comes from trying to figure out what their particular situation is. When we first encounter them in a story, where are we finding them in their lives? What’s going on? How does it intersect the givens of the story world? And how does that situation change over the course of the story?

To me, it is not a scene if there is not a situation, a set of relations among the various elements in the scene. A scene is not just a surface transcription of actions. A scene is the dramatization of a situation. As such, it requires a relation (be it conflict or something else). So a story that opens with a description of someone in a room some place while offering little in the way of interrelation between that someone and the room and the other people in the room is not really a story, is it? It’s, well, an enumeration of objects.

To return to our earlier example.

A hiker lost in the desert is a situation, yes. But imagine if you didn’t know they were lost. Imagine if you were just reading a description of someone standing around in a desert. Imagine if the author failed to convey that relation, lost, to you. What would you have? A description of a person experiencing heat outside. The thing that transforms the hiker and the desert into a situation is the relationship between the two, the lost of it all. That is a situation, and it is a situation that suggests a multitude of plots because it contains a multitude of potential responses. And which of those responses come about is determined, in fact, by something we might call character.

Details without relation is just stuff. Actions without relation are just arbitrary moves.

Does this mean that you should have a thesis statement in your story? No. One can be subtle. But the purpose of detail and action, the basic components of dramatic enactment, is to convey in stepwise and collective manner the totality of the relation that comprises the situation. Every gesture, every line of dialogue, every bit of exposition, all of it serves to further clarify either the situation or some change in the situation.

In my own writing and reading, I often analyze work on a scene-by-scene basis by asking: what is the situation of this scene? What is the characters’ understanding of the situation of this scene? How does that differ from my understanding of the situation? How does the situation of the story manifest in each character’s life?

When I have answers to these questions, I feel that I can see the scene clearly. When I don’t, I feel confusion and the scene presents itself as a muddle to me. When I’m writing, I consider this muddle an issue of composition and try to work through it until I come to some understanding of the situation.

How does one do that? When presented with a block in understanding, how does one try to pierce that block? When I’m confused about a situation, I like to make a list of things I know about a scene and its components by asking questions like: Where does it take place. Who is involved. What happened to those characters before they showed up in this scene. What do they say to each other. What do they do to each other. Why might they say or do those things. What do those things said or done mean to them or how do they understand those things, if they understand those things.

A lot of my fiction writing process boils down to using things I was taught in third grade when we were taught to solve word problems. Underline the main question. Write down what you know. Write down what you need to know. In physics and chemistry, my teachers taught me to write down my givens and my knowns. And to find out how those givens and knowns might be arranged in order to get at what I needed to know. It’s simple, but I find it effective.

So, if given a scene you don’t understand, break it down into what you are given. Who are the people? Where does it take place? What is the relationship each person has to that place? What just happened before in the story? What is at stake in this scene? For whom is that at stake? What are the possible outcomes? How are these people’s motivations in sync or in opposition. You would be surprised how many things present themselves to you when you take note of what you already have.

For me, understanding the situation of a story or a character or a scene or an arc provides so much room for invention and articulation because when you understand the situation, you are drawing from a fundamental relation between the components of your story. That network of relations, particularly when dense and variable, is what makes a story feel like a story. It keeps things from feeling so arbitrary.

You do not need to articulate to the reader right away what the situation is. Not at all. Think of haunted house stories. If you were happen upon such a story without knowing that it’s a story of a haunted house and you’re just reading it or watching it, you wouldn’t know why the things are moving on their own or why the people are getting more and more stressed out. But if it is made well, you will continue to watch because nothing feels arbitrary. There is a sense in which we are proceeding toward…something. And in the end, or in near-climax, when the ghost reveals itself, the situation itself is thus named. But all along, the situation has been informing the selection of events presented to the characters for them to respond to and overcome. It builds quietly in the background toward a climax.

So no, you don’t need to tell the reader the situation upfront. But when understood properly, the situation will govern and organize the composition process. It will govern the revision process. And it will ultimately guide the reader along because when the situation is grasped, nothing in the story feels arbitrary.

What then might we generalize from this rambling?

So, what might we generalize about openings from these examples?

1. Situation describes a relation between elements in a story or scene—these elements may either be concrete (people, places, things) or abstract (time, money, history). What is critical is simply that the situation arises because the elements are in tension.

2. There is the large Situation which governs the story itself, and then there are local situations of character and scene which more rapidly change and alter in response to character situation. We might call the larger, more stable Situation governing the story at large as fate, destiny, or even social position.

3. The work of a scene is to alter a situation in some way—be it the large Situation of the story or the local situation of scene and character. The scene has not come off if the situation remains unchanged. It might be the case that the work of the scene is to demonstrate a character trying to change their situation, only to fail, bringing about no material change in their condition. I would argue that the scene has still been effective because now the character has knowledge of having tried and failed and whatever they do next will be informed by that knowledge. So in effect, their understanding of their situation is different. So the scene has achieved some work.

4. Plot follows from situation in dynamic fashion, coming about as the result of character choices and actions in response to the situation(s) presented to them.

Here is an exercise, especially if you have a scene or story that you find confusing or unclear. For each scene write down your list of knowns, that is, the who, the what, the when, the where, etc. Then answer the following questions:

1. What is the situation at the start of the scene?

2. Has the situation changed at the end?

3. Has the character(s) understanding(s) of the situation changed in some way?

4. Has the reader’s understanding of the situation changed in some way?

Do this until your confusion lifts.

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