Exercise: A Very Short Story & Analysing a Story

Exercise: A Very Short Story

Five years ago, when I was on holiday in Devon with my family, my brothers, my cousins and me went out for a drink to the local town.  After a few drinks at the local nightclub we got a taxi back to the house.  When we got in the taxi, the driver seemed very strange, and despite us all asking him questions, he completely ignored us during the whole journey, smiling to himself and driving erratically.  When we arrived back at the house the driver mumbled that he didn’t like outsiders in the village and drove off quickly.  We were all a little intimidated and hurried back into the house, worried that he may return. 

Exercise: Analysing Your Story

Reading the information in the course material about the structure of stories was extremely interesting, especially when I began to investigate whether these structural points were achieved in my story, even with very little knowledge of their necessity in narrating an interesting and relatable story. 

Below is a table comparing the structural points in the course material with my very quick story above.

A specific world or setting	Immediately set my story in Devon, a ‘realistic’ world and later elaborated about the local town.
A protagonist	In this story I was the protagonist.
An antagonist	The driver.
An incident or incidents that start the story off	The group getting into the taxi.
A protagonist who wants something	In this case it was my desire to learn more about the drive and have a conversation.
Obstacles to above point being achieved	The driver was ignoring all interaction.
A chain of plausible events	* discussed below.
Big plot twists as a result of which things change radically or we find new big things out	We find out the driver strongly dislikes ‘outsiders’ to the point of totally ignoring any interactions.
A theme or idea behind it	Inclusion, racism.

(*) Despite my story containing a number of plausible events leading to the taxi journey, I’m not sure that, following the dramatic climax of the confrontation from the driver, the story has enough ‘space’ to elaborate given the strict guidelines of length, time and description. 

When I came to collating this information I was quite surprised at how easily these structural points appeared in my story, even the simple task of ‘retelling’ an anecdote.  In order to make our stories interesting, even to our close friends and family, we must include vital elements to enable the listener to engage, relate and fully understand the story.  Of course, in daily life our anecdotes would probably contain more visual information about the scene, through gestures or facial expressions, but it is interesting to see how these structural elements naturally appear, even when a story is ‘stripped back’ to its most basic form.