What’s in a Story
According to the most memorable of my English teachers, a story contains a protagonist, an antagonist, a problem, and a solution. Of course, there is space for much more within the breadth of a story, but this is what she believed the framework of a story should be, unless you were either long-deceased, critically acclaimed, or both, in which case English and writing could be whatever you pleased. For school assignments, her framework worked well, and with my never-ending stream of random thoughts, I didn’t suffer too much whenever she assigned creative writing.
But what is in a story; actually, what is a story? Do they really need a main character, or can there be many; does there need to be a problem, or can it simply tell of an existence? What if there is no solution, is the story incomplete then? What if there is no antagonist, only grey beings scattered throughout the plot?
Being the fiercely contrary student I was, I contended her boundaries constantly, and that is probably why my ending grade did not look as nice as it could have. As a high school sophomore, it also wasn’t wise of me to try breaking out of a shell I didn’t understand yet, which I understood too late. Even now I do not quite comprehend the concept of a story, not well enough to verbalize it, much less write one, but with my paltry seventeen years of experience with life, this is my understanding: a story is a sharing, a message, a lesson. A story can be a story with one character or none at all, a thousand mind-bending problems to solve or just one or perfection, and still be a story, but I think a story loses its story-ness to me when I feel nothing.
This sounds self-centered, even to me, I know. But very rarely do I really feel nothing about anything. When my mother nags endlessly about cleaning my dump of a room, I’m frustrated; when my teacher assigns a research paper on the pandemic that’s only been assigned by other teachers about five times already, I’m annoyed and the process is boring. Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights had me close to throwing the book and all its siblings into a pile and burning it in a reenactment of Emperor Qin’s infamous rampage against philosophy, but I felt nothing close to indifferent about the book. I hated Heathcliff and Catherine, Linton and Cathy, and pretty much every other character in the book because of their complicitness in the sheer length and (my perceived) uselessness of the book, but amidst the boredom there was emotion. Wuthering Heights was a story - unnecessarily long and melodramatic - but it was rich and brimming with humanity, emotions, and feelings.
We live in a world filled to overflowing with stories, and for that, I’ve never been more grateful as we experience calamities and upheavals small and large, personal and global. Our story is winding and alive, effusive and abundant in characters, in happenings, in emotions, in actions and everything that makes a story a story. It may not always be pretty, but it is brilliant in that we hold the pen ourselves, and we can write it ourselves.
