‘Storytelling Theory’ is a pretentious term I came up with to explicitly differentiate it from ‘Writing Theory’ which I feel is…not great.A)
Storytelling Theory is concerned specifically with the underlying mechanics of storytelling. Basically, what makes stories tick and, by extension, how to determine whether they’re good or bad.
Why is this important to know? Knowing what makes stories good or bad is of the utmost importance for writers…assuming you want your story to be good. And the audience might find this important because good stories are likely to be entertaining and better at communicating their themes.
Note: This article is a little messy right now, but I’ll gradually improve it. I think it does still get the point across, though.
Setup and Payoff comprises the most basic building block of any story. In fact, as far as I’m concerned, a story isn’t a story unless it contains at least one instance of this.
I’m having trouble figuring out how to explain this because I just understand it intuitively at this point. Though one thing I’ll note is that these are two parts of a whole: you can’t have one without the other.
Setup is basically the preparation for the payoff, with the payoff as the result of setup. ‘Foreshadowing’ is essentially just setup, just that the term used is a little different…but they’re the same thing.
Another instance of setup/payoff is ‘beginning’/‘end’, which is why a story requires setup/payoff: the beginning is setup, the ending is the beginning’s payoff.
One way of, maybe, understanding this more intuitively is with an example.
A character in a story says, early in that story “Y’know, I’m a little scared of heights…”; later in the story, that character is made to cross a rope bridge.
In this case, the setup is the character revealing their fear of heights and the payoff is that same character having to go through a situation that is directly relevant to that fear of heights.
If you can then understand this intuitively and figure out how it applies in different instances, then you already understand the basic mechanics of stories.
Most stories are made up of many individual instances of setup/payoff though, obviously, exact numbers cannot be given for this. A general rule is that the longer and more complex a story is, the more instances of setup/payoff there are. This also applies in the reverse: the shorter and simpler a story is, the fewer instances there are.
This fact also means that it’s much easier to perfect a simpler story and why, generally, my advice for fixing issues is to simplify a story. Though it’s also more impressive to create a complex story that fits together.
These examples are incredibly simple and mostly focused on demonstrating setup/payoff on a small scale to help with intuitive understanding.
I sat in a creaky chair, then fell over.
I got tired from running, so I sat in a chair to rest.
The rest of this article is basically just a link to other articles that will explain the whole story thing to you in greater detail. Those other topics may help to make it more intuitive.
These are, I guess, mini-essays on very specific story-related things. Generally a form of analysis of a concept…or, y’know what, just read them directly. Summarizing them is difficult at the moment.
I generally recommend reading these if you’re more interested in the details or you’re focused on story criticism.
As is clearly visible: there are not a lot of them. This is because most are actually not very well written, so you’ll have to wait a bit to see them.