THE GAME WITHIN - or THE FIRST LAWS OF NARRA-DYNAMICS
What is a story — at its deepest level?
And what, ultimately, does it do?
As we’ve seen, a story, by definition, is a many-splendored thing — infinite in its elaborations, transcendent in its force — but if I had to abstract fiction down to single principium, a fundamental law of narra-dynamics, I would propose that stories are ideally a technology for deepening.
Good stories — the only ones that should concern us in this instance — seem to unite their formal aspects to one end, one purpose: the creation of a profound emotional connection, a limbic entanglement, neural synchrony, between itself and its reader.
A good story is good precisely because it ignites this affective magic inside a reader.
To enable a story — to make it work — the writer must not only kindle this limbicity throughout the duration of the story, but with each line, each page, each scene, each turn, the writer must deepen it.
Therefore, in order to succeed, and definitionally to be a story, a story must always be deepening.
Otherwise, the story will gutter and fail.
Fortunately for us, stories are a narrative genre uniquely devised to produce this astonishing cathexis.
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(But is that all a story is — all it does?
To quote Forster’s famous couplet: Only connect?
Of course not.)
No story, no matter how skillful the writer that constructs it, can sustain a limbic bond with its reader, much less progressively deepen that bond, without its reader’s active participation.
It is not enough for the story to be a delight, to surprise or titillate, to be wonderfully and cunningly crafted. To be truly engaging, a story must be structured to elicit its reader’s collaboration in its own instantiation. A collaboration that must be given willingly, freely, without manipulation or duress — or else the feel-bond will fail.
Stories are technology for deepening but to produce that deepening stories must invite their readers to co-create —
— to, in other words, play.
How does a story traditionally and reliably create the opportunity for this co-creational play?
How do stories guarantee that the reader will have the chance to bring the lightning?
Very simply.
By always being a game.