If nothing changes, it is not a story

The minimum story is two states and a reason

Here is a true, well-shot, competently edited ninety-second film: the workshop in the morning light, hands at the lathe, a slow pan across finished pieces, the owner saying they have always cared about quality, the logo. Everybody involved is proud of it. Nobody who watches it can tell you anything about it an hour later.

It has no change in it. At the end, everything is exactly as it was at the start: the workshop existed, the owner cared, the pieces were good. That is a description, and descriptions are perfectly legitimate objects. They are just not stories, and they do not behave like stories in a viewer’s attention.

The minimum unit of a story is: a state, a thing that happens, a different state. Three parts. Remove any one and it stops working.

The shop had made the same sign for forty years. Then the road was widened and the shopfront lost two metres. So everything they knew about sign-making at that size became useless in a week.

That is a story in three sentences, and you already want to know what they did.

The test: name the two states

Before you script anything, write two lines:

state at the start:  ...
state at the end:    ...

If you cannot fill them in with different content, you have a description. That is not automatically fatal (a product demonstration, a menu, a price list and a location film are all descriptions and all useful) but you should know which you are making, because a description has to earn attention a different way: through usefulness, beauty or brevity, never through suspense.

When the two states are the same and the piece is supposed to be a story, the usual cause is that the change happened to somebody who was left out. The customer’s state changed. The film was about the workshop.

Change can be small

People hear “story” and reach for drama: the near-bankruptcy, the flood, the family tragedy. Most work does not have access to that and does not need it. A change of understanding is a change:

• She thought the delivery would take a week. It took four hours. Now she orders on Fridays.
• He assumed the expensive blade was a con. He counted the re-sharpenings. He was wrong by a factor of three.
• The team believed the form was fine because nobody complained. Then they watched somebody fill it in.

Each of these is small and each is a genuine change of state, which is why they hold. The size of the change sets the emotional scale; the presence of the change decides whether there is anything there at all.

Chain the units

A longer piece is several of these joined end to end, where each new state creates the next problem. This is where but and therefore do their work: they are the joints that make one state cause the next. A piece that can only be joined with “and then” is a list of events, and a list can be reordered without loss, which is the diagnostic: if you can swap beats two and three and nothing breaks, they are not causally linked and one of them is probably deletable.

The counting exercise

Take any piece you are working on and write one line per beat. Then, beside each, write the state it leaves the viewer in. If two adjacent beats leave the same state, the second one is doing nothing and you have found your cut. This routinely removes a quarter of a rough edit, and it removes it on evidence rather than on feel.

Where this does not apply

Not every piece should be a story, and forcing narrative onto material that does not have it produces the worst genre in the trade: the manufactured journey, where a company that started trading in 2019 is given a hero’s arc and a moment of doubt that never happened. Viewers detect this reliably, because invented adversity has no specific detail in it: the struggle is always described in general terms while the success is described in concrete ones, and that asymmetry is visible.

If there is no change, say the true thing plainly and make it useful or beautiful instead. A clear, honest description of what you do, well made, outperforms a fictional arc every time, and the fictional arc carries a risk the description does not, which is that somebody who was there remembers it differently.