A fundamental way of organizing data
Story has existed in every known human society. Like metaphor, it seems to be everywhere: sometimes active and obvious, and at other times fragmentary, dormant, and tacit. We encounter it not just in novels and films and conversations, but also as we look around a room and see objects that have history, or wonder about an event or think about what to do next week. If you were to personally count every instance of story that you encounter in the course of a day, the number would not be just one or two but likely in the dozens, if not greater. One of the important ways we perceive our environment is by anticipating and telling ourselves mini-stories about that environment based on stories already told. Make stories is a strategy for making our world of experiences and desires intelligible. It is a fundamental way of organizing data.

Stories abound in all professions
Story principles have been found in the work of a wide range of professionals, including attorneys, historians, biographers, educators, psychiatrists, and journalists. Thus, story should not be seen as exclusively fictional but instead should merely be contrasted to other ways of assembling and understanding data.

Not all communications are stories
What is not story? Lots of information would not be classified as story:

One way to classify data is into four basic types: story fiction; story nonfiction; non-story fiction; and non-story nonfiction.

	FICTION	NONFICTION
STORY	novel	history
NON-STORY	poetry	essay

As you can probably guess, the boundaries among these four types are not absolute, but relative to the questions one wishes to ask about the data that have been organized. The fact that most poetry, for example, is non-narrative does not mean that it cannot sometimes exhibit story qualities. Indeed even such typical non-story data as stock market reports and recipes can be infused with a narrative organization.

Defining story

A story is... "that which has a beginning, a middle, and an end. A beginning is that which does not itself follow anything by causal necessity, but after which something naturally is or comes to be. An end, on the contrary, is that which itself follows some other thing, either by necessity, or as a rule, but has nothing following it. A middle is that which follows something as some other thing follows it. A well-constructed plot, therefore, must neither begin nor end at haphazard, but conform to these principles."

Intuitively we all know what a story is, although we may not be able to articulate all its elements. Generally, story is an organization of experience which draws together many aspects of our spatial, temporal, and causal perception.

In a story, some person, object, or situation undergoes a particularly type of change, and this change is measured by a sequence of attributions which apply to the thing at different types. Story is a way of experiencing a group of sentences, or pictures, or gestures, or dance movements, etc., etc., which together attribute a beginning, middle, and end to something. But typically this beginning, middle, and end are not contained in discrete elements but rather in the overall relationships established among the totality of elements. For example, the first scene of a film is not in itself the “beginning.” It acquires that relationship together in combination with other scenes and in relation to their scenes. Although a scene, or sentence, or page being physically first may be necessary to include it in the beginning, it is not sufficient since a beginning must also be judged to be a proper part of an ordered sequence or pattern of other elements.

Stages of story
What exactly is this pattern? Story theorists argue that a story consists of 5 stages:

1. a state of equilibrium
2. disruption of equilibrium
3. recognition of the disruption
4. effort to restore state of equilibrium
5. results of that effort, typically another state of equilibrium

Cause and effect
When “cause and effect” is violated, story is diminished, sometimes to such an extent that the audience no longer wishes to allocate attention and processing energy. It is likely that all of us at some time has stopped watching a film, or stopped reading a novel, or stopped being engaged by some kind of story because the unraveling of events was marred by faulty cause and effect. That process must ring true.

But to understand the power of story, one needs to know about a broader concept: cognitive schema.

Chunking
When exploring mental processes, we begin with the fact that our brains have severe capacity limitations both in terms of our attention and memory. For example, our short-term memory is said to be able to manipulate only about 5 to 9 “chunks” of data. But by “chunking,” we are able to remember more smaller pieces than by not chunking. For example, the word “red” counts as one chunk, but the letters “edr” count as three chunks. Given a list of 20 letters to remember, one would no doubt have great difficulty recalling them individually.

But chunking them might allow for greater recall and recognition:

In much the same way, story provides a schema to assist us in our attention and memory processing. Experiments have demonstrated that what perceivers remember from a story, as well as what they forget, is not random but dictated by the specific method used in searching for global properties. Using story as a means for search guides the acts of encoding, comprehending, storing, retrieving, and remembering the features in a narrative. These experiments support a basic premise of cognitive psychology, namely, that the classifications which a person imposes on material at the time of its processing will limit the ways in which the material can be subsequently accessed and used.

Cognitive Schema
What basically is a cognitive schema? A schema is an arrangement of knowledge already possessed by the perceiver that is used to predict ad classify new sensory data. The assumption underlying this concept is simply that people’s knowledge is organized. A schema assigns probabilities to events and to parts of events. If you were to hear the word “bathroom,” for instance, the vague sort of mental pictures occurring right now in your brain are not unlike the operation of a schema in representing an ordered set of associations and expectations that are used to judge certain experiences. A schema, however, tests and refines sensory data at the same time that the data are testing the adequacy of the criteria embodied in the schema. The interaction of schema and data creates a perceiver’s recognition of global patterns characteristic of that data.

Narrative schema
The specific method of using story as a way of attending to, storing, and accessing material is called narrative schema. Nearly all researchers agree that a narrative schema has the following format:

1. introduction of setting and characters
2. explanation of state of affairs
3. initiating event
4. emotional response or statement of a goal by the protagonist
5. complicating actions
6. outcome
7. reactions to the outcome

So when we say that we remember a film that we saw months ago, we do not normally mean that we remember the angle from which it was viewed in the movie theater, or the exact angles assumed by the camera in the scene, but rather, our knowledge has achieved a certain independence from the initial stimuli. We are even likely to attribute qualities or actions to characters in the story which were not depicted or even inferred. But what we do remember is the “story skeleton,” and which is determined and guided by what we term narrative schema, with its format of 7 elements, listed above.

Improbable story elements
There are other remarkable facts about story comprehension. For example, certain information in a story is elaborately processed and assigned to a hierarchy in working memory according to relative importance, while much else is discarded. The “value” of information increases according to its Improbability -- so that typical and probably elements carry the least amount of information. The more typical the information is for the perceiver, the less well it is recalled for it is already implicit in a guiding schema. Events in a story are therefore marked as salient and acquire special significance because they vary from the expectations defined by the internal order or a schema. But they must not vary so much that they violate the “cause and effect” rules of the schema or perceiver’s use of narrative schema will be disconfirmed. Again, if it stops making logical and plausible sense, we, the audience, will no longer “buy it” as a story.

Furthermore, a perceiver strives to create connections among data in order to match the general categories of a narrative schema. So audiences, when immersed in a story, will automatically “fill in” material that is deemed to be missing in the narrative.

Stories where there are no stories?
It has also been demonstrated through many psychological experiments that narrative schema may be applied in many situations that are not story related. For example, even with meaningless nonsense figures moving in abstract paths, viewers were able to describe and remember a much longer series of events, but generating a simple story, and attributing anthropomorphic qualities to the figures and motions perform, than they could handle in purely physical terms. It seems that narrative schema is an option in processing data even when there are no human characters or the events are essentially nonsense. In this way, not only does narrative schema help enhance memory -- much like how “chunking” letters into words improves memory -- but also how we use narrative schema to construct stories from information that may not in way be narrative. Perhaps because we are ever immersed in stories in our daily life and have come to develop a highly refined narrative schema, we may see stories in random material, information and data were stories do not otherwise exist.