Rats in a maze (elements of storytelling)

There are many writing styles out there, more than I can count, but I think the main difference between them is how they have chosen to balance these three elements: the maze, the rats, and the bird’s view. In all it’s basics, storytelling is setting (the maze), the characters (the rats), and the plot (which is heavily influenced by the bird’s view). As everything in life, the goal is balance. Balancing how much focus to put on each element, how much control to exercise over each element, and how much development you allow in each element. Different readers will have different balance preferences, different genres will require more of some elements, but every reader will want and every story needs balance, it is the key to good storytelling.

Each element, when favored, has their own strengths, their own type of stories to tell, but each also have their weaknesses when overly favored, when too much focus is put on them. So without further ado, here are the elements.

The Maze

This is the setting. This is where it all takes place. This is where you balance what to tell the reader/ viewer, this is where you have to remember ‘less is more’, this is where you take care not to make the descriptions too long and potentially boring.

The maze is more than just where it all takes place, the maze is essential to determining what will take place. A small town as the setting will be different from a setting in space which will again be different from a 1700 French court (unless your name is Steven Moffat and you’re writing for Doctor Who).

In historical fiction, like Gone with the Wind, the sweeping sceneries not only provide the picturesque effect but also sets the tone for what is expected of the rats. The walls of the maze are not only the outer walls, there are hundreds of walls within the maze that seem illogical to modern day people (rules to follow, social hierarchies to navigate) but the rats still have to navigate them all to get to their goals, to get their cheese. The maze, in this case, serves to let us understand why the rats seem to be walking around like idiots instead of going straight for the cheese.

The rats

The characters. These little rascals running around in the maze trying to find the right way, trying to get to the cheese, figuring out their own strategies, trying to find their way from where they started.

This is the part where you scream “character development!”, because not only are static characters boring, they are downright annoying. If the rat walks into a wall five times without learning from it, or it starts going around in circles for four hours, even if it just sits down and stops moving, it will leave the reader/ viewer in a position where they will not want to relate to them (regardless of whether they truly can recognize themselves in it). The rats have to learn and evolve, otherwise, they are below us and we have no reason to care about them*.

The bird’s view

This is the really tricky one to master, and balance is everything here. As an author, writer, or storyteller of any kind, we need to have a bird’s view of the maze. We need to know where all the obstacles are, where each rat is, which type of cheese each rat prefers and how they are most likely to go about getting it. Rightly balanced, this results in some amazing foreshadowing or small details for the reader/ viewer to discover years after they were first acquainted with the story. Done without balance it will put leashes on the rats and destroy the story.

Do you know that kind of story where things just happen out of nowhere? Like when a character suddenly drops dead, like when a kid shows up and says ‘I think you’re my father’, like when someone comes back from the dead, or like when everyone survives despite the majority of them having a less than 10% chance of survival. It is as if someone outside the maze has picked it up and decided to give it a good shake or keep it unrealisticly still.

There is, of course, a huge difference between someone with a bird’s view deciding to shake the maze, and a rat stomping around so loudly its steps shake the maze. Like in Star Wars, that was the Darth Vader rat shaking the maze to throw off the balance of the Luke Skywalker rat. In Glee when the Finn rat died, that was outside forces shaking the maze in a way neither characters or writers had any control over. In Supernatural when Mary came back from the dead it was the writers shaking the maze to create more drama.

The danger here is that too many shakings will take away from the rat’s own instincts, the characters own choices, and perhaps more importantly, the reader’s/ viewer’s ability to engage honestly in the story. Life sometimes drops bombshells on us, sometimes it feels like someone outside our little world, our little maze, it throwing stones and trying to ruin our lives, that is a part of life, the danger is when it becomes too often to be natural or coincidental (like when every season of a show is the writers shaking the maze rather than a cause and effect continuation).

The difficulty with fiction is that even the best idea executed without a balance between these elements will never be entertaining or engaging, it will be annoying and flat. On the other side of the spectrum, even the most cliche idea can be rather fun to watch/ read if the balance is just right. Sadly, in my opinion, it is rare to find nicely balanced TV shows these days, even though balance is such a basic thing. This means that once you find a balanced show, it’s like finding a thousand dollar bill – even if that is just a piece of paper.

*Please note I’m talking about fictional characters here and that rats are a metaphor, I am in no way saying that animals are beneath humans or should be regarded in any way relating to humans.