INTRODUCTION
I’ve been teasing this series for a while and (despite my feelings of inadequacy) I believe the time has come to take some steps forward. Why? Because the market is flooded with stories that don’t mean anything, or worse, have destructive messages carelessly hemmed into them for the sake of action and plot twists. Let me be clear: every story communicates something. The author who says, “My story has no messages or themes and was written purely for entertainment,” is deceiving themselves. Their story may well have been written purely for entertainment, but it will also communicate multiple messages to the reader, even if those messages are as subtle as: sometimes well-intentioned people make mistakes, friendship can help you get through hard times, or it doesn’t matter if you break your promises as long as you are good looking.
An author has the right to put whatever messages they want into their story. But they ought to know what they are saying. Anything less is as irresponsible as repeating random words in a foreign country without looking up what they mean.
There is a degree of personal interpretation in all art. But the power of art lies in its relation to reality. And the artist needs to understand their subject matter as it exists in reality before they can turn it into art. Color theory, form, and perspective are all essential building blocks for the visual arts.
Ideas are the building blocks of stories, and authors who do not understand the language of ideas will assemble their stories based on how it makes them feel at that point in their lives.
Or they will try to copy their favorite stories (whether or not they understand what makes them work). The results of both will be unpredictable. Some authors have better instincts than others. But here’s the clincher: it doesn’t have to be a constant guessing game. There’s a whole field of the study of ideas and it’s called PHILOSOPHY. Even just a perusal of some of the basics will strengthen your writing by leaps and bounds.
But let’s back up a second because I know there are some people who are not yet convinced that ideas are the building blocks of stories. Plot, characters, rising action, climax, falling action. These are the technical elements of stories. But behind each one of them are IDEAS. Ideas about what shapes and drives human beings. Ideas about the nature of the world around us. Ideas about choices and their consequences.
Let’s look at the major branches of philosophy and how they drive the stories you love.
Axiology- What is Valuable? (Includes Ethics and Aesthetics)
I’m starting with this one because I believe it is the most self-evident. I haven’t done the research, but I think if you did, you’d be hard-pressed to find any story without a moral dilemma or value statement of some kind in it. Conflict is the major motor of most stories, and conflict always involves questions of morality. Even stories driven by wonder and discovery contain assertions about what is good. Character arcs are rooted in ethics. For a character to grow or change in any way for the better or for the worse, there has to be some value standard.
There are so many interesting examples to draw on, but I’m going to bring up The Odyssey. What is fascinating about this book is that it depicts the axiology of humans thousands of years ago. That’s why it makes people so uncomfortable. You don’t have to agree with its ethics or aesthetics to find the story fascinating (in fact, you probably shouldn’t). For the purpose of this blog I’m going to skip right over all the questionable morals (you know what they are), and talk about two of its more interesting elements. The first is hospitality. In an undergrad English class I wrote a whole paper on how the concept of hospitality as sacred was vital to Greek culture on a practical level (trade and travel), and the importance that their literature reinforced this. The second element is their seeming equivocation of idleness with ultimate happiness. The upper class is depicted as doing little other than throwing feasts and sleeping and this is meant to represent the human ideal. I don’t know about you, but that actually sounds rather boring to me. I do think it’s significant when contrasted with the ten-year war they all just finished fighting. But it does raise lots of questions about what a good life actually looks like and where we as humans find our identity and purpose.
Issues I’ve Seen:
Way too many modern storytellers dismiss moral and emotional consequences of plot-central and character-central decisions. At worst, this can create a damaging impression that we aren’t really accountable for our actions. At best it ALWAYS removes the story a degree away from reality and a degree closer to fantasy (see metaphysics).
Metaphysics- What is Real?
Metaphysics ties into every story, most frequently in questions about the nature of humanity, the existence of God, and the presence of an afterlife. The metaphysics of your story will affect its ethics and aesthetics. If you have created a whole world for your story, then you know the answers to all of these questions (but that doesn’t mean your characters do). If your story is based in the real world then you do not know all of the answers to these questions. Whatever you believe and whatever evidence you have to back up those beliefs, there is still so much we really don’t know about the nature of this world we live in and the nature of our own existence.
For example, if you believe in the human soul, how does that soul relate to the physical human body? Is it attached to it as a whole, or contained in a specific part of the brain (the pineal gland), as Rene Descartes believed? What happens when a person donates blood, or a kidney? Do they lose a part of themselves? What happens when a person falls into a coma? Is their soul still contained in their body? What about brain transplants?
While these questions may never come up in your story, the point is that you do not have concrete answers for these questions. None of us do. But the answers to these questions would change the morality of certain choices within your story. When authors write from their own limited experience and worldview without leaving room for different experiences and opinions they shrink the complexity of our world down into a sort of imitation reality which will ring false for most readers.
If you are writing speculative fiction, there is good news and bad news. The good news is that you can remove metaphysical elements which you don’t want to implement into your story. Maybe you don’t want there to be an afterlife so the entire weight of consequences for characters’ actions lies in the material world. Okay, great. The bad news is you still need to build a lot of things from scratch and add in layers of complexity to make this world feel real. And you need to know how the metaphysics in your world affects the ethics of your characters.
Issues I’ve Seen:
There are a lot of stories out there that so blatantly ignore human psychology and/or the laws of causality that they would have been far more effective if set in a different universe.
Epistemology- What Can We Know?
At first glance this branch may not seem to affect your story much at all. Epistemology is all about knowledge, truth, and justification. It sounds like pretty heady stuff (and it sure can be), but there are also a lot of extremely applicable aspects of epistemology for storytelling. For one thing, everyone has a personal epistemology about what they can be justified in knowing, whether they can articulate it or not. Your personal epistemology will shape your book, so it’s good to be aware of it. But more than that, you need to understand the basics of epistemology in order to create a diverse cast of characters who will surely have different epistemologies. Perhaps one is a scientist who firmly believes only things we can be justified in knowing are observable phenomenon. Wouldn’t it be interesting to pair that person up with a psychic who can’t explain why he’s right all the time, but has full faith in his psychic intuition? The study of epistemology gives you a better glimpse into human nature and how humans think. If you’re a spec fic author, it can also launch some brilliant story ideas (The Matrix, anyone?). So many concepts we take for granted come from epistemology such as empiricism, the scientific method, coherentism, induction, argument from analogy, probability, inference, and skepticism.
Why is this important to story? Believe it or not, a lot of these concepts are tools you will use in your story to get your reader to connect and engage with the plot. Your story is trying to convince your reader of something, if only that certain characters would behave in certain ways. In that sense, your story needs to compile a body of evidence, much like an inductive argument and remain internally coherent. Foreshadowing, for example, is a form of inductive prediction.
Issues I’ve Seen:
One of the biggest mistakes I see in modern fiction is a lack of epistemological coherency in stories. Every story has a set of truth claims it is making. If those truth claims contradict or undermine each other, your story will lack coherency. This will often break the suspension of disbelief which is needed for all stories to succeed, and lessen the emotional impact on the reader.
Logic- What is Reason?
If you do nothing else…if you ignore the rest of this blog…please, please do yourself a favor and do something to strengthen your reasoning skills. Not only will this HUGELY impact your writing and ability to dissect other stories, but it will benefit you in all other aspects of your life. (But as we are focused on the subject of stories I will not break into a tangent rant although I am sorely tempted.)
Logic is all about combining premises to lead to a conclusion. Yes, this is extremely relevant to storytelling, not least because most stories have at least one educated character who would probably have been exposed to some sort of study of logic and reasoning. In truth, just as we said your story needs to have epistemological coherence, it also needs to have a consistent internal logic.
Some of this is pretty foundational stuff: jumping to conclusions and assumptions are faulty reasoning. If you use them in your plot you will lose credibility with your reader, not to mention, pull them out of the story.
If the entire conflict of your story is based on a logical fallacy, and you never acknowledge within the story that it is a logical fallacy, it looks like you have no idea what you’re doing. Especially if none of the characters ever challenge it, even when several of them are well-educated scientists. (I’m looking at you Captain America: Civil War)
I wish I had the time to go into logical fallacies in this post because they are fascinating. But I am going to list a few particularly relevant ones here:
False dilemma– two alternative statements are given as the only possible options, when in reality there are more.
Slippery slope– some small action will lead to a chain of events resulting in something negative, therefore it shouldn’t be permitted.
Cherry picking– only presenting the evidence that supports your case, when other evidence contradicts it.
Poisoning the well- presenting adverse information about a person in order to discredit their argument, without actually addressing the argument itself.
Gah. Aren’t these fun? I wish I could keep going. They are so great for driving story conflict, character dilemmas, and villain speeches. They are not so great when the author slips them into the story as if they are legitimate arguments.
Are you beginning to see how all of these branches of philosophy tie together to strengthen your story? I mentioned The Matrix without much explanation, but let’s take a look at it now.
In the movie the The Matrix, the main character Neo discovers that the life he thinks he has been living is all a giant simulation created by machines who have enslaved humanity. It raises metaphysical questions: is what we perceive around us actually reality or just sets of impulses in our brain? Once Neo is aware of the truth he learns that he can manipulate the matrix code to bend the laws of physics as we know them. It raises epistemological questions: if we gather knowledge through our five senses, and our senses are capable of being deceived, then are we even capable of finding truth on our own? The only reason Neo learns the truth about reality is because someone outside of the matrix tells him. And both of these questions lead to questions of morality. If the world as you know it is a simulation and all of humanity is enslaved by evil robots then suddenly things like trespassing and stopping at red lights don’t seem so important anymore. The metaphysics affects the epistemology which affects the morality of the characters.
So there you have it. An introduction to how philosophy forms the backbone of good storytelling.
This series is going to consist of a couple different things:
- A breakdown of specific philosophical concepts and the role they play in stories
- A breakdown of specific stories and how they embody certain philosophical questions and concepts
I’m really excited about it and I hope you are too because I’d love for you to get involved. Do you have any specific questions or topics you’d like me to focus a blog post on? Leave a comment below!
E.B. Dawson 