JCB's Ruminations on the Craft of Fiction #47
April 8, 2021
I’ve recently been trying to focus on writing an academic paper rather than fiction (gotta use that PhD once in a while!), and this gives me the opportunity to write about some of the similarities between crafting an argument and crafting a narrative. Argument and narrative can each be analyzed as conforming to an abstract structure, and I think there is good reason to believe that the underlying abstract structure for both of them is more or less the same. In other words, both argument and narrative rely on the same principles and probably engage our minds in similar ways.
One of the most basic ways argument and narrative are similar is that argument can be based on premises and deductions from those premises, while a narrative can be built out of a character’s problems and the decisions that arise because of the problems. Each of these begins with the establishment of a foundation, and by following the profluent development, we can arrive somewhere new. The interest each of these can create in an audience derives from the energy of its development and the satisfaction of its conclusion. In addition, we are dissatisfied by, among other things, unconnected elements that inordinately influence the development: in argument, a non-sequitur; in narrative, a deus ex machina. Quite a few parallels can be drawn here.
It’s also true that a story can develop an argument as part of its structure, and the argument can be its profluent feature. We can establish characters as emblems for various terms of an argument and then let them develop off of each other to see what conclusions might be drawn. This is a sophisticated (and rare) structure for a story, but it is possible. It’s sometimes employed in philosophical writing. More often in fiction, narrative moments simply represent argumentative turns through a kind of parallel structure. We don’t necessarily read the story itself as an argument, but an underlying argument can be represented by the development of the narrative.
These considerations probably won’t have any immediate effect on anyone’s writing craft, but I think it’s worth pointing out at the very least to give another point of view on the structure of narrative and how we might think about the stories we’re telling. Considering our stories as arguments might also be useful in overcoming blocks where we’re not sure how a story should continue or conclude. At the very least it’s a good distraction from the fact that I’m not writing fiction this week.