One of my favorite writers is Jorge Luis Borges. One of his shortest stories is On Exactitude in Science, which goes as follows:

…In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.
(translation by Andrew Hurley)

We can discuss for days about the meaning and philosophical implications of this story. You may like it or dislike it. But it is a *complete* story. It tells about something that has a beginning, a middle and an end, where the end is not clear from the beginning. It does so in a very short space, but it is complete. It has a plot, and nothing is missing from it. We are not left hanging. It has nothing to do with postmodern crap. This is traditional story-telling at its finest.

Though the story may have a deep significance and several layers of interpretation, from a structural standpoint nothing differentiates it from a penny dreadful or an early XX century pulp magazine story.

It is far from me to want to push all story-telling within the confines of a single structure, but the thing that makes Borges’ story a satisfying, well-written story worth telling is that it has some kind of twist to it. Someone is doing something, but then something else happens. X is Y-ing when Z.¹

X, in this case, are the Empire’s cartographers. Y-ing is the attempt to perfect the science of cartography. Z is the fact that their success in perfecting said science renders it unserviceable.

So if we had to condense the essence of the story into a short sentence, we would say: The cartographers of an old empire manage to perfect the science of cartography, whereupon they discover that perfecting it makes it useless. X is Y-ing when Z (you can substitute ‘when’ with ‘whereupon’, ‘but’, ‘and then’, ‘but then’, etc.)

If the story had been:

In that Empire the cartographers made huge maps in an attempt to make them as accurate as possible. One day they managed to make a map that was as large as the Empire itself, and then they went home.

You’d be justified in thinking that this is no story at all. That’s because here we only have ‘X is Y-ing’, but only the Z makes the story worth telling. Pretty much every memorable, complete story has an ‘X is Y-ing when Z’ structure. In fact, even the single scenes of a story generally follow this structure (though, in Borges’ case, there is only one scene.)

When I say that this structure is near-universal I do not mean it in the same way as people rave about the Hero’s journey and other semi-academic tools of analysis. All these may have their place, but ultimately they are external models, while fiction is much freer than most people would like. Still, a story without an internal ‘Z’ factor is like a joke without a punchline, and in order for the ‘Z’ factor to make sense it must be nestled within a context in which X is Y-ing. Again, ‘X is Y-ing when Z’.

There *are* reasons to tell a joke without a punchline (to waste people’s time, maybe), just as there may be reasons to tell a story without a point. For instance, plenty of critically acclaimed writers write pointless stories for the sake of them being pointless, usually to show their intellectual peers that they, too, are possessed of the smarts or irony necessary to understand how meaningless life is.

But at this point we are just playing with semantics here: if the point of the story being pointless is that it is pointless, then it becomes its point. It’s just that the point is now external to the story, and found in the writer’s delusion of grandeur.

Of course there is much more that goes into crafting a good story than a simple formula. But, as far as I am concerned, this is not even a formula. It is the reason people have been telling stories since the beginning of times: to be enchanted by the witnessing of meaningful change. This is what makes story-telling so similar to magic: something changes before our eyes and we are left dazzled by it.

MQS

Footnotes

1. Holly Lisle, one of the people whom I learned writing from, had a different formula, but still to the same effect. I recommend you check her out. I have link to her website in my recommended links. ↩︎