Here’s a perspective: A story is a string of salient
events in the lives of the protagonist(s).
How do we decide the precise significance of an event
in a story? More importantly, what really qualifies as an event? Is an event something
out of the usual and having importance to the broad story line or could it be anything
that occurs in the story involving the protagonist – one can argue that
anything that occurs in a person’s life will be significant unless we have a
yardstick to measure it with some other events. This means that the
significance of events in a story could be directly proportional to the number
of characters in it. For example: if the story were just about one character,
the comparison of events in the life of this character will be just with their
life events. However, let’s add another character to the story and you get a
broader spectrum for comparison. Say you have to write a story in a finite set
of chapters – in order to make it a succinct read – you will tend to leave off
the extraneous details or occurrences.
That brings us back to the main question: what
qualifies as an event in a story? In a story involving 2 people, an event in
one person’s life compared with the other’s will emerge as the significant incident
if it takes the story forward in narrative by leaps and bounds, has the ability
to transfix the reader and moves the story decidedly towards its conclusion. So,
a story is a series of such significant episodes with character precis,
location details and weather summaries thrown in as fillers or glue.
That got me wondering: in a story having just 1 person,
you could call “having a birthday” as a significant event. Widen the group to
say a family, and you can call “celebrating a festival” as an event. Further
widening the group to say a city, you can call “winning a sports championship”
as an event. Furthering the expansion to a country, an indigenously developed satellite
launch can be an event. Now let’s consider the world, and a “war” between
countries would be an event. Going further, discoveries of hidden galaxies in
far parts of cosmos would be a significant event in the story of the outer
space: a gigantic asteroid travelling in high velocity towards a planet 10
times the size of the Earth and smashing it to smithereens would be a catastrophic
event! Now compare that to the event of “having one’s birthday”!!!! Somewhere
in space a planet just got blasted to pieces and elsewhere someone celebrated
the day of being born! Now there’s an irony to that for sure!
Never mind! A story is a story! And everyone can choose
the story they relate to. So, no story is too small or too larger than life.
The profundity is in the perspective!
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