Imagine a painting of a woman’s head and shoulders. From this painting, we can maybe tell a lot about this person—how old she is, where she lives, how much money she has, etc. But nothing’s happening, it’s simply a portrait. And portraits can be great, but they’re not stories.
Now add a smirk. Suddenly we’re asking: I wonder what she’s smiling at? Possibilities form in our minds, and we start moving toward Story territory. By adding this enigmatic smirk, the painter has charged their portrait with an almost tangible narrative Energy.
Thinking about the material that makes up a story—characters, for example, or places, or objects—as Story Matter, and the work that turns that material into a story as Story Energy, can give us a new vocabulary to illuminate our favourite stories and the sparks that ignite them, and to help us add more life and depth to our own stories. Here follows a brief description of each form*:
Any form of matter (a person, a building, a tool) we introduce into our story has some built-in Potential Energy, and some have a lot more than others. Think of Chekhov’s famous gun—if there’s a rifle hanging on the wall in the first scene, the potential for story increases. A house can be charged with Potential Energy if it is haunted by its murdered former inhabitants, or if its gas main is held together by duct tape; a floorboard gains Potential if it creaks. Perhaps most importantly, if a character wants something really badly, they are charged with Potential Energy; if they need something, whether they know it or not, that’s more Potential; if they’re the kind of person who goes out and tries to get what they want, even better. Where there’s love, or desire, or ambition, there is potential for story—objects of desire can be striven for, or stolen away.
Regardless of whether a story aims for conventional realism, or creates its own reality filled with unicorns, dragons and flying saucers, there should always be an earth to come crashing down to (even if it floats in space on the back of a turtle). Every story world must have its own logic, its own set of rules, its own natural and social forces to be resisted. Defying gravity—whether you’re Icarus with your dad’s miraculous wings, or Juliet with your dad’s sworn enemy—can be exhilarating, but the higher we fly...
(Gravitational Energy is a specific form of Potential.)
A rubber band is quite boring when it’s relaxed; stretch it, and things get interesting. Many great stories are structured around rising tension, and many powerful climaxes involve some kind of snap. When tension is generated, the Potential Energy of a story can become massively amplified, and every choice a character has to make becomes exponentially more meaningful.
Things tend to become more compelling when they move. If characters are going places, doing things, interacting with each other and the wider world, they are adding kinetic energy to your story. Even a one-on-one conversation feels more vibrant if the characters are driving in a car; wading across a river is more exciting if there’s a current to pull you under.
If you’ve ever walked out onto a porch during a lightning storm, you know that feeling that electricity creates. And, of course, weather’s not the only way to charge an atmosphere. Love can be “in the air”, as can violence. Any setting—a war zone, a street protest, a department store—if vividly portrayed can make your story crackle and fizz. And just as a place can be imbued with atmosphere, a character can be filled with emotion, that electrical charge that makes our hearts pump faster, or skip beats.
Some characters have it in spades, because they are charismatic, or enigmatic, and when they walk into a room everyone feels drawn toward them. Sometimes attraction is more personal, when one character feels intensely pulled toward another. And then there’s that equal but opposite force, repulsion. Romantic or platonic, positive or negative, Magnetic Energy can make a story irresistibly compelling. (Charge a space with enough Magnetism, and you can generate Electricity.)
As matter is made up of atoms, bonded together into molecules, stories are made from words and sentences. These elementary building blocks, when wielded with skill and care, can generate magnificent force. Einstein tells us that energy and matter are the same, and a well-placed word or well-formed sentence can be both particle and wave, harbouring the details that comprise our story’s matter, as well as the energy to propel the story forward.
Adding (or taking away) heat can change a substance from one form to another. All the above forms can be converted to Thermal Energy, and if we add enough heat to our story it can transform before our typing fingers. To push this metaphor even further, if we melt our story it will flow, and take on a life of its own, and we can then follow it in directions that can surprise even us. And, finally, there is always the faint but real possibility of achieving Sublimation—from the Latin sublīmō (“I raise, I elevate”), this term describes the transformation of a solid, when heated, directly to a vapour, and sometimes the experience of reading or watching a great story can feel like this—suddenly, it seems, we are lifted, billowed by an overwhelming sense of awe.
*—these forms do not perfectly align with their equivalents from physics [it’s a convoluted metaphor!] but even I’ve been surprised by how helpful this approach has proved to be for illuminating and improving all sorts of stories.