Aristotle's Poetics Distilled
by Paul Lewis

Aristotle wasn’t a playwright, but he observed the elements that were common to Greek theatre. Most modern theories on storytelling derive in some way from his observations. The following is what I’ve distilled from his theories.

Characters
The objects of a story are human characters in action. Stories can have characters that aren’t strictly human, but they do this by anthropomorphizing them (treating them as if they were human). A story requires that these characters be in action. That can be as simple as a conversation over dinner or as intense as a battle between armies of millions, but to be relevant to the story, action must reveal the personal qualities (or character) of the characters.

Aristotle defined two kinds of characters: higher and lower. Basically, they are the good guys and the bad guys. Higher characters demonstrate the story’s good moral value, and lower characters demonstrate the opposing moral value.

Qualities of a character
Aristotle defined four qualities of a strong character: morality, propriety, trueness to life, and consistency. Morality means the character, good or bad, must have a moral purpose. Even an evil person does evil because he believes he’s right to do it. Whatever the moral standard of your story, when the bad guys oppose it, they do so not because they want to be bad, but because they believe they are justified to do so.

Propriety means the outer characteristics of your character must ultimately agree with the type of character they are on the inside. A character who is living a lie, though he might appear at first to be open and honest, will eventually show that he has something to hide. He might appear nervous at a lie-detector test, or avoid that person who might recognize him. These characteristics fit a character trying to hide the truth.

Trueness to life means we believe the character could be real even though she might be fictional. An effective way to do that is by maintaining consistency. Characters change through a story, but when they change, it should never be as if the old character died and someone else took her place. There should be some continuity between the before and after so that the change is believable.

Appeal
The appeal of a story comes from two basic human needs: the first is the need to learn by imitation, and the second is the need to see an overall harmony, or orderliness in the events of life.

We learn how to do everything from tying our shoes to speaking our native language by imitating those we see around us. So a story can appeal to us by giving us an easy way to learn from someone else’s failures or successes (even fictional ones).

Stories also draw us in because they show us order in the events of life. Even a story that tries to tell us life is meaningless has a meaning. If a story were truly a meaningless jumble of random events, words and characters, no one would want to read it or see it. A story appeals to us by establishing a pleasing relationship between various causes and effects. Aristotle described this as a harmony or rhythm. In the way that different musicians draw out different tunes from the same set of notes, so also different storytellers can draw out different types of orderliness from the same set of events.

Magnitude
The longer your story, the greater the “pay-off” must be in order to please your audience. The way to do this is by building anticipation. A story can stretch on for several episodes and still have a payoff as simple as “boy meets girl,” provided that the plot progressively builds anticipation in the audience. In the end, they see why it’s the most important thing in the world for the boy and girl to meet and fall in love.

Plot
Basic as it sounds, every plot has a beginning, a middle and an end. Aristotle defined them by a cause and effect relationship. The beginning is the cause that needs no earlier cause to explain it. The middle is caused by the beginning, and in turn causes the end. The end is an effect that does not need to be shown to lead to any further effects.

The best plots avoid relying on chance events. Something may initially happen by chance, but the story should revolve around the effects of the decisions and actions of the characters.

Theme
Aristotle called it thought. We might call it the “big idea” or theme of the story. To be complete, a good story should hang on a main thought to which all the action lends its support.

Spectacle
Aristotle included spectacle as one of the elements of a good story. It’s the “gee whiz!” factor: explosions, battles, races, technological do-dads or strange creatures. Many story gurus downplay the role of spectacle, and rightly so. Without an interesting plot or characters, spectacle can’t carry the story. However, there is a place for it.

Unity
The focus of a story is not on the character, but on a single continuous action of the character. Since a person’s life contains many different actions, the storyteller’s job is to select the most interesting primary action, and then only focus on the actions that relate to this primary action.

Plots
Aristotle classified two kinds of plots: simple and complex. A simple plot merely focuses on one continuous action without any change along the way. A complex plot involves a change in direction.

Aristotle identified two ways in which change can occur in a story. The first is by a reversal of the situation, where the action turns to the opposite. For example, for one part of the story, our heros might be out to sneak into the castle of the evil prince, but once they sneak in, they find it’s a trap and now they have to break out. The second is by recognition, where the identity of one character is revealed to another. This recognition implies a changed relationship between the characters. Aristotle described four basic ways in which recognition can happen: by signs or tokens (clues), by declaration (the character identifies himself, or another character does), by memory, or by reasoning.

Sympathy
Aristotle noted that a good tragedy inspires pity for the main character. A good story in general then, leads us to sympathize with the main character. We should care about what happens to him or her. To do this, the storyteller should craft a character who is neither especially good nor especially bad. If the character is especially good and has no flaws, we have a hard time identifying with him. If the character is especially bad, we will hope for his demise.

To maintain our sympathy, whatever problems the character faces should not come about by his own intentional wrongdoing. Instead, they should due more to an error or weakness of the character. Otherwise, as an audience we’ll be thinking, “It’s your own fault. You got yourself into this.” And when that happens, we no longer cares what happens to your character. You will have lost your audience.