The Anatomy of Story

Stories are verbal games the author plays with the audience (they keep no score—the studios, networks, and publishing houses do that). The storyteller makes up characters and actions. He tells what happened, laying out a set of actions that have been completed in some way. Even if he tells the story in the present tense (as in playwriting or screenwriting), the storyteller is summing up all the events, so the listener feels that this is a single unit, the full story.

The storyteller is first and foremost someone who plays.

A speaker tells a listener what someone did to get what he wanted

and why.

Notice we have three distinct elements: the teller, the listener, and the story that is told.