The Value of a Story Chart

       I have been using this story chart in my classes for as long as I can remember.  For literary analysis, the chart allows students to take apart any short story, play, novel or non-fiction narrative by reducing that narrative to its basic elements.  For me the most important part of the chart concerns the conflict, for without a conflict a story simply doesn’t exist.
       I have always used the same anecdote to illustrate this point.  An older, somewhat disheveled gentleman is sitting at the counter in a coffee shop with a cup of coffee in front of him.  A waitress is straightening up behind the counter.  They are the only two people in the shop early on this weekday morning.
       No conflict exists in this scenario, so as interesting as these two characters may be, nothing is going to happen.  Now if the waitress were to pick up the fresh pot of coffee behind her and walk over to where the man is sitting in order to offer him a refill, lose her balance because of a slick spot on the floor behind the counter and pour steaming hot coffee down the front of the man’s shirt, quite suddenly and unexpectedly a story has begun.
       Of course, the author of this story has to decide from whose point of view the narrative should be told, the customer or the waitress, and she or he probably ought to have some sense of who these two people are (although that may change over the course of the story); nevertheless, this particular narrative has begun.
       For creative writing, the story chart provides a good way to help students get started when they are writing their own original short stories.  In addition to filling out the chart, I usually ask each student to write a description of her or his main character, the setting and the conflict before he or she actually starts writing a draft of the story because I want to try to steer him or her away from disaster, and descriptions of these basic elements give me some sense of where each student is headed.
       As I have already mentioned briefly at the start of this note, the story chart also provides a student with an equally good way to get a sense of how any story that he or she is reading operates.  One way or another, in filling out a chart for that narrative, students will discover something they wouldn’t have realized if they had not done so.  Whether students are taking stories apart or putting them together, a story chart can become an essential tool in their literary toolbox.  I hope you will agree!  Best of luck, Harper