II - STORY

Everyone loves a good story. Our lives are full of stories, from the bedtime stories of childhood to stories of our lives told at our funerals.

We tell stories all the time. Gossip consists of stories. Ask “What did you do today?” or “How was your day?” and you will get your answer back in story form. Open the newspaper; you get news stories. Turn on the television; the programs present stories. Whether they are dramas, sitcoms, talk shows, news, sports, movies, or game shows, they all deliver information in basic story structure.

Religions all convey information through story. Open the Bible. The overwhelming percentage of the text is stories. Check out other religions and notice the role of story.

If there is any culture, any tribe, any social group, anywhere in the world, that does not tell stories, I do not know who or where it is.

You are asleep at night. You dream. What do you dream? Stories . . . they may be boring, or bizarre, or terrifying, but they are stories. Dreams are largely beyond our conscious control, yet they consistently take the form of a story.

Clearly, there is something very fundamental about stories and the way the human mind organizes information. Let us now examine the structure of a story.

What is a Story?
Normally when we hear a story we understand it to be about what certain people or other characters did, why they did it, and what came of it, a recounting of events, and that’s what happened. This the audience perceives. This the audience believes.

The time has come for you to stop being just another member of the audience. Get up out of your seat and come with me. I want to take you backstage and show you what a story is, what it is made of, how it is put together, how it works, and what it does.

A word of caution is in order here. If you come with me, you can’t go back. Stories are not what you think they are; once you understand their true nature, stories will lose much of their magical hold on you. In place of that, you will walk through life with a new awareness of how human society works and what it’s all about. That’s a choice you will have to make. If you decide to proceed, your mind may rebel at being led to give up a reality it has depended on for your entire life. If you find yourself either immediately rejecting what I am saying, or feeling threatened or confused, that’s okay. There are a lot of new ideas. Take your time so you don’t feel overwhelmed by them.

Keep in mind that I am writing about everyday life: actions, thoughts, feelings, situations, and relationships we all experience. Your own life is full of examples of everything I am saying in this book, so you can look at your own life in light of what I am going to tell you and make up your own mind whether or not you think it is so. The ideas in this book may be new to you, but if you take your time reading to consider and work with these ideas, you will see that they are both true and powerful. At that point you can start making your life be what you want it to be. As I said, it’s your choice. With you or without you we will now proceed.

A story recounts something which is happening, did happen, will happen, or that we can imagine happening. Something, but not just anything. Stories are not what you think they are. Stories are never exactly what happened, never the complete picture. Ask any two people to tell you the story of some event you all three witnessed. One won’t tell the same story as the other, and you will feel that both left out some important points you would have included.

All three of your stories combined are still not what happened. They are stories based on what happened. We always make a selection from what we can remember when we assemble our story and assume or create what we need to fill in the gaps. The gaps are also in our perceptions. No one can observe everything.

As we make sense of our experiences, we assign meanings to our actions and perceptions and rank them in relevance and importance to the situation at hand. No two people will make the same decisions about the stories they tell. We all put our own slant on everything we say and do. There are no unbiased stories. Every story is an expression of a particular storyteller and comes out of his own experience and imagination. Every story is different.

Yet all stories have similarities. If the story is to hold our attention and engage our minds, it cannot be just any recounting of events. A successful story has a definite dramatic framework. The storyteller may or may not be aware of the rules of story structure, but if the story is working, you can be sure the rules are being followed.

All stories are different. Each one follows the rules in its own way. But once you know the rules, you can see their effect in every story and how they make that story work.

A story starts with the situation at point A and takes it to point B through a series of events. Something happens to get us from A to B. Some stories appear to go from point A back to point A. “I had this problem and I did this and that and these and those and the other about it and I still have the same problem.” That is a story. Notice that even though you are still apparently at point A, your experience is different at the end than at the beginning. You may not have moved physically, but you have moved psychologically as a result of your efforts.

A story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. We begin at A, in the middle we are moving, and we end at B. The story begins with an ongoing context in which a significant event happens. For example, let’s examine a simple little story. Suppose our story is Boy Meets Girl. “Once upon a time in a large city there lived a boy.” Here we have the ongoing context, the soil into which we shall drop the seed that will grow into a story. “One day he was walking down the street trying to figure out in his mind an algebraic solution to the Three Body Problem.* Just as he got to a tricky place in the equations, he looked up and there she was, the girl, a lovely, thoughtful girl. At that moment she was wondering if there were any exceptions to the Universal Law of Stuff, that the volume of one’s possessions always grows to exceed all available storage space.”

Here is a significant event. Without the girl, the boy would keep on walking down that same street thinking about the Three Body Problem forever and nobody would care much for
the story. Enter the girl, though, and things are looking up. Someone new has come into the boy’s life.

At this point, there will be a question in our minds. What is the significance of the girl? The answer is found in the actions and attitudes of the boy as a result of their encounter. Suppose the boy saw this beautiful girl but just walked on down the street and we never hear from her again. In that case, the function of the girl could be to demonstrate the single-mindedness of the boy. She would be part of the preexisting context, not a significant event that puts the story in motion.

The Big Question
Now suppose instead that on seeing the girl he falls in love with her. This is more like it. We now know the significance of the girl. She has interrupted the boy’s normal life. The plot takes a turn when the compelling odd event enters the picture. The boy now has to deal with a situation, a question, beyond his previous experience, something new. His life has been disrupted by his sudden love for the girl and he wants to win her. We now have a question. Can the boy get the girl? He must decide to take action to answer the question. Why? The standard explanation is that the question and its call for resolution have unbalanced his life so he must do something to answer the question in order to get back to normal.

That explanation will not do. It is intended for the audience and demands a suspension of disbelief so that the boy, a character created for a story, may be considered as a real person with free will. Even so, the explanation is flawed. In real life most boys who see a beautiful girl on the street admire her, wish they could win her, realize they can’t, and do nothing about it.

If you have ever written an original story, you know the backstage point of view. Why does the boy take action? Why does he respond to the question? Because the story needs him to. If he does nothing, the story dies; the audience gets bored, demands its money back and goes home. The characters are there to serve the story. The story does not serve the characters.

So it is with everything in the story. Each element of it helps make it a good story. Anything that does not has no business being there. That leads to a question. What is a good story? One that holds the audience’s attention. They might not agree with it but they are there for what the story delivers.

The question now is what stories deliver. The answer is that they deliver a lot. A well done story can entertain us. It can also teach us. It can also comfort, delight, scare, persuade, amaze, revolt, anger, distract, charm, ennoble, inspire, shame, pacify, embarrass, arouse, excite, titillate, or humor us. Stories move us in any number of emotional directions with a strength that can rival or even surpass direct experience. They are an extremely powerful way to convey information. Tell a wonderful, entertaining story and the audience will accept your fiction as valid.

The Appeal of Story
But why do we care? Why do we give our whole attention to some tale that can be, with our full knowledge, completely fictional, totally made up, something that never happened at all? We do because we want to know. Human existence is far too complex to ever fully master. By eliminating extraneous information, a good story gives us a simplified and therefore more comprehensible version of life. We need to understand reality in order to survive and prosper in it. We accept the fictitious story’s parallels to reality as accurate insights into life. Stories show us what could happen in circumstances we may not have experienced, thus helping us make sense of the past, cope with the present, and foresee the future. We are all anxious, we are all competitive, we are all curious.

We have anxieties. We are not sure how we stack up against other people, so we identify with characters in conflict with others, especially in conflicts similar to ones we fear. Unknown situations threaten us, so following a character’s strange adventures helps us cope with our fears.

We want acceptance and approval. There are aspects of each of us that are far from ideal which we hide from others. In a story a character’s weaknesses will be revealed. We are fascinated by the results of this exposure and how the character copes.

One benefit of acceptance and approval is having alliances with others. These may be with friends, kin, team members, or even strangers. The alliances may be informal or formalized such as contractual alliances between buyer and seller. We are dependent on these relationships for our survival, yet they always bear some level of instability. Stories are full of shifting, broken, underhanded, and deceptive alliances and we love to watch it all happen.

We are competitive. We want to win. We want to come out ahead of other people. Stories can show us winning strategies we can copy and mistakes we can avoid. We are shown how each of a character’s actions affect his forward progress and whether or not those actions are effective in conflicts with others.

We are curious. We want to know. We want answers. Stories are built out of questions and answers. A question is raised at the beginning and answered at the end. The boy will get the girl or he will not. Other stories answer different questions. A good story’s question engages us, for it has relevance to the uncertainties that frame our lives and drive us forward, the main one being “Which way is forward?” We need to know, to satisfy our eternal curiosity. We seek both new knowledge and confirmation of our existing convictions. We approach change with a mix of eagerness and fear.

We also depend on stories to help fill out our lives. Most of our days are routine and predictable. Stories take us on an emotional roller coaster through new territory and adventures. Stories enlarge our mental experience.

A story is like an experiment. Both lead us to an answer to a question, an answer larger than the particular chain of events witnessed. In an experiment we put this and those together under controlled conditions and see what happens. In a story we put a chosen group of characters into a particular situation and follow them to a conclusion.

Experiments are used to correlate cause and effect. The situation is simplified so that causes irrelevant to the question are excluded so that only causes of interest will affect the result. Thus we can see clearly what cause is making which effect happen. The knowledge gained is then applied to the larger world.

So it is with stories. The storyteller is trying to show a correlation between how certain actions by particular characters in response to the story question produce a specific result, the answer to the question. As is done in the experiment, a skillful storyteller eliminates everything from the story that is not necessary to understand the situation, characters, and actions that give the question that particular answer. Unlike real life, in which people have a wide range of actions, stories present a world of very limited action, so the answer and its causes and meanings are clear. Thus the story can make sense of the mysteries and confusions of life.

Time for Action
But how does the question affect the world of the story? When the storyteller puts the girl in view of the boy, the question of Can the Boy Get the Girl takes over the boy’s mind. His world has been expanded, because now it includes his love for the girl. If the story is to have any meaning, the boy cannot go back to his old life the way it was. The events of the story have changed his world forever. His life will never be the same. The question made a difference and so will the answer. That is why the story has meaning, why we care and why we pay attention to the story. The question and the answer it gets through the plot of the story matter to us.

So far in Boy Meets Girl we have a background reality context. We have a main character, a protagonist, the boy, and a secondary character, the girl.* We have an event, the appearance of the girl (pun intended), that raises a question.

Until the boy has finished his adventure with the girl, he cannot go back to a simple life of walking down the street and even then, his life will be different. Life has been disrupted by a question. Let’s rejoin the boy and see what he is going to do about it.

Oh, good. We got back just in time. He is walking up to the girl. He asks her “Will
you marry me so we can live happily ever after?” He has now taken an action to answer his
question. What are the consequences of that action? He could get an immediate answer. The girl could say “What a great idea, and it’s so fortunate that we are standing in front of a
church. Let’s go inside and get married.” They do and live happily ever after. The story
ends and the answer to Can the Boy Get the Girl is yes.

Suppose the girl accepts differently, saying “I’d love to marry you. I’m free on Tuesday afternoon. How does two o’clock sound?” Now the situation is more complex. Is the story over, the question answered? That depends on what we understand in the story “getting the girl” to consist of. If her acceptance of his proposal will do, then the story is over. If “getting the girl” requires marriage, the story will not be over until 2 p.m. Tuesday. If this story is at all typical, the boy and girl had better watch out, because getting to the altar on time will be the hardest thing they ever do.

Now suppose the girl says no. If the boy sees his love for her as a lost cause and gives up on her, he accepts her negative reply and the story ends and the answer is no. If he does not accept her answer as final, the question Can the Boy Get the Girl is still open and the story continues as he takes further action to win her.

The Way is Blocked
When the protagonist moves to answer the story’s question, we go from the beginning of the story to the middle, where we will remain until the climax.

The middle is usually the longest part of the story. It consists of a series of actions arising from the characters’ attempts to deal with the story question. Some will happen easily and go well. Others will be difficult and/or engender complications. The easy actions get brief mention. The heart of the story is actions that either are trouble or cause trouble. The characters run into obstacles. Stories are about characters (not just the protagonist) coping with these obstacles and the resultant complications. These events keep the main question from being quickly and easily answered so the story may continue.

Obstacles are what fill out the plot. Without them we wouldn’t have much of a story. Your average romantic tale could be reduced to one sentence. “Once upon a time they found each other, got married, and lived happily ever after.”

The storyteller puts obstacles in the path the boy takes to win the girl. As he deals with the obstacles, the boy will change the world by his actions and change himself by learning from his experiences. He cannot go back to a state identical to his previous existence. Each obstacle he copes with causes a shift in the world experienced by the boy and is another step in the process of transformation that is the story.

The boy is not the only one who faces obstacles. All the major characters have them so the progress of their agendas will be in doubt. We won’t know who will prevail. The answer to the story question will remain unknown until the storyteller reveals it.

Each obstacle creates a small story within the larger plot. The character has a problem, so we have the question of can he solve the problem and how. He will take action that will give us an answer. That answer will give him a new obstacle. If not, something else in the story, another character, the forces of nature, random chance, his own subconscious, has to do it. But there must soon be another obstacle. If not, the question-answer pattern will be disrupted and the audience will lose interest.

Similarly, if an obstacle is either trivial or impossible, the answer is obvious beforehand and interest in the story will drop at that point. If the girl’s reply to the boy’s proposal had been “Yes, if you will kiss me,” and he gladly and easily does with no complications, the story drops. If she says “Yes, but only if you grow to eight feet tall in the next three seconds,” unless the story is set outside normal reality, the obstacle is clearly impossible. Either the story ends at this point or the obstacle must become possible. He could try to get her to modify or drop her height requirement.

Trivial or impossible obstacles cause a problem. As soon as the question is raised, we know the answer, so the actions of the character give us no new information. Against a trivial obstacle the character prevails and against an impossible obstacle he fails. We already know that, so the storyteller loses our attention as our minds wander off to more amusing thoughts. He then has to win us back, which can be difficult.

Relevant Obstacles
In a normal story, obstacles are not random. Not just any problem will do. The question posed by the obstacle needs to logically arise from the main question of the story and the answer to the obstacle question needs to help fill out the answer to the main story question. The answer to the obstacle question is a secondary answer to the main question that will support the main answer we get at the end of the story. If in response to the boy’s proposal, the girl had answered “No, you don’t have a job,” we would accept that obstacle because we understand the relation of income to wedded bliss. If she had said “No, because the President of the United States wears ugly ties,” we would not take it seriously because there is no logical connection between the obstacle’s question and our understanding of how boys get girls. Note that the obstacle is neither trivial nor impossible. It would be difficult, but possible, for the boy to go to Washington and convince the President to wear better ties. But the story would have to first set up a logical connection between true love and presidential ties, or the story would become laughable.

Indeed, ridiculous, irrelevant obstacles are a standard part of comedy. Suppose the girl is two blocks away and the boy has one minute to get to her. First he is stopped by a sidewalk preacher. Then he has to go around a construction hole in the street and dodge heavy machinery. Suddenly he is blocked by a parade. After he fights his way through the endless marching band, all looks clear ahead. Then from a doorway a gorilla steps out and blocks his path. He gets free from the gorilla and a flying saucer lands in his way. I dare the audience to keep a straight face.

Obstacle Hierarchy
So far we have considered obstacles that are direct barriers to answering the main question of the story. Most obstacles stand between the character and the resolution of some other obstacle. To get the girl, the boy needs a job. To get the job, he needs to find who is hiring. To find that out, he needs to buy a newspaper. To get the newspaper, he needs fifty cents. To get fifty cents, he has to look under the couch cushions, but his roommate is asleep on the couch. If he wakes up the roommate, there will be further complications, on and on.

So it is with everything in the life of a character. Every little move he makes, every step he takes, is in an effort to overcome some obstacle, something standing between where he is and where he wants to be. As soon as he gets there he has a new set of problems. A character’s life in a story has a few successful moments like tiny islands scattered across a vast sea of trouble.

Since any character, if looked at closely enough, copes with a semi-infinite number of obstacles, much of the storyteller’s job is editing out and bridging over all obstacles that do not contribute to a full answer at the end of the story. If obstacles whose questions and answers are irrelevant to the main question and answer are left in the story, the audience will get anxious. They will ask questions like “What is the point of all this?” and “Where is this leading?” They feel that the story is meandering, wandering about with no clear goal in sight. The irrelevant obstacles divert the plot from the track the audience wants, movement toward the story’s answer.

Agenda Conflicts
One source of obstacles the characters face is each other. In a good story the characters have different questions they are trying to answer. This gives them agendas that are mutually contradictory. The boy wants to marry the girl now. She wants him to first get a job and improve his life. As they are discussing this, Mr. Cool rolls up in his shiny red sports car and winks at her. She gets into the car and they drive away, leaving the boy with a new set of problems. The girl will discover her agenda differences with Mr. Cool later on that evening.

The characters are such trouble for each other because the story needs them to be. Each one should to be a different kind of person who sees the world and his place in it in his own way and therefore has a unique set of needs and desires, an agenda different from the others. The questions of stories are about what kind of character will prevail in a given situation and how he will do it.

If each character is trying to advance his agenda and the agendas are mutually exclusive, they cannot all succeed. The boy and Mr. Cool cannot both win the girl. They could both lose. The girl could stay single. But that is not as satisfying. Who wants the game to end in a tie? We want winners and losers so we will know who is better, who is dominant, and which strategy we can learn from to come out ahead.

Obstacles are about dominance. Either the character dominates the obstacle and bends it to his will or the obstacle dominates him and he either does something else, some third force eliminates the obstacle, or that character’s involvement in the story stops.

Characters have agendas. They want. Which character will get his way? Usually one character prevails, then another. The dominance shifts. Stories are built out of dominance reversals. No one agenda prevails for long. That way, the outcome is in doubt because no one is reliably more powerful than anyone else. The uncertainty holds the audience’s attention and maintains the meaning of the obstacles, since the answer to the main question cannot be known yet.

Sometimes the story is best if an obstacle question is raised and left hanging while other questions are answered. The plot can change focus from one character’s situation to another. The interrupted unanswered question can increase suspense and thus the audience’s desire for an answer. The delayed answer pattern also keeps the story from being too straightforward and obvious.

Two simultaneous obstacles can reinforce the importance of each. While Mr. Cool is trying to make time with the girl, the boy must delay his efforts to find a job so he can think of some way to get the girl away from Mr. Cool. The audience does not know how well Mr. Cool is doing with the girl, so the boy’s attempts to sabotage their relationship are of more unpredictable outcome. At the same time, Mr. Cool’s efforts are of greater significance because of the obstacles being prepared by the boy. Can Mr. Cool win the girl enough to weather the upcoming challenge? The storyteller can switch back and forth between progress by the boy and Mr. Cool and keep the audience hooked.

There are three types of obstacles. First there are pragmatic obstacles. While Mr. Cool and the girl are in the restaurant, the boy is out in the parking lot trying to push the sports car into a handicap space so Mr. Cool will get a ticket. The boy has trouble because his shoes slip on the wet pavement. Second, there are obstacles caused by conflicts within the character’s agenda. The boy cannot put all his effort into moving the car because he is afraid of being caught and keeps looking around. Third, there are obstacles caused by another character with a competing agenda. Here comes Mr. Cool.

In stories, agendas advance with great difficulty, hounded by these three kinds of obstacle. This is the pattern of stories, over and over. The protagonist’s agenda is formed by the main question of the story. How he copes with the obstacles will give us the answer at the end.

The Climax
At the end of the story, after dealing with numerous lesser obstacles, we arrive at the largest obstacle in the story, the hardest one to overcome, the climax. This will be where all is gained or all is lost, because this final grand obstacle will give us at last the answer to the main question of the story. Because this answer will be filled out by all the secondary answers, it will seem more true, complete, and meaningful than it would have if the story had lacked all the other obstacles.

Yet at the same time, the climax must not be a trivial or impossible obstacle. The storyteller’s creativity will be tested, because the climax has been set up by the story question and the preceding obstacles, yet those must not make the answer obvious. The outcome must be in doubt until the last possible moment. Coming up with a satisfying climax is a real challenge for any storyteller and to have created one is a feat worthy of genuine pride.

Even if the story is one in a genre in which the outcome is known, the climax can still hold our attention. We know that in the mystery story our hero, the detective, is going to solve the murder. In our own story of Boy Meets Girl, we know that ultimately the boy will get the girl. So what do we do for a climax? We put the boy up against an apparently impossible obstacle that he overcomes by means supported by his actions against previous obstacles, yet that are not foreseeable by the audience. A common way to do this is for him to be forced by his desperation to move beyond his previous mental and physical abilities, to give more than 100%. Perhaps he runs faster than he ever has before, or thinks up a new understanding of the human condition that melts her heart.

Breaking new ground can make for an effective climax. If the protagonist believably thinks up what has never before been conceived and does what has never before been done in order to prevail, a good foundation for the climax will be in place.

What must not happen is for the boy or the situation to change its nature before our eyes to hand him an easy win. Suppose at the climax the girl is standing outside the church and the boy has about one minute to win the girl before she has to go inside and marry Mr. Cool, and suddenly word arrives that Mr. Cool dropped dead on the spot, so the boy gets the girl by default. Or, with one minute to go, and no foreshadowing, no hint of this in the story so far, the boy tells the girl his rich uncle in Australia died and left him ten million dollars. Endings like these are cheap shots. The audience feels cheated and disappointed because such endings do not provide valid answers to the original story question, answers that are supported by the previous obstacles and help the audience deal with their own lives.

What will work as a climax is for the boy to take action that we can believe he could and would take under the circumstances. The action will conclusively demonstrate that the boy is more worthy than Mr. Cool of the girl’s love. Perhaps the boy will risk his life to save the girl from some misfortune while Mr. Cool dithers. Maybe the boy will win a final confrontation with Mr. Cool which reveals how superior the boy is, thus winning the hand of the girl.

A common technique to justify the climax and increase doubt about its outcome is the use of the dark moment. Fate has turned against the boy. Everything has gone wrong for him. The girl is about to marry Mr. Cool. The boy couldn’t find a job and now he can’t find the church. He gets lost trying to take a shortcut through the woods. Despite running as fast as he can from the sheriff, he gets arrested for trespassing. He is now in jail. We want the boy to succeed but he is stuck, apparently doomed to lose the girl. Nevertheless, the boy does not give up. Somehow he finds his way to one last chance to get the girl and we move from the dark moment up to the climax.

After the climax has been dealt with and we have the answer to the story’s question, we reach the conclusion. Here we tie up loose ends as the characters return from their adventure to normal life. It will not be the same normal life as at the beginning, but it will be clear the story is over, and that the storyteller needs to get off stage now. My rule for plays is that once the question is answered, the playwright gets one page of script, maximum, to get that curtain down and send the audience home. There is little that will ruin a good story more effectively than a conclusion that goes on and on. The question is answered. The audience is ready to go home, wants to go home, but feels trapped and soon develops a hatred for the storyteller and his story. Whatever else you do, get off stage before they throw you off stage.

Dramatic Tension
The audience needs an answer to the story’s question. The obstacles as dealt with by the characters answer secondary questions related to the main question. The flow of secondary answers increases the audience’s emotional commitment to getting a final answer. A focused excitement occurs as the approaching main answer gains importance in the audience’s mind due to the gradual assemblage of secondary answers.

At the same time, the storyteller uses obstacles to both delay the final answer and keep it in doubt. The answer’s importance and its uncertainty keep the audience glued to the story in a state of dramatic tension. The audience thinks the excitement and tension are in the story. They are mistaken. The story is neutral. The emotions are in the mind of the audience. That is “mind,” not “minds.” A good storyteller will manipulate the attention of his audience into a state where every mind is in step with every other and they think and react as one—the mind of the audience. Some time when you are in a group story situation, perhaps at a movie or a play, consciously break your attention from the story and watch the audience. If the story has them in hold, you will see the unified mind.

The manipulation of attention is at the heart of good storytelling. The audience craves being taken for the ride and gladly gives time, money, and attention to get it. The ride consists of a carefully crafted emotional sequence. If the story kept the audience at the same emotional level throughout, the story would pall. It would be monotonous. The storyteller creates a dramatic rhythm with his choice, sequence, and timing of obstacles and actions. The audience is led up and down through a variety of emotions, building to the high point at the climax. The effect is heightened if we experience the story as real, for then it has more meaning since we accept it as an accurate view of life. It carries more weight with us, so we fall into the willing suspension of disbelief for the sake of the experience. Even though we know it is a made up story, we want to know what happened, we want to know if the boy got the girl.

What happened was as the boy was trying to make himself think of how to get out of jail, his mind kept going back to his memory of the trees and bushes flying past him as he ran faster and faster trying to outrun the sheriff. The way the trees went by—Yes!—that’s how to set up the coordinates and if you do that, those terms drop out, and the equations fall into place. The boy grabbed a paper towel and wrote it out. Yes, it really worked. He had algebraically solved the Three Body Problem. Just at that moment he was allowed to make his one phone call. He was so excited he called the chief mathematician at NASA and described his solution.

A few minutes later, not only did the boy have a solid job offer from NASA, they made the sheriff let the boy out of jail and give him a ride to the church. In walked the boy just as the preacher asked if there were any objections to the marriage of the girl and Mr. Cool.

The boy exclaimed to the crowd “Yes. I have algebraically solved the Three Body Problem and I have a job with NASA.” The girl ran to him and an awful row broke out. Soon the boy and Mr. Cool were rolling on the floor fighting. Mr. Cool was getting the best of it and almost subdued the boy. At that moment, the boy realized that Newton’s Third Law of Motion can be restated as “You can’t push on anything that doesn’t push back.” Armed with that knowledge he soon got the upper hand and won the fight and married the girl on the spot.

So the boy did get the girl, and just as we hoped, they got married and lived happily ever after (except for a minor disagreement a couple of years ago about the color of the living room drapes). Mr. Cool never married, but became the assistant manager of a discount tire franchise in Wichita Falls.

* The Three Body Problem is to describe the motions of three objects in space as influenced by their mutual gravitational attraction. So far, in the real world it has never been solved algebraically.

* The boy, not the girl, is the protagonist because it is his question, not hers, that is getting answered. If the same sequence of events were told such that they followed answering her question, she would be the protagonist and it would be her story, not his, that was being told.