Every Story Has an Emotional True North, and Everything Else Points Back to It
You can see this with Little Red Riding Hood in One Sentence
What is the full magic of the one sentence story captures to which this Substack is devoted?
I’ve struggled to explain this, at times even to myself, and can never seem to settle on one metaphor that feels complete enough.
But let’s go deeper and explore using a short and probably very familiar fairy tale: Little Red Riding Hood.
The Sentence Tells Us What the Story is About, Right?
Yes, but the point of Little Red Riding Hood in One Sentence is not simply for me to tell you what Little Red Riding Hood is about. Chances are you already know this perfectly well, so repeating the information — even in an especially succinct or evocative way — would not have been a great use of my time.
If someone didn’t know the story already, the one sentence capture would give them a good sense of what emotional journey they’d be in for if they choose to spend more time with this fairy tale. And so, one sentence captures for other stories that you don’t already know are a great way to preview what they’re about and whether you’d be into them.
But this is far from the most useful thing about them!
It’s About Learning Emotional Design Tips, Isn’t It?
Nor, at least this week, is the point for us simply to draw fairy tale crafting tips by examining the overarching emotional architecture of Little Red Riding Hood, though we absolutely could do that. So much of writing craft is about shaping beautiful trees and hoping they cohere into a lovely forest, but I think it’s incredibly helpful to zoom up to 40,000 feet sometimes and study big picture forest design by looking at well-completed forests.
That will be what we’re doing here many weeks, using a wide variety of stories from across all genres, formats, time periods, etc, that you will not need to have read or watched in order to learn something from them. Though hopefully you’ll discover some unexpected stories you’re excited to spend more time with along the way!
But I think the one sentence captures are capable of doing much deeper work still.
Every Element in a Story Connects Back to Its One Sentence Capture
We can use them as a lens onto any craft element in a story because, when a one sentence capture is constructed well, it functions as an emotional north star for the entire work.
Everything in the story connects back to it somehow, or is of much less emotional importance than what does. You can use the sentence to scan every smaller element of the story — the beginning, middle, and end; every scene, character, and bit of dialogue — and see how they all point back to emotional “true north,” developing some aspect of what’s in the one sentence capture.
To use a different metaphor, the one sentence capture is the story’s core emotional spell and every other element is there to help cast it.
With that in mind, let’s look at Little Red Riding Hood (aka Little Red Cap), the Brothers Grimm version. It’s about 1000 words long, so would take you about 5 minutes to read if you want to do that first. Though, since there is little danger of me spoiling this one for you, you can also just read on and revisit the tale with increased perceptual fluency after the post.
Little Red Riding Hood in One Sentence
A girl eager to please the grandmother whose red cap gift she always wears must defeat the wolf she lets deceive and devour them both.
Character + Stakes
The very first sentence of the fairy tale tells us exactly whose head we’re going to be in, whose emotions we’re mirroring: the girl’s.
The rest of the first paragraph sets the stakes. Everyone likes the girl, but her grandmother is the person who likes her the most. If anything bad happens to grandmother, the girl would lose the person in the world who likes her the most.
Her doting grandmother also showers her with presents, particularly the iconic red cap. And it’s not like grandma has bad taste either. Little Red loves the cap, it suits her so well, she wants to wear it all the time, and she comes to be named for it.
This is by far the strongest emotional bond in this tiny story world, which is why it features heavily in the one sentence capture. It helps to define the unique emotional landscape of this tale.
Because this story is probably so familiar, by the way, it might help to imagine you’re a small child hearing it for the first time — from a committed adult who is completely selling it — and you are totally buying it.
So we have most of the first part of the one sentence capture in play in the first paragraph of the story. We haven’t fully gotten to the part where Little Red is eager to please grandmother yet, but we will.
Journey
One of the hardest things to describe when writing a one sentence capture is what a character is doing for most of the story. Because they are, of course, doing different things moment by moment!
The sentence is meant to capture the biggest, highest stakes, most emotionally impactful thing the character will have to do in this tale, which is an important part of its core emotional architecture. Much of the rest of the story is a vehicle for delivering the protagonist to this moment of truth, at least for narratives that are structured around this type of climactic moment, which is many of them.
In the second paragraph, Little Red accepts the mission from her mother to take cake and wine to her sick grandmother, and shortly after promises to stick to the path. This doesn’t really reflect the eagerness mentioned in the “one sentence” yet, she’s just accepting the errand. So while a sentence like “A girl taking cake and wine to her sick grandmother must defeat the wolf she lets deceive and devour them both” wouldn’t be wrong exactly (or a bad basic description of Little Red Riding Hood), it would be less of an emotional north star because it’s relatively passive for Red, she could just stick to the path and succeed at that task with very little drama.
But she’s about to make a much more active and dangerous choice, which is that once the wolf points out the beauty of the flowers in the forest, she thinks “If I take a bouquet to grandmother, she will be very pleased.” This is what sends her off the path she promised to stick to, the one thing important enough to her to override her promise to mother. And it’s that gap between her intent and where it actually leads them all — to her and grandmother both getting deceived and devoured by a wolf — that creates the most unique and dramatic and high stakes emotional tension this fairy tale has to offer.
The rest of the story’s middle is developing the part of the one sentence capture where Red lets the wolf deceive and devour both her and grandmother. He strikes up a conversation, gets all the information he needs to find and deceive grandmother, Red gives him the chance by leaving the path, the wolf finds and tricks and eats grandmother, and then proceeds to deceive and devour Little Red after she finally makes it to the house.
While we do spend some time in the wolf’s head and later the huntsman’s, because we were so thoroughly grounded in Red’s head and mirroring her emotions first, we still subconsciously calculate how all of their thoughts and actions will ultimately impact her.
You could close your eyes and pick out any part of the middle and see how it’s pointing back to “true north” by developing the whole “the wolf she lets deceive and devour them both” part of the story’s core emotional architecture.
Little Red’s Moment of Truth
Finally, we reach the last few paragraphs of the story, and the “must defeat” part of Little Red’s journey.
We could draw a fairy tale craft lesson right from the one sentence capture here. You might ask how a girl defeats a wolf who has already literally eaten her. But the rational logic of fairy tales never really needs to add up as long as the emotional logic does! Given that these are some of our oldest and most enduring tales, I think this reflects something of how the emotion-processing layer of our brain is much stronger and more ancient that our rational thinking layer.
In a very deus ex machina moment, a huntsman happens to come along who has been hunting this very wolf for a long time. He deduces what must have happened to the grandmother and cuts the wolf’s belly open with scissors.
How does the wolf stay asleep through all of this? It doesn’t matter!
What matters is the emotional development that Red has been given a second chance and wastes no time gathering stones that all three use to fill the wolf’s belly. She is doing the “defeating” part of her core journey.
(Eerily enough, when I finally hit on the version of Little Red’s “one sentence” that I included above, the thought of being eager to please someone but putting them in serious danger instead made me feel exactly like a stone had dropped into my stomach.)
How do the stones not just fall out as the wolf with the cut open belly tries to run away? It doesn’t matter!
What matters is the emotional development that he falls down dead, defeated by Little Red, and the three humans are happy. The huntsman gets his pelt, grandma enjoys her treats, and more important than either of these bounties, Red announces the lesson she’s learned about not leaving the path when mother says not to, thereby completely “defeating” the wolf within the world of this story.
(The Grimms include a little follow-up story showing how well Red and grandmother have learned their lesson when a different wolf tries to speak to Red, but I haven’t included that in this analysis.)
Every Story Has a One Sentence Emotional North Star, and Everything Else Revolves Around It
The value of capturing a story’s “global maxima” — of whose emotions we’re mirroring, what they’re doing, and why it matters to them — is that pulling this core emotional spell into one sentence allows us to see what every other part of the story is adding up to, and how.
That was my double meaning in choosing Lit in One Sentence as the name of this Substack: not only is it literature in one sentence, but a rigorously crafted sentence has the power to illuminate every other element of a manuscript, no matter how much you zoom in or out.
Stories seem to be emotionally self-similar in this way, at every level. Which is probably why you could read a few randomly selected fragments from across any book and get a pretty good sense of its overall emotional vibes.
It’s worth noting that this has nothing to do with the author’s intent. With Little Red, the Grimms in the 1800’s were recording a tale passed down through oral storytelling traditions from the Middle Ages.
They almost certainly never wrote a sentence like the one I did for this story. It doesn’t matter, because this phenomenon is the direct result of how our brains produce and process the emotion-transmitting patterns of story.
Every story will have an emotional “true north” that can be captured in a single sentence. And everything else in the story will point back to it.
The magic of that is what we’re here to explore.