Not long ago, I had an editing client who had meticulously plotted his story according to the most reputable advice he found. He’d read dozens of books, spent thousands of dollars on seminars and workshops, and worked one-on-one with a mentor and two other editors – one of them prestigious. For each chapter, he’d thought through his inciting incident, climax, resolution, and more. But despite all of that work, he still didn’t have the knowledge he needed to plot his novel. Every time an editor looked at it, it needed another overhaul.
And his experience isn’t unique. I’ve talked to writers who received rejection after rejection without knowing what they were doing wrong. I’ve heard from people who felt that trying to write a good story was akin to rolling the dice.
We’ve been taught that this is just how things are, but that’s not true. It’s happening because no one is teaching the most essential lesson in storytelling.
Instruction Is Failing Us
Generally, it’s expected that when teachers give assignments, they will teach students how to complete the assignment. If the student masters every lesson the teacher delivers, they should have the skills necessary to get a good grade. In almost all classes, this is taken for granted. That’s just how teaching works.
But as soon as creative writing is the subject matter, no one believes that anymore. Many teachers just tell students to write a story and then mark points off when it isn’t engaging, without offering any instruction on how to make it so. It’s as if they expect students to walk in the door already knowing what the class is supposed to teach.
Once they leave school, people can demand more value in exchange for their money, but they are left to piece together an education on their own. With schools setting such a low bar, aspiring authors might not even realize they have something to learn, much less what. They aren’t in a position to scold editors for being vague or distinguish good advice from bad. Learners are easy to take advantage of, and even instructors with the best intentions may not be helpful.
Why aren’t we getting a better storytelling education? Because most instructors don’t know what they know.
You’ve probably heard the phrase “I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it.” Perhaps you can also remember a time when you couldn’t articulate why you made a specific judgment about something or someone. This happens because much of our knowledge is subconscious. Our brain is recognizing patterns on its own, without our awareness.
Now imagine that you know it when you see it, but you have a student who doesn’t know it when they see it. Your student needs to replicate what they can’t see. How would you instruct them?
If you’re trying to teach storytelling, you might tell them:
- Read lots of books.
- Get lots of practice by writing every day.
- Change methods. Finish every story, or alternately, let go of your current story and write a different one. Outline. Don’t outline.
- Ask yourself lots of contemplative, open-ended questions about your writing.
- Sorry, but you just have to be born knowing it when you see it. Only the chosen are worthy!
In a best-case scenario, an instructor in this position will ask students to write a story without direction and then use their gut to describe what each story needs in imprecise terms. Then it’s up to the students to make sense of this and come up with a strategy for doing better.
Unsurprisingly, these teaching techniques usually fail, and when they do, the student will be blamed. But the failure is the instructor’s; they neglected to make their conscious mind discover what their subconscious knows. We cannot teach what we do not understand.
So, what is it that instructors see but can’t articulate? Lots of things, but one thing in particular.
What Is a Story?
No really, what does that word actually mean? What is the thing it represents?
A layperson or learner often thinks that a story is any recounting of events; the storyteller chooses whatever events they feel like. Let’s test this, shall we?
A pebble fell. Mia walked to class in her red sweater. The price of Microsoft stock went up by a dollar.
Is that a story you would tell to someone? Why not? It has a sequence of events.
Mia is only in the middle sentence. Maybe this isn’t a story because it lacks a main character that features throughout. Let’s try that and see if it’s still lousy.
Mia dropped a pebble. Mia walked to class in her red sweater. Mia sold Microsoft stock after the price went up.
You might consider this an improvement, but Mia clearly hasn’t turned this situation around. No one would tell this as a story, so a sequence of events featuring a person does not, in itself, create one.
You might be screaming that it needs a plot. But what is a plot, exactly? We can’t say three acts; there are already three acts right there. They aren’t good acts, but that’s my point. It’s not having three acts in itself that matters, and by the same token, simply having a beginning, middle, and end won’t do it.
Maybe it needs rising action, a climax, and falling action. You know, the one thing your grade school actually taught you about stories. But did your grade school break down exactly what “rising action” was? Since the answer is probably “no,” let’s go with the simplest layman’s definition. It means getting in bigger fights as the story continues. I’ll add another sentence so the rising action is longer than the falling action. Also, I’ll be generous and say Mia is still a main character, in case that helps.
Mia dropped a pebble. Mia wrestled another student in her red sweater. Mia fought pirates out on the ocean. Mia sold Microsoft stock after the price went up by a dollar.
Ta-da! It’s the story you were taught to write in grade school. Except it’s not a story. If you tilt your head and squint, maybe it looks a bit like a baby book, but only because I haven’t bothered to vary the sentence structure much.
Well, folks, we are a big failure as writers. Clearly we were not chosen. But like any aspiring storyteller who makes it anywhere, let’s keep trying.
Our biggest problem is that the events in our wannabe story don’t feel related. But how do they need to be related? Let’s go back 2,300 years and use Aristotle’s advice in Poetics. It’s hard to understand him, but he essentially means each event in the plot should cause the next one to occur. He specifically stated that featuring one character throughout isn’t necessary.
A pebble fell. Mia heard it hit the ground and paused to look for it. She spotted some litter instead and threw it away.
You’ve failed us, Aristotle. This follows the three Neoclassical Unities and everything, and it still isn’t a story. However, it does feel like it could be part of a story, so we’re probably getting closer.
Let’s add in another definition I find occasionally, which is probably from theater. A story features a character pursuing a goal. Let’s give Mia a goal to pursue throughout. To speed things up, I’ll not only keep adhering to Aristotle’s rule of causality, but I’ll also end with Mia achieving her goal, even though an ending isn’t usually specified in this definition.
Mia wanted a shiny pebble. She walked outside where there were pebbles. She grabbed a shiny pebble and put it in her pocket.
That’s a little better. The events are not only related, but it also feels like there’s a reason why it starts where it does and ends where it does. Even so, it’s definitely missing something, because the whole thing feels too unremarkable to tell to someone.
Let’s give it that thing writers are always talking about: conflict. What is that? I’ll give you the definition for free: it is a protagonist struggling to achieve a goal. That means getting the pebble needs to be difficult for Mia.
Mia wanted a shiny pebble. She walked outside where there were pebbles. Unfortunately, it was dark, and try though she might, she couldn’t see which pebbles were shiny. Finally, she took out her phone and used the flashlight app. Mia found a shiny pebble and put it in her pocket.
We’re getting warmer; this is starting to look like a story. But the shiny pebble still feels so trivial. Who cares?
To make people care, storytellers do what’s called “raising the stakes.” This means making it so bad things will happen if Mia doesn’t get that shiny pebble and good things will happen if she does. Let’s add some stakes – though we have to let go of our dear friend, the pebble.
Through the window, Mia saw a gold coin shining in the grass. With that coin, she could pay for the medication she needed. She went outside to find the coin. Unfortunately, it was getting dark, and try though she might, she couldn’t see it shining anymore. Finally, she took out her phone and used the flashlight app. Mia spotted the gold coin and put it in her pocket.
I think we have a story! It’s not a perfect one, something about her finding the coin with her flashlight app doesn’t feel right. But at this point, I don’t think many people would claim it isn’t a story.
We got here by:
- Making each event cause the event after it.
- Writing about a character pursuing a goal.
- Giving the character a conflict over their goal.
- Ending with the character achieving their goal.
- Giving the goal significant stakes.
Well, I guess that’s it. We’re done. Or are we? For these criteria to be a good definition of what a story is, not only must they force us to create a story, but they shouldn’t rule out any stories.
So let’s reverse. Instead of writing the worst thing I can that follows the rules, I’ll try to write something that’s indisputably a story yet breaks them.
An alien ship landed just outside of town, emitting cosmic rays that made everyone nearby sick. Most of the townsfolk fled, but not Mia. She was going to make those aliens pay for hurting people. Mia grabbed a rocket launcher and raced toward the unwelcome ship. As she aimed her rocket launcher, she realized the ship was smoking and the aliens huddled about it looked sick, too. She put down the rocket launcher and instead gathered together tools and materials to send to the aliens. Using the gifts, the aliens repaired their ship and flew away. Once they did, the town recovered.
This story doesn’t begin with Mia or her goal, and then after Mia appears, her goal changes. While the story as a whole certainly has stakes, it’s arguable whether or not Mia’s initial goal does, or whether what’s in here qualifies as conflict. But hey, look: Aristotle’s rule is intact. How does it feel knowing that we’ve had this essential piece of advice for 2,300 years and your school still didn’t teach it?
So if a character pursuing a goal can be a story but isn’t always, what do events actually need to be a story? This time we have to skip to the end, because you and I don’t have all day.
It’s not the specifics of an event that matters; it’s what feeling it evokes. A story opens with something, anything, that evokes tension. Tension essentially means readers are concerned about an uncertain outcome. While there is no perfect word in English for this, I think “problem” is the closest fit. When Mia was hunting for that gold coin, the problem was that she couldn’t pay for her medication. In the alien story, it’s that the townspeople are in danger. Then the story ends when the uncertainty is gone. Mia has the money she needs; the town is saved.
Looking at how difficult the simplest story was to define, you might understand why instructors are having trouble teaching the basics. And this is only the tiniest tip of the storytelling iceberg. What happens when the story is the size of a novel? Don’t stories still need rising action and a climax? How important is the main character? If you’re looking for these answers, I recommend starting with the articles under our Story Plotting 101 tag.
Difficult or not, storytelling can be taught, and simply telling students to go write a story without proper instruction isn’t fair to them. But this problem doesn’t just affect people who are learning storytelling for the first time. If your foundation is cracked, how sturdy will your house be?
How Missing Knowledge Affects Our Practices
While many storytellers pick up a gut feeling for storytelling through practice, vague feedback, and osmosis, it will never serve them as well as if they actually understood what they’re doing. The gut can only tell us whether something in a story works, not why. So when a storyteller tries a new type of story or removes something they didn’t know was important, they can find themself with a broken story they don’t know how to fix.
Not only that, but many common storytelling practices disregard the most basic lesson of our workshop: that events must be related.
We Waste Time With Popular Structures
Our ignorance has led to the proliferation of story structures like The Hero’s Journey, Save the Cat, or even just three acts. These are akin to the classic grade-school graph of rising action, climax, and falling action, except they are expressed in a series of stages. For instance, The Hero’s Journey is a sequence that starts with The Ordinary World, The Call to Adventure, and The Passing of the Threshold.
When a person who has a strong gut understanding of storytelling looks at these stages, they subconsciously fill in all the things we went over in our workshop, such as tension and causality. Then if they plot a great story using the structure, they assume the structure is responsible. But the structure didn’t do that; they did. The Hero’s Journey doesn’t include anything about making events feel related.
Because of this, many of the formulas that are supposed to help writers plot their stories are just snake oil. For more, see my full article breaking down why popular structures don’t work.
We Fracture Stories Into Disconnected Pieces
If you view stories as a series of miscellaneous events instead of a cohesive unit, that will change your storytelling choices. Even if you subconsciously know events should be related, you also won’t understand the harm of abandoning that when it’s convenient. This explains why techniques that interrupt story flow are so overused.
- Interludes: These are like book intermissions, and they appear to exist solely because storytellers can’t resist the temptation to insert extra content no one is interested in. However, an interlude never comes with a guarantee that it won’t contain anything that’s important to the rest of the story, so many readers will feel compelled to read it even if they don’t want to.
- Multiple points of view: While a great tool in the right situation, writers often use them to take several completely different stories, mix them in the blender, and then stuff them into one book.
- Disconnected prologues: When writers have trouble creating a compelling opening – or just don’t want to bother – they instead take the opening of a different story and paste it up front. But the interest and excitement of a prologue isn’t likely to spill over into an unrelated chapter one.
Interrupting the story at hand to jump to unrelated events has significant repercussions for audience engagement. Writers should consider this carefully before doing it.
We Can’t Build Off of What We Don’t Know
Without an understanding of the most basic question in storytelling, how can a storyteller hope to master the more advanced ones? We were just looking at a summarized story the length of a paragraph. A novel could easily be 100,000 words long. Once you understand how stories work, what you need to do with all those words is pretty clear. Before then, you might find yourself inserting random events to take up space.
But the average instructor can’t explain that to you, just as they probably can’t explain exactly how to pace your story or what movement is. They’re likely to give a descriptive but not particularly insightful answer on how to plot a novel series. They almost certainly can’t tell you precisely what it takes to make a climax and end feel satisfying. All of this requires understanding stories as a basic unit, and then using that brick to build a house. No brick means no house.
Several months after instructing my hard-working but struggling client, he contacted me to let me know what a huge difference my foundation-level lessons had made to him. After learning from me and revising his story, the next professional finally told him “this is a book.” His novel still needed smaller-scale work, but it no longer needed to be rewritten.
P.S. Our bills are paid by our wonderful patrons. Could you chip in?
Being explicit and telling students exactly what they need to know is good advice for every teacher.
I always tell my students very explicitly what philosophers mean by “intuition”, because I and many others felt that when we were new to the field, this was something you were expected to get via osmosis or something, just from reading texts and hearing people use “intuition” and “intuit” in context. Let’s just say that learning the concept this way was awkward and took some time.
I think the main problem is that we don’t really know how stories work, deep down at the core. We like telling them, because that’s how we explain our world, but we have never fully dissected and analysed them. As you pointed out, the advice we have – built on what we know – isn’t helpful if you haven’t already understood something about a story.
Reading books helps insofar as it gives you experience in stories. You begin to understand on a certain level how the stories work. That’s why, for instance, a book about plot structure I read recently pointed out that you need to understand the genre conventions to fill out the middle of the story, because then you know what people expect from that part. Beginning and end are always more or less the same, but the middle of a cosy mystery novel and the middle of an espionage story will vary greatly. To understand what needs to go there, reading stories from that genre is necessary.
I’d also say all your ‘stories’ from ‘Mina wanted a pebble’ onwards are technically stories – just not very interesting ones in the first few cases. ‘Interesting’ differs from reader to reader, though, some might like the ‘shiny pebble’ story.
I’ve also found that writing stories I would like to read works for me – by assuming that I’m not the only person in the world who would like to read that kind of story. That’s no writing advice, though, because it gives no real help to people who haven’t written before or aren’t sure what is missing from their story.
Have you every thought about writing a book about storytelling&writing, so there’d be at least one out there that does teach the basics and articulates them clearly? In my critique groups, I often find people who could benefit from these foundation-level lessons, but I have a hard time getting them to read a list of blog articles. I guess it appears less professional than a book. And even when they do check out the blog, I often find out that they didn’t read the “Story Plotting 101” articles, because they think they know that stuff already.
I really hope Chris compiles everything into a book someday!
I definitely want to, it’s just my time is very limited because blogging for Mythcreants is something I currently do on top of my paid work. Fingers crossed that I’ll be able to start on something like that this year.
Another small remark: I’d add your article about character karma to your “Plotting 101” tag. At least for me, it was a revelation and I think it really helps to better understand attachment and satisfaction.
Good to know. I think it was there before, and I took it off. I’ll put it back.
I think structures are not as bad as you make them look. They do give just that, structure. A way for us to organize the content to achieve a more engaging/succesfull story. If you have a better way to arrange the events than the Hero’s Jurney, you should already used it, but in absence of it , it is a good point to fall back. You can even divide the Hero’s Journey into a 3 acts structure or, like me, make everything 3 act from scenes to chapters to parts, just to organize and prevent the “flow” to be random and nonsensical.
I mainly agree with everything else, plus the trend of using the adaggio “it is an Art, not a Science” while most of the art forms have a quite lot of science backing it up (i.e anatomy or perspective regarding to drawing). The article on Arousal Misattribution being an example applicable to writing.
I actually think the four quarters and eight sequences work a lot better than the hero’s journey. They’re not gendered and they can be adapted for every genre.
Yet, structure will only help if you have a basic understanding of what makes a good story. The structure can make it better, can help you pinpoint problems, can tell you where something specific (like the midpoint twist or the dark moment) should happen. Yet, they do not define what a story is or how it really works. They optimize your story, but if it’s lacking things that make for a good story, they will not help.
I think it the nature of stories goes even deeper than that.
Your article “How to Use Story Structure in Non-Narrative Writing” made me ponder about the difference between fiction and non-fiction. Ultimately, they are both forms of communication. The only differences are that fiction relies on our imagination and normally has a more rigid structure than non-fiction.
While fiction usually doesn’t have a thesis like non-fiction does, it’s still communicating to the reader.
Power fantasy stories, for example, are a way of telling the reader how awesome they are.
Romances tell the reader that there are people out there that desire them.
Horror and thriller are all about making them feel worried for a while before resolving that tension in the end.
Sci-fi and fantasy are more-or-less about taking them on a mental journey through strange worlds (at least traditionally).
I think, before even selecting a throughline, it can help to figure out what the overall theme or mood of the story is supposed to be as, subconsciously or not, that’s what readers are looking for and that can decide about success or failure of the story.
I’ve read quite a few stories that were utterly terrible by the rules Mythcreants reached, but that were still extremely successful because the author knew their audience. The best example are probably isekais and LitRPGs – most don’t even finish (as they are usually released in serialized form), center around ultra-candied characters, and lack any plot beyond “the protagonist levels up every chapter”.
At the end of the day, I believe this is where the myth of talent comes from. If you see storytelling as a form of communication, social skills are likely a relevant factor. Those who are really good at impressing people will probably have an easier time subconsciously picking up the “rules” they need to follow to achieve their results. They only need to read a few books in their genre and find out what the audience wants to see. I don’t have any data on this, but I can see a connection between my struggles with writing and my general struggles in the soft skill area.
Don’t get me wrong. I believe there absolutely rules and formulas that writers can learn to achieve results and the sort of tips Mythcreants gives are among them. It’s just, I’d rather see them as suggestions than rules. That is, they help, but, with writing being a soft skill, I can understand why writing culture is the way it is.
I really like this comment. Stories are communicating to the reader, and the writers who understand what their audience wants tend to be more successful. I like your example of stories that are basically just wish-fulfillment, but the writer knows that that’s the purpose of the story and doesn’t try to pretend that it’s a literary masterpiece.
Love you came back to the client. I was properly invested in finding out if the advice made a concrete difference to his story telling.
I have to admit, I got a little lost after the list of things that build a story – tick, great – to the breaking down of all the things on the list a story doesn’t actually have to have. Err… I think I missed what was left.
Making each event cause the event after it. – Causation definitely essential
Writing about a character pursuing a goal. – Consistent goal not essential, though they always need to want something causationally related?
Giving the character a conflict over their goal. – Struggle to achieve goal is essential, but as goal can change, so can the type of struggle?
Ending with the character achieving their goal. – Not essential, as the goal can change. The thing that needs to be resolved at the end is not necessarily any one goal but the tension/problem presented at the beginning?
Giving the goal significant stakes. – Essential for the problem/its resolution to matter, and is expressed in tension established at opening?
Please forgive me for a bit of a meta response, but I feel like I’m on the edge of grasping what this article is about. I suspect it comes down to my still fuzzy understanding of definitions, or perhaps there’s an overlap that’s confusing me. I think better in examples (and writing down my processing), so I’ve sketched out a mini story and am trying to piece out what the features are. If I’m not getting it, I’m really hoping someone will set me straight.
So here is the story.
An endless line of writing students enter and exit writing classes, and still can’t produce a working story. Many believe the failure is entirely their own fault, get depressed and give up.
One of these students is a boy. Despite countless hours and thousands of dollars in instruction, the boy’s dream of writing a novel is falling short. He questions if he will ever write a novel that works.
After wandering hopelessly though the wilderness of writing advice land, he stumbles into the backwater realm of Mythcreants. They talk about story differently. He’s intrigued, but is unsure how their advice applies to his story.
Personalised advice will cost more money and there is a waitlist, but the boy has a glimmer of hope.
He applies for an editorial assessment.
The editorial feedback is delivered, and he is given the golden key of story foundation. His story needs events with causation, and tension which opens at the beginning and resolves at the end. Boy is mind blown.
He revises his story, and though it needs tweaking, finally it works.
And here are my attempts at breaking the story down.
Problem – writing students enter and exit writing classes, and still can’t produce a working story
Stakes – many believe the failure is entirely their own fault, get depressed and give up
Tension at opening – will students get the advice need to succeed?
Protagonist – boy is one of these students, he is losing hope
Causation & struggle – boy wanders hopelessly through the wilderness of writing advice land
Turning point – boy discovers Mythcreants
Resolution – boy is intrigued by their different approach to story-telling advice
Causation & struggle with rising stakes – so lost in the hugeness of the novel, he’s unsure how to apply their advice to his own work. Personalised advice will cost more money and there’s a waitlist, but the boy has a glimmer of hope.
Turning point – boy applies for an editorial assessment.
Resolution – the editorial feedback is delivered. He has been given the golden key to story foundation. Boy is mind blown.
Tension resolved – boy revises his story, and finally it works. Other students can do this too.
I think the thing which surprised me, was that the resolution of the final turning point, which I suppose was the climax, was not enough to resolve the broader tension. Intellectually I knew the student had already been given the advice we were reading about in the post, but I needed the explicit resolution of the beginning tension to know someone had taken this advice and succeeded.
Anyway, if I’ve not broken it down properly, or my questions to the application of the earlier points is off, I’d enormously appreciate the feedback.
Sorry if I made things overly complicated. I was delving into some of the frameworks people use for stories outside of Mythcreants.
The character goal only becomes essential at the turning point, because the character needs agency there. They have to be trying to do something – which means they have a goal. That doesn’t equal agency, but it’s one of the prerequisites for agency.
The purpose of stakes is to help satisfy the requirements for tension. The negative side of stakes (something bad that could happen), is one of the prerequisites for tension.
The “causation” portion is what we typically refer to here as “movement.”
You’re absolutely right that the bit about my client was a story beginning and end. Trying to put in a proper turning point in there is a bit tough though.
What’s in this article was simply a demonstration. To understand the requirements of stories, head over to these articles: https://mythcreants.com/blog/tag/plot-101/
Sorry Chris, I don’t think your article is over-complicated. But integrating your points into what I’ve understood up to this point, might be.
Thank you for the clarifications!
Great post! :) Would also highly recommend the Brandon Sanderson lessons on Youtube for anyone looking for the basics and more.
On his channel, he has uploaded the most recent writing class he taught and there is heaps of more content from the past years. Helped me lots to get motivated and know where to start!
Honestly, I have always thought that stories are just the modern form of myth. The oldest litterature is religious / magical.
So if you look at what the Greeks called Mythos :
– events are connected : Zeus under form of a swan had children with the woman Leda, who were the mortal Castor and the immortal Pollux = the Gemini, they emerged from an egg ; you have cause & effect but clearly they need not be realistic, they can be magical / symbolical… And in Greek myhtology chains of events are very long, if you look at the Atreids family for example, Also, several of them are linked : many heros embarked on the Argo to help Jason, lots of characters intervene in the Trojan War and all have their backstory and sometimes a story after such as Cassandra, Andromachos or Ulysses…
– there is conflict : Apollo had to kill the serpent Pytho before he could found his temple of Delphae, and that was because he had been deceived by a nymph into believing the site cursed by the serpent’s presence was more suitable than her source… (he punished the nymph afterwards)
– you have high stakes : Zeus avenged himself and his siblings by killing his father Cronos and imprisoning the other Titans in the Tartaros, then committed Hades to guard it as the new king of the Cosmos ; he then restored Order to the world and this was supposed to last forever, as explained by Hesiod in the Theogony.
So you see, no need to read books on story structure. Just read a lot of mythology, gest ost into it and you will naturally “feel” what a story is like, because the basic rules have always been there.
Or test a bedtime story on a child and you will know if anything is wrong at once, because children tell you outright and always ask the right question : “but why ?”.
It’s actually the opposite way. Myths and legends work because they have regular story structure. Because humans explain the world around them in stories (the second “The Science of Diskworld” book is full of scientific explanations for that). We’re not ‘homo sapiens,’ we’re ‘pan narrans’ – the story-telling ape.
Each myth gives you the starting point (because stories have to start somewhere). Each myth has twists and turns, following a conflict that starts early and goes to the end, usually with a twist somewhere at midpoint and a horrible moment before the hero prevails. Each myth ends somewhere (because you can’t continue to tell the story of the descendants of the descendants of the descendants of your original characters forever).
Myths are mentioned in books on structure – most prevalent in “The Hero with a Thousand Faces”, but they’re also in others. Myths are stories and follow the same structure. Real life, on the other hand, refuses to follow story structure.
Mia dropped a pebble. Mia wrestled another student in her red sweater. Mia fought pirates out on the ocean. Mia sold Microsoft stock after the price went up by a dollar.
I can’t be the only one who’s trying to think of a way for Mia’s fight with the pirates to affect the price of Microsoft stock. Maybe they’re *software* pirates – among other nefarious deeds like stealing Mia’s red sweater and selling it to another student – and putting them out of business meant more people bought software instead of pirating it, which increased the value of her Microsoft stock.
(That makes the battle with the pirates a turning point, with a child-arc turning point when she got the fellow student to give up where she bought the sweater that had been stolen from Mia).
The dropped pebble is representative of Mia being in a disconsolate mood – actually foreshadowing for the sequel, in which she learns she shouldn’t be fighting for software giants at the expense of people so badly off that they need to buy stolen clothes from pirates.