A story needs a break

Most case studies I read, including early ones of my own, are chronicles. First there was a brief, then research, then three drafts, then the build. Every sentence is true, and still nobody remembers it. This text argues the following thesis: a sequence of events only becomes a story when an expectation breaks within it. The common claim that a story needs a conflict is too narrow for this. It needs a break, and whether the break is there can be tested with a simple tool, the but test.

Three models of the same observation

The oldest version is the plainest. Aristotle requires an action to be a whole, with a beginning, a middle and an end (Aristotle, ca. 335 B.C.E./1982, 1450b). In 1863 Gustav Freytag turned this into a model of drama: five parts, introduction, rise, climax, return or fall and catastrophe, linked by three moments, the first of which, the exciting force, sets the action in motion at all (Freytag, 1863). Syd Field condensed the same thing into three acts for the screenplay, setup, confrontation and resolution, separated by plot points (Field, 1979). Anna Dahlström transfers such narrative structures to the design and presentation of digital products (Dahlström, 2019).

The models differ in the number of parts, not in substance. All of them presuppose a point at which something expected does not happen: Freytag’s exciting force, Field’s first plot point. Without that point there is no rise, only sequence.

The word between the sentences

Two practitioners put this most sharply. Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of South Park, visited a storytelling class at New York University in 2011 (“South Park Creators Visit NYU Class,” 2011). There they described a rule for every sequence of scenes: between two story beats there should be the word “but” or “therefore”, not “and then” (Parker & Stone, 2011, as cited in Myers, 2022). “And then” lines things up, “but” breaks, “therefore” links cause and effect.

The rule is a rule of thumb from screenwriting practice, not a finding. It does, however, have a theoretical foundation. The psychologist Jerome Bruner, one of the founders of cognitive psychology, lists canonicity and breach among the features of narrative: a narrative is about how an implicit canonical script has been breached, violated or deviated from (Bruner, 1991, p. 11). Whoever tells a story presupposes a normality and shows its deviation. Parker and Stone’s “but” is the linguistic trace of that breach.

The counter-test: kishōtenketsu

If this holds, there should be narratives that do without conflict and still are not mere chronicles. There are. Kishōtenketsu, a four-part structure that originates in Chinese poetry and is widespread in East Asian literature (in Korean as gi seung jeon gyeol), consists of introduction (ki), development (shō), twist (ten) and reconciliation (ketsu). Conflict is not a driving force in it; the plot develops through events and revelations, and in the ten a contrasting element is introduced (Oh, 2025, pp. 2–4).

For the thesis this is a test, not a refutation. Kishōtenketsu refutes the claim that a story needs a conflict. But the ten is a breach in Bruner’s sense: it departs from the expectation that ki and shō have built up. This yields the more precise formulation this text argues for: narratives need a break; conflict is only its most common form.

The but test in four steps

For designers this is more than literary theory. Case studies, pitches and presentations are narratives, and many fail because they are chronicles. The but test makes this visible:

1. Break it down. Write the project in six to ten sentences, one event per sentence, without judgement.
2. Connect. Between every two sentences put the word that actually fits: “and then”, “but” or “therefore”. Don’t dress anything up where there is only sequence.
3. Count and name. How often does “and then” appear? And which expectation breaks? Write that expectation down in one sentence. If you can’t, the break is missing, and no layout replaces it.
4. Rebuild. Either delete every “and then” or turn it into a cause. Where there is no opponent, no resistance, no failure, set the break as a contrast, as in the ten: something unexpected that makes what came before readable in a new way.

My own case studies follow the scheme challenge, approach, outcome. That is a three-part division like Field’s, and the test shows where it holds: the challenge is only a break if it names an expectation that did not work out, not merely a task.

Why it is worth it, and where the limit lies

That narratives have an effect is empirically supported, if indirectly. In several experiments, Green and Brock (2000) showed that readers who are more transported into a story afterwards hold beliefs more consistent with it and evaluate its characters more favourably. Whether the story was labelled as fact or fiction made essentially no difference. For design communication this means: a case study read as a story is more likely to stick than one read as a report.

What these studies do not show is the relationship that matters here. They measure the effect of transportation, not the effect of a break. That “but” strengthens transportation is therefore a hypothesis. It could be tested with the same method: two versions of the same case study, one as a chronicle, one with a named break, measured with Green and Brock’s (2000) transportation scale and a question testing what readers can retell afterwards. It also remains open whether a contrast of the ten kind has the same effect on a Western audience as a conflict, or whether it is read there as a missing punchline.