All that you have
is light and texture
What makes a good movie?
Let alone a noir.
Let alone a novel.
Let alone a tall tale. You spin your world out of threads - gossamer, glitter, half-remembered dreams - but what will make your stories retold? If there are truly only seven stories, then why begin at all? Haven’t they all been written already? And hasn’t someone else already bottled the formula, labelled it, and locked it in a drawer?
So what’s left?
Here’s the hidden provocation:
Stories are not remembered because they are new.
They are remembered because they are yours.
A noir is not noir because of the shadows. It is noir because of what those shadows reveal: your moral weather, your obsessions, the way you imagine a person standing on the lip of ruin.
A good movie is not good because its plot is fresh; it is good because its characters flicker alive in a way they never have in this exact moment, with these exact fears, desires and flaws.
A tall tale endures because someone tells it with a glint in their eye.
A novel endures because the author once hurt in a way that only this story could explain.
A noir endures because corruption, desire, guilt, and fate become a mirror - and someone, somewhere, recognises themselves in the tarnish.
And the formula? The seven stories? They are scaffolding. They do not dictate the shape of the cathedral. They do not predict the stained glass. They cannot hear the echo of your footfall in the nave.
There are only seven stories because there are only so many things a human heart can break over.
There are infinite stories because every break is different.
What gives a story its pulse?
Voice - your fingerprint, your cadence, the way you slant the light.
Perspective - who you allow to speak, and who you refuse to let off the hook.
Moral charge - what the story believes is at stake for humanity.
Emotion - not declared, but revealed through what the characters choose and what they cannot bear to choose.
Specificity - the trap Ezekiel built in the romance I wrote in January (un-Marple as it may be), the grief Sarah carries, the coffee bar where she shouldn’t have been.
Tension - the ‘will she, won’t she,’ the inexorable pull of what feels wrong but fills the void.
Risk - not merely the characters’ risk, but yours: what you dare to reveal when you tell it.
This is the great secret:
You don’t start a story because no one else has written it.
You start because no one else can write your version of it.
And that is why it matters.
That is why readers retell.
Not because they have never heard the tale -
but because they have never heard you tell it.
Marple December 2025