What draws audiences into a film, book, or play is engagement with the story it communicates. Everything else is secondary to that. Unless I’m engaged by story in some form, I’m out of there. Inventiveness about how that story is delivered is welcome, as long as it enhances that immersion in the story and doesn’t detract from it. Which is why the formal inventiveness of the graphic novel Asterios Polyp gets in the way of me liking it, where the creativity John Pham brings to the pages of Sublife makes me warm to his comics work all the more. Asterios Polyp’s creator David Mazzuchelli deconstructs the story he’s telling before your very eyes, drawing attention to the methods he’s using to get it across. Pham, conversely, uses experimental art techniques in the service of story, embracing cubist and other methods to get across the effect of travelling through space beyond light speed on the crew.

It all comes back to character. And that works for pretty much any narrative I’ve enjoyed as a film, comic, book or play. Character and plot need to advance together, or the effect is lost. I read a Jeffrey Archer novel once just to see what got so many people to buy the things. It was very well plotted, but there was zero sense of the characters as living beings. Stuff happened to them, some of it pretty grim, but they carried on regardless, remorsely making their way from one plot point to another like robots. At the other extreme, there’s Tarantino’s Death Proof, where his well known penchant for dialogue heavy writing runs away with him and there’s a disconnect between the verbose exchanges of the characters and the action of the film. They’re talking for the sake of it, which can be enjoyable, but without it being bound to story beats comes across as self indulgent.

Perhaps no surprise then, that some of my favourite stories are those which move the plot forward, have three dimensional characters, and good dialogue — and where the writer’s intelligence is firmly in the service of story. That’s very much the case with one of my favourite screenwriters, David Mamet. And it’s true in a different way for novelist Lee Child, whose Jack Reacher thrillers are masterclasses in creating apparently effortless stories. See also Carla Speed McNeil’s ‘aboriginal sf’ comic Finder, where every line — written or drawn — counts for something in depicting character and situation.

Effectively, stories are a kind of trance, and I don’t like to see that trance interrupted. Not unless it’s done within the context of the artwork itself, rather than to remind you that it is indeed a confection. Yawn: that stuff has very low appeal to me. That said, I do find some metafictions appealing. It’s all about the spirit in which it’s done. Cartoon characters have been finding out that they’re animated since the birth of the medium, in playful ways. But somehow my hackles rise when presented with a Jasper fforde book — there’s an overwhelming smugness about the enterprise that seems to be about a clever chappie telling me what books he’s read. Compare with the delicious experience of Steven Hall’s novel The Raw Shark Texts, which is postmodern and all the rest of it, but keeps you engaged with the story and characters throughout — a sheer delight.

What is it about story that entices? Well, let’s go back to that notion of trance. We go in and out of trances throughout the day: you could argue that each mood is its own trance, shaping your consciousness and consequent behaviour. Sometimes those trances are accidental, a function of identifying with the situation we’re caught up in — stuck in traffic, waiting in a queue, fantasising about someone we find attractive. And the story trance is one in which we have the opportunity to empathise with someone who’s like us, in some ways, but isn’t us. Who is up against obstacles that are in all likelihood on a mightier scale than the ones in our own lives. And who surmounts those obstacles — in most stories — and in the process tells us something about our emotions, raises questions about morality, points to inner truths. Which, if we’re looking at 90 minutes or so of film, or 250 pages of a book, is a lot to ask. But explains why so many of us relish the experience of story, whatever form it’s presented in.