How does story structure apply to our daily lives?

Somebody asked me recently: "I'm curious: have you (or the crew at tvtropes) made a distinction between tropes in fiction vs non-fiction?" This prompted me to talk at length about stories and how they relate to the real world, and I thought perhaps y'all would be interested in my response.

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Tropes as the TVTropes crew defines them are primarily in the domain of fiction. They're storytelling devices that authors use, either as a kind of shorthand or because they give the story good structure. You don't need to explain to the audience what a zombie or a superhero or an elf is, because they're tropes: fictional constructs that the audience can be expected to recognize at a glance. Same with structural tropes: Most stories can be boiled down to the basic framework of 1) establishing some characters and the world they live in, 2) introducing a problem that the characters have to deal with, 3) the characters struggling against that problem in a series of escalating conflicts, and 4) the characters conquering the problem at some great cost or by learning some important lesson. We use this structure because it works, it allows the audience to undergo character development alongside the protagonist, and it provides a satisfying emotional rollercoaster.

Applying storytelling tropes to the real world is something I'm still exploring. Certainly problems in our daily lives do not always conform to a satisfying narrative, but perhaps this is a matter of perspective?

Another important structural trope is the Law of Conservation of Detail, which can be summed up as "Don't waste the audience's time with things that don't matter." This is why you never see characters on TV go to the bathroom unless something important is going to happen in there. Part of the craft of storytelling is knowing which parts to skip over. I have found examples in my own life of disastrous events that made no sense at the time and seemingly contributed nothing positive to my life. But after enough time had passed, I found that these moments made me far stronger and became an irreplaceable part of my story, and if I had the chance to go back and erase that pain I wouldn't.

The specific example I'm thinking of is failing out of Azusa Pacific University in 2005. When I saw for the first time how much pain and suffering was in the world, I had a theological crisis and I couldn't make myself care about my schoolwork. My grades crashed and I lost all the scholarships that I had worked for years to achieve. As a college dropout, I decided my best option was to join the Air Force, where I learned a lot of discipline and earned the GI Bill that got me through college. Now I have a bachelor's degree and I'm a far stronger and happier person than I would be had I not gone through all that pain.

I see two possible perspectives on tropes in non-fiction. The first is that people use stories to help them make sense of a chaotic world. They are constructions we can use to convince ourselves that the world makes sense so that we can assign meaning to our lives, and tropes are the tools we use to build them.

The second possibility is that the world actually is a story--that from some perspective all the way up at the top, the world really does make sense. This requires belief in a Storyteller--a deity or other intelligence that is ordering this world into a cohesive storyline. If this is true, then studying storytelling can help us recognize patterns in history and help us anticipate plot twists before they arrive.

I leave it to you to decide which of these theories makes more sense. For my own purposes, I see some evidence that God is ordering my life into a satisfying story, despite some significant blunders on my part. It's not conclusive evidence, but it's enough to give me a reason for my faith.