You're partway through a book - or a game, or a series - and someone asks how it is. Without even thinking, you say something like: "It's getting somewhere now," or "It felt like it was going nowhere," or just "I don't know where it's headed."
Notice anything? You've described a story entirely in terms of movement. A destination. A journey. And you probably didn't give it a second thought, because that's just... how we talk about stories. But why?
We've Always Mapped Stories onto Space
The connection between narrative and travel is old - genuinely ancient. Apparently the earliest recorded long-form stories we have, the Epic of Gilgamesh included, are structured as physical journeys. The hero leaves, moves through the world, arrives somewhere changed. The story and the trip are the same thing.
Linguists and cognitive scientists sometimes talk about how humans use physical, spatial concepts to understand abstract ideas. Time, relationships, arguments - we talk about all of them in spatial terms. An argument has ground you can't cover. A relationship goes through phases. Time passes. Stories, being one of the most abstract things humans engage with, lean heavily on the most concrete metaphor we have: moving through space.
So when a story "drags," it's moving too slowly. When it "rushes," it's moving too fast. A plot "twist" bends the path. A "cliffhanger" leaves you dangling mid-step. We've built an entire vocabulary out of the assumption that a story is a route, and we are walking it.
What Does It Mean for a Story to "Go Nowhere"?
Here's where it gets interesting. The movement metaphor isn't just decorative - it carries real expectations about what a story is supposed to do.
If a story is a journey, then it should arrive. Not necessarily at a happy place. Not necessarily at a tidy one. But somewhere. A journey that loops back on itself, or that just stops in a field, or that adds more road every time you approach the end - that's not a satisfying journey. That's a treadmill.
"Going nowhere" is one of the sharpest criticisms you can level at a story, and it's interesting that we reach for this particular phrase rather than, say, "nothing happened" or "it was boring." Saying it goes nowhere implies that it had the shape of going somewhere - it just never delivered. It promised a destination and quietly swapped it for a gift card to more journey.
We've written before about why a story that ends is worth more than one that doesn't, and this is really the same instinct from a different angle. The movement metaphor makes us expect arrival. When arrival never comes, it doesn't just feel unfinished - it feels like we were lied to about the nature of the trip.
The Protagonist as Traveller (and Why That's Not a Coincidence)
Most stories, when you strip them back, involve a character going from one state to another. Not necessarily across a physical landscape - though plenty do that too - but through an emotional or moral one. They understand something they didn't. They lose something. They become something. Internal movement mapped onto, or alongside, external movement.
The most enduring story structures - the hero's journey being the obvious one, though that label gets overused to the point of meaninglessness - are literally described as circular paths. You leave home, you go out into the world, you return. The world has changed you, or you've changed the world, or both. The circle closes. Tea, presumably, is drunk. Everything settles.
What makes a protagonist feel real, as opposed to a narrative function wearing a name badge, is often this sense of trajectory. Do they want something? Does wanting it take them somewhere? Does arriving (or failing to arrive) mean something? The spatial metaphor gives us a way to ask all of those questions at once: where are they going?
It's worth noting that characters who actually remember what's happened to them feel like they're genuinely travelling - because their past is carried with them, shaping where they step next. A character with no memory of earlier events isn't on a journey; they're just standing in a series of different rooms.
Why This Matters for Interactive Stories
In traditional fiction, the author controls the route. You might feel like you're travelling, but you're really on a guided tour. In interactive fiction - anything where your choices shape the path - the movement metaphor becomes literal as well as figurative. You are actually deciding which way to go.
That's exciting. It's also where things can collapse. Because if the story doesn't hold together as a journey - if it just generates more terrain indefinitely without shape, consequence, or destination - then the movement metaphor breaks. You're not a traveller. You're just... wandering. And wandering can be pleasant for a while, but it doesn't make for a story you'll remember.
The interactive fiction we're building - Wordfarer, in development for Android and iOS - is built around this idea of a tale that actually goes somewhere. A real shape to the narrative: chapters that build, characters who carry the weight of what's happened, and a genuine ending rather than an ever-expanding horizon. The journey closes. That's the whole point.
"Where Is This Going?" Is the Right Question
Next time you catch yourself asking that about a book, a film, or a game - sit with it for a second. You're not just asking about plot. You're asking whether the story has a destination worth heading towards. Whether the road is leading anywhere. Whether the traveller is going to arrive.
Those are the questions that separate stories that stay with you from ones that drift out of your head the moment you put them down. The ones you remember are the ones that felt like they knew where they were going - even when the route surprised you.
Funny, that we reach for a walking metaphor to talk about sitting still and reading. But then, maybe that's the whole trick of stories: they make you feel like you've gone somewhere, without leaving your chair.