I responded to the question by stating that you might just as well ask if a story needs a purpose or if the characters need to be interesting.

I think most writers would agree with the basic statement that characters must be interesting, and that flaws, at some level, are what make them so. But why do I make a linkage between the moral element of a story and its purpose?

Let me start at the source of the discussion. In this book, Mr. Longyear states:

What are you trying to accomplish with your story? What is its moral or theme? Is it to demonstrate the worth of a particular brand of morality, to point the way toward the future, to deplore a certain ideology or form of social organization? The story is a lie, but the lie must accomplish something besides simply being believed. It must excite, teach, enlighten, stir to action, soothe, uplift, depress, sadden, bring happiness--something. Otherwise, there is no point in telling it. And what that purpose is may or may not be your choice. In making up a story, the tale's purpose is not necessarily the starting point. You may not even know the purpose until after you have finished inventing the tale. But there must be a purpose. Without a purpose--or without a purpose of significance--the story becomes trivial.*

I agree with this statement. I equate the moral element of a story with its purpose because I see them as interchangeable. They are the primary method by which readers achieve something out of a story.

So, you might ask, where was the problem?

At its heart, I believe the issue really focused on the use of the craft, the use of story structure. The writer in question was actually asking, "Why do I have to follow standard formula." (emphasis mine)

The reason is simple, of course.

Each element of a story means something to the reader. Leaving out a basic element blurs the reader's understanding of the story you are trying to tell.

The elements of story structure are basic and clear. They are high-level parameters and have little in specific that restricts the author in any way. At their basic level, you cannot add to the elements of structure. They are the skeleton upon which you create a fully fleshed-out tale, a guideline to ensure you don't leave the reader behind.

As writers, we are required to flesh out the story, to add the details of a character's life (but only those of relevance, of course), to determine specific occurrences that lead the reader along the story line (but leave out those that are extraneous to the tale, of course), to describe situations and senses and feelings that give depth to the situation and bring out the readers' emotions (but leave out those situations, senses, and feelings that don't add to the effect, of course).

The best stories are so fleshed out you don't see the skeleton. But underneath that flesh, the best stories still have bones that support them. This is the trick of writing . . . the art, if you will. Leaving out a piece of the skeleton runs the risk of making your story fall flat.

Dennis McKiernan describes the writing process with a Venn diagram that identifies the total domain as including a business environment, a craft environment, and an artistic environment.

Structure is pure craft. Basic. Very little to the imagination. It is where all the real work is. This is why I think newbies (like me) tend to avoid it like the plague. It makes us feel like we're manipulating the reader, or cheating her in some fashion. Of course, we're tricking the reader. We're trying to make her believe something that isn't real . . . like David Copperfield without the tigers or the ladies.

However, we new writers often let our artistic side argue for us when we discuss craft issues. It's certainly easy to do. The art is the reason we are usually drawn into the field to begin with. It is the narcotic, filling us with power and the feeling of total control. When the rules of the craft are thrown at us, we rise up and decry it as something evil--something to be "broken" rather than used to further our deceptions of the reader. Or even worse, we accuse these structural tools to be the vile workings of the dark forces of the business environment.

This is a shame. Structure is one of the tools we use to make our art. As are the rules of grammar. As is the use of appropriate vocabulary. Nothing more, but certainly nothing less.

Yet new writers tend to decry the use of structure as simply another senseless "rule" that falsely implies success if followed and absolute failure if ignored.

The problem here is in how you define success. To me, success is in clarity. What are you trying to do? Just as the rules of grammar are vitally important to the clarity of a sentence, the rules of storytelling are vitally important to the clarity of a story. There are certainly times where one chooses to sacrifice sentence clarity for the sake of another element--generally characterization (often in the form of slang or dialect). Likewise, there are times when we as writers choose to ignore, or at least heavily downplay, an element of story structure to accentuate a different element.

But we must be careful when we do it. And we must realize what we are doing as we undertake this task. In James Kilpatrick's book "The Writer's Art", he describes going to an art museum and seeing Picasso's paintings. For most of the afternoon, Kilpatrick was awed by Picasso's unique style, his freedom and his willingness to break boundaries. Then Kilpatrick went into two or three rooms that were filled with Picasso's first fifteen years of work. They were all classical, "standard" techniques, "standard" poses and models and whatnot. He (Kilpatrick) was struck by the force of what he was seeing. The visual artist's rendition of "learn the rules before you break them" was spread before him in dramatic fashion. Picasso painted for fifteen years to learn the basics. And only then did he step outward and begin to apply those basics in different fashions.

Should we wait fifteen years before we experiment? I don't know. But the lesson was very clear to me.

Learn the basic elements of structure. Experimentation can wait.