The Quest - Understanding the 7 Story Types by Looking at a Girl and an Apple

It's late at night. Girl is upstairs in her room studying for a crucially important test. She struggles with a particularly troublesome mathematical problem.

After an hour-long battle, a voice in her head reminds her how apples are the symbol of knowledge. The same voice, which for some reason greatly resembles that of her literacy teacher, tells her that if she were to eat an apple right now, she'd solve the problem in no time. Girl, whose reason had long left her exhausted frontal lobe decides that eating an apple is the only way forward right now.

'I shall eat an apple,' Girl exclaims, 'apples are knowledge, and knowledge is power. I shall be mighty knowledgeable and solve this stinky equation.'

Thus, she leaves her room. The house is dark and quiet, everyone is asleep. Girl turns on her torch, it flickers and goes off.

Barely making out the outline of things in the dark, Girl makes her way toward the stairs and starts down the creaky steps.

A thunderous explosion outside makes her jump and lose her footing. She stumbles down the stairs; behind the tall stairwell window, shiny streaks of firework spiral up the sky. The tear-off wall-calendar shows the 5th of November.

Mighty winds rattle the windows, making the walls hum and creak. Lightning cuts across, sending slit shadows through the corridors. Thunder bellows.

Girl jolts with a yelp. Breathing short and fast, she keeps going.

Finally, the kitchen! She rushes in and turns on the lights. Gasp. The fruit basket is empty.

Another streak of lightning lacerates the dark skies, followed by deafening thunderclaps. The lights flicker and go off. Girl swears under her breath. She flicks the switch off and on, but it looks like the whole neighbourhood has a power cut.

'Give up…' whisper the freezing floorboards.

'Give in…' urge the rattling windows.

'I will never give up on knowledge,' Girl mutters to herself, scouring the house with a barely working flashlight she dug out of the kitchen drawer. After searching in every nook and cranny, she finally unearths a half-eaten mouldy apple buried deep in her old school-bag. She wrinkles her nose at the horrific pong.

She turns the remains of last year's apple in her hands, looking for a plausible bit under the scarce light of her torch. Ignoring the surrounding mould, with a churning stomach, Girl bites into the fruit's somewhat acceptable side; one more bite, and another one. Girl awaits for the foggy numbness of her fed-up mind to dissipate to reveal the long-anticipated answer to the stinky equation, but nothing happens. Looks like it was all for nothing.

Then, however, she senses with enormous delight, the dark caverns of her skull brighten up. Oh no, that's just the electricity is back.

Nevertheless, by the time Girl returns to her room, the cogs of knowledge and understanding are perfectly aligned. In no time, she solves the particularly troublesome mathematical problem of 'How Many Apples Does The Girl Have?'

image by Michal Jarmoluk