Storytelling is an existential fundamental, meaning that it's relevant at every level of the art process and life itself.
Stories are a central feature of human motivation, as a "story" encompasses any goal that cannot be reached directly. There is a series of obstacles between you and the goal, and each of those obstacles increases the tension of the story, meaning the level of stress your mind and body are experiencing during it. When you finally resolve the story -- which is achieved by either reaching the goal or giving up on it -- that tension fully releases.
These obstacles are the most common type of story beat. A beat is any event or change consciously relevant to the goal. Because they consciously remind you of something you haven't accomplished yet, all beats raise the tension by default, but this can be offset to a net reduction of tension in beats that cause significant progress towards the resolution or provide other forms of stress relief.
The sequencing of beats in a story is called its plot, which refers to the way these beats can be "plotted" on a grid with the cumulative tension on one axis and the story beats (in the order they're experienced by the listener) on the other.
The listener is the person having the story delivered to them and experiencing its tension, while the storyteller is the individual responsible for delivering the experience of that story.
The listener allows the storyteller to control the experience because they trust that storyteller to take them to their goal eventually. When this trust is lost, the listener either stops listening or changes the goal of doing so. This goal change may be a good-faith shift (such as treating the story like a "guilty pleasure" and focusing on elements the storyteller is better at delivering) or a bad-faith shift (such as "hate-listening" to the story for the purpose of finding errors to correct or things to get upset about).
The listener and storyteller are sometimes the same person.
The plot of a single story with a single goal typically looks like a triangle, with obstacles increasing the tension until it reaches a climax, which ideally occurs at the maximum amount of stress appropriate for the story and its listener. Following the climax, progress must be made towards the goal or the realization of its irrelevance / futility, reducing the tension and eventually resolving the story.
This period of progress leading to the resolution is sometimes called the falling action of a story, while the period of obstacles leading to the climax is sometimes called the rising action, both referring to the increase and decrease in tension. These concepts are embodied in Freytag's Pyramid:
(https://i.imgur.com/YxMnoAc.png)
Because of the rounded shape created when smoothing out this graph, plots are also referred to arcs.
This "tense, release, tense release..." see-saw is very stimulating to our brain and produces all kinds of motivating chemicals, causing us to seek out stories wherever we go.
But these stories need to fit within a perfect goldilocks zone to keep us engaged with them to the end. Having too many obstacles can increase tension to the point that our brain forces us to set the story aside in favor of some stress-reduction coping mechanism, and in the worst case scenarios, it can even generate a trauma response that prevents us from picking the story back up again later. But having too few obstacles fails to catch our attention and engage us, and in the worst case scenario, we train our brain that it's so obvious and easy, it should just auto-fill the goal in our mind and make us move on without completing the story in reality. More on tension management. (https://lib.hol.ink/index.php?topic=32.0)
With these tension issues in mind, it's important to realize that any story longer than a paragraph or depicted with more than a few symbols is not actually a "story" of its own, per se. It's a conglomeration of many stories that are woven together to create a longer and more stimulating experience.
You simply can't drag out a single goal to the length of an entire novel. In a few pages, the listener's tension gets so high that they give up. It feels like progress will never be made, they lose their trust in the storyteller to take them to their goal, and they develop an avoidance of the story.
We need subplots to resolve along the way. This lets us 1) distract the listener from the lack of progress on the main goal with a new one (because every reminder of an incomplete goal raises the tension associated with it), and 2) use these resolutions to reduce the tension in a way that feels satisfying, bringing that see-saw back into play.
This is where we start getting into the design side of storytelling, as we have to make creative decisions about how to layer each story. Where should things start and end to manage the tension just right? How can we ensure that the various stories we include all feel relevant, cohesive, and have a sense of unity? We get to engage with the principles of design (https://lib.hol.ink/index.php?topic=14.0) to compose the story we're telling.
Of course, we also need other elements to compare with these principles. Many will be unique to the medium, such as words or shapes. However, stories also have their own conceptual elements, like characters, locations, events, props, themes, and other motifs.
There are also unique structures formed in a story besides its arcs. An arc is only one type of thread in a story connecting its elements. Another is the series thread, which represents the frequency with which a motif comes up in the story, rather than the tension of a goal.