The End
Your story will be much more interesting if you make the problem very hard to solve.
One way to do this is to create obstacles. Obstacles are the smaller problems that your character has to solve before being able to tackle the main problem.
If you play video games, you run into these problem-within-a-problem obstacles all the time. Say you’re playing a game where your goal is to save the kingdom from a dragon. You set out to find the dragon, but then you come to a river, and its bridge has collapsed! You can’t get back to tracking down the dragon until you figure out how to cross the river. That missing bridge is an obstacle—and you’ll probably run into a lot of those before you even reach the big dragon battle.
In Chapters 10 and 11 of Stuck in the Stone Age, Tom and Marisa face several obstacles, each one bigger than the last. Here they are in and Obstacle Organizer:
The first obstacle, Marisa’s panic attack, is pretty minor.
The second obstacle is the attack by the cavemen. That’s much bigger and more urgent. If Tom and Marisa don’t solve that, they could die! Tom tries to use his phone to frighten the cavemen away, but it doesn’t seem like that’s going to work—until the cavemen suddenly run away! What a reversal of fortune! Except it turns out they only left because of …
The third obstacle: A saber-toothed tiger shows up and tries to eat them! This is the most serious obstacle of all. Fortunately, in yet another reversal, Marisa overcomes the life-threatening obstacle (for now) by poisoning the tiger.
There’s no wrong way to get past an obstacle. In fact, your characters might find totally different solutions to the exact same obstacles. It’s important to think about how their strengths and weaknesses give them ideas for what to do. For example, Marisa’s great strength, her scientific knowledge, is what saves their lives when she spots the poisonous berries. When your characters use their strengths and weaknesses to deal with obstacles, it makes them seem more realistic and more interesting.
Idea Storm: Obstacles
Now you try it! Think about some obstacles that might get in the way while your character is trying to deal with the main problem. How is each obstacle handled? Does the character solve it using one of their strengths? Do their weaknesses lead them to a bad or goofy solution? Worse, do their weaknesses cause the obstacle or make it worse?
Grab some paper and draw your own Obstacle Organizer!
Storytelling 101: Villain Check-In
When we last discussed Dr. Palindrome, we weren’t sure he was a villain. But now we’ve seen him erase the only evidence that Tom and Marisa are stuck in the Stone Age—making their main problem much harder to solve! It’s clear that Dr. Palindrome is a bad guy.
But he isn’t the only villain in this story. The saber-toothed tiger (who we’ll learn is named Tooka) wants to eat Tom and Marisa! A villain is someone who stands in the main character’s way, trying to stop them from getting what they want or solving their problem. And eating them would definitely get in their way. So it’s safe to say that Tooka is a villain.
What about the cavemen? They’ve thrown rocks at Tom and Marisa twice already, so they seem like villains. We don’t know enough about them yet to be sure that they won’t become shape-shifter characters, who start out as villains and later turn into allies of our main characters. We’ll have to wait and see.
If you have a story with a villain (or villains) in it, it’s helpful to keep track of both how they’re trying to stop the main character and why they’re doing it. A good villain always wants something (just like a main character wants something), which is what puts them in conflict with the main character.
Check out the Villain Organizer we used to track the villains in Stuck in the Stone Age. If your story has a villain, you might want to use one of these, too!
Idea Storm: Villains
Does your story have a villain—a character who’s going to try to stop your main character from solving their problem and getting what they want?
Not all stories do. Sometimes, what’s keeping the character from getting what they want is just their situation—perhaps an avalanche, an illness, or not having enough money to get something they need. Sometimes, the main character is standing in their own way. Maybe they have a weakness, like a short temper, that causes their problem.
If your story has a villain, the more you know about them, the better your story will be. You can draw your own Villain Organizer to get you started. Or, if you want to go even more in depth with your villain, you can draw a whole Character Creator to ask the same questions about your villain that you do about your main character: What are the villain’s strengths? What are their weaknesses? Have fun with it, and don’t be afraid to GET WEIRD!
Write Like a Pro: The Five SIX! Senses of Setting
To make your readers feel like your story’s actually happening and that they’re right in the middle of the action, it helps to think about the setting from your main character’s senses. When they first enter a new setting, what does it look like? Feel like? Sound like? Even taste and smell like?
The more you can use the five senses—sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch—to add details, the more your setting will come alive.
At the Story Pirates, we like to add a sixth sense: a sense of danger!
Most people don’t include danger with the other five senses. But we do! Because if you think about it, every interesting setting has some kind of danger. It’s not always physical danger, but a sense that something could go wrong at any time.
If your setting is a school, that sixth sense might be your main character’s fear of not making friends. If it’s a basketball court, the danger is that the other team could win. If it’s a pancake factory, there could be a team of ninjas lurking in the shadows!
The scene in Chapter 14 of Stuck in the Stone Age, when Tom and Marisa arrive at Dug’s cave, is a good example of writing with all six senses. There’s the sight of flickering firelight. The sound of cavepeople shrieking in fear. The smell of sewage, body odor, and dead animals. The taste of berries and nuts. The feel of getting smacked in the head by low-flying bat wings. And the danger of not just an obvious, in-your-face threat (a caveman who tries to attack them with a club), but unseen and longer-term threats (the diseases they could catch from the sewage, and the tiger they know is still lurking in the darkness outside the cave).
Thinking about all six senses can also help you write by showing, not telling. Once you’ve thought about all these sense details, show how they make your characters feel and what they do as a result.
For example, in Stuck in the Stone Age, we learn that the cave smells pretty bad, but the setting comes to life when we see Tom’s reaction:
It was like a combination of sewage, body odor, and dead animals.
But mostly sewage.
“Oh, geez,” said Tom, putting his hands in front of his nose. “That’s powerful stuff.”
It’s pretty amazing that Tom manages to smell all that stuff without throwing up!
Storytelling 101: A Big Twist!
Holy cow! The cavepeople don’t just fear Tooka the tiger, they worship him! And they make human sacrifices to him! And now they’ve just sacrificed Marisa to him! How will she ever get out of this?!
That’s a heck of a plot twist! A twist is just like a reversal of fortune, except it’s usually a HUGE SURPRISE both to the audience and the story’s characters (some of them, anyway). A twist makes your audience feel like they’re on a roller coaster that just made a hairpin turn, and they have no idea what will happen next.
Sometimes, the twist makes the problem much bigger or more urgent.
Sometimes, the twist involves a shape-shifter character who we suddenly realize is a villain.
Sometimes, the twist reveals that everything the main character was doing to solve their problem was actually making it worse. Or it reveals that they were trying to solve the wrong problem, and the REAL problem is something completely different.
/> And sometimes, there’s no big twist at all! Not every story has to have one.
Write Like a Pro: Show BEFORE You Tell
One key to creating a great plot twist is to “show BEFORE you tell,” or “plant it early and pay it off later.”
In other words, you should set up a small clue early in the story. But make it small enough that the reader won’t notice until it pays off when the big twist arrives.
For example, in Stuck in the Stone Age, we first learn about the big sacrificial pit in Chapter 14:
“Look out!”
It was a three-foot-wide, ten-foot-deep pit about twenty yards in front of the cave entrance.
“What do you think that’s for?” Tom asked.
Marisa shrugged. “Self-defense?”
When you read that, you probably thought, “What’s up with that pit?” It was a mystery to the audience and to Marisa and Tom, as well. When the characters stopped talking about it, you probably stopped thinking about it, too. That is, until a few chapters later, when Dug tossed Marisa into the pit, and its purpose was revealed in the big twist.
That early clue is important, because if we don’t learn about the pit until right before Dug tosses Marisa into it, the moment might feel a little fake. But if we’ve known for a while that the pit is there, it’s much more believable (and satisfying) when the big twist arrives and we learn the pit’s true purpose.
Idea Storm: Twists and Reversals
Want to put a big twist in your story? We can help!
Start by looking at your setting. Remember the sixth sense of danger we talked about? Think of something dangerous in your setting that will make your character’s main problem or one of their obstacles harder to solve.
But then, keep that danger a secret from the main characters—and the reader. Just plant a clue early in the story, which they’ll remember when the twist happens later.
Here are some examples to help you brainstorm:
•There’s a locked door in the basement. What’s on the other side? A secret treasure? A spy who’s been kidnapped? If it’s a treasure, did your character hear a rumor about it early on in the story? If it’s a spy, did your character hear mysterious yelling at some point?
•Your basketball team’s headed for the finals of the big tournament! But when you all get on the bus to leave for the game, the bus breaks down! Suddenly, that strange clicking noise that the engine made when you drove to the semifinal game seems a lot more meaningful.
•That robot butler sure is neat—polite, helpful, and quiet—which makes it very surprising when the robot suddenly ties up your main character and steals their car!
Here’s an important thing to keep in mind when you’re putting a big twist into your story: If you’ve already started writing, you’ll probably have to go back and put a clue into an earlier part of the story. That early clue about the pit didn’t appear in Geoff Rodkey’s first draft of Chapter 14. He had to go back and add it later once he decided the pit would be important in Chapter 19. It’s like we said at the beginning: All the best writing comes from RE-writing things!
Storytelling 101: Trying! Failing. Trying Again!
Hurray! In Chapter 20, Marisa finally got past her most life-threatening obstacle: Tooka the saber-toothed tiger. This obstacle was so big that she wasn’t able to solve it right away. She had to try (and fail) several times before she finally succeeded. Take a look at the next page.
Having your character try and fail to solve a problem is a great way to create the reversals of fortune that make your story exciting to read. It can also make their obstacle or problem even worse. For example, when Marisa made Tooka sick by feeding him the poisoned berries, he became even angrier and more determined to eat her.
In some shorter stories, having a character try several times to solve a problem (and finally succeed) takes up the entire middle section. Then you’re already at the end of the story! If you ever have to write a story for school, or if you’re just in the mood to write a short story of your own, the Solve the Problem Organizer can be your secret weapon. Think of a character and a problem, and then use the organizer to plan the middle of your story. Easy!
Unfortunately for Marisa, she hasn’t made it to the end yet. She still has to solve her main problem and find a way out of the Stone Age. At least now she can breathe a sigh of relief, knowing she won’t have to worry about Tooka anymore. Things should be easier from now on, right?
Well, not necessarily. Remember that stories are full of reversals of fortune. A moment like this one, when the character has tried and tried to solve a problem, and finally succeeded—at just the moment when they’re feeling most awesome about themselves—can be a very exciting time for the writer to have something HUGE go wrong. Keep reading and we’ll show you what we mean.
Storytelling 101: The Darkest Hour
We’re almost done with the middle section of the story—and that means bad news for the main characters. This is because, in the same way that the beginning ends with the characters realizing what their huge problem is, the middle ends with them facing their darkest hour. In other words, things are about to get really bad for the main characters, so bad that they almost lose hope completely.
For example, just seconds after her big success in defeating Tooka, Dug is furious that Marisa’s just killed the tiger his tribe worships. He suddenly decides to kill her. Now things are even worse than before! What a huge reversal of fortune!
To top it off, both Tom and Marisa are now sure they’ll never get what they want. All Marisa ever wanted was to make friends, but now she’s hiding alone in a cave with bats. All Tom ever wanted was to become a scientist, but Marisa has revealed to him that it won’t ever happen. Their dreams are crushed, and they’re furious with each other.
Wait a minute! This is awful! We want to go back to Tom and Marisa being friends and hoping that they find a way back from the Stone Age! Why would you ever want your characters to be this sad and hopeless?
Not to spoil anything, but the end of the story is coming up soon, and they probably will solve their big problem. BUT it’s going to be much more exciting to watch them do it if you first pile up so much trouble for them that they will be convinced they’ll never succeed.
Idea Storm: The Darkest Hour
Is your main character getting close to solving their main problem? Don’t let them solve it too quickly! Before they finally succeed, give them a HUGE reversal of fortune: a darkest hour where it seems like everything is going wrong and they may never get what they want.
The real key to making this work is to make sure the reader understands exactly how terrible your characters feel in their darkest hour. One great way to do this is by using words with flavor. This is vocabulary that shows the audience exactly how someone feels.
Emotions are like colors. For every primary color like blue, there are LOTS of variations: navy, indigo, azure, cobalt, sapphire, cyan, turquoise, royal blue, baby blue…The list is almost endless.
For example, when Marisa loses control and finally tells Tom the truth about his job, the author doesn’t say “Marisa felt sad and mad.” Here’s how he describes it:
“You’re not a scientist, Tom,” she said in a bitter, seething voice.
Bitter! Seething! Those words really pack some punch! Here are a few more words with flavor.
Different flavors of “sad”
blue
despondent
gloomy
heartbroken
melancholy
pessimistic
somber
sorrowful
Different flavors of “mad”
peeved
irritated
enraged
fuming
furious
infuriated
irate
outraged
seething
wrathful
Different flavors of “mad” and “sad” at the same time (and probably a little mean)
bitte
r
petulant
resentful
spiteful
sulky
sullen
vengeful
If you’re looking for even more words with flavor, try looking in a thesaurus. A thesaurus is a book or online database that has lists of similar but very specific words you can use for any situation. Just make sure that if you choose an unfamiliar word from a thesaurus, you look it up first in a dictionary. You want to be certain that the word means exactly what you want it to mean.
THE END
Just when it seems like all is lost, we reach THE ENDING. It’s when all the hard work pays off for your character, your audience, and YOU the writer!
Storytelling 101: The Climax!
Finally! Tom and Marisa have made it back to the present day! This is the story’s climax—the moment when the characters finally solve their problem.
It isn’t easy. It shouldn’t be! The harder your main character has to work to solve the problem, the more satisfying your story will be.
For example, it would have been a real letdown if Chapter 27 of Stuck in the Stone Age just went like this:
Marisa and Tom saw the fetcher. They got it from the lake. They pressed the button and went back to their own time.
That isn’t fun to read at all! Luckily for the reader, it’s not that simple. Getting the fetcher back is hard, and our characters need to come up with a plan to make it happen. And then, they face a bunch of obstacles and reversals before they finally get back to their own time.
As usual, there’s no wrong way for the characters to get past the obstacles, but it can help to think about their strengths and weaknesses.
Stuck in the Stone Age Page 14