Damn Fine Story: Mastering the Tools of a Powerful Narrative

by Chuck Wendig

  Consider the misdirection of A New Hope, where we’re told by a theoretically reputable mentor (Obi-Wan) that Luke’s father died in the Clone Wars, killed by Darth Vader. It is true (say it with me: from a certain point of view, in that Anakin was once a human who was reduced in such a way to be taken over and even destroyed by the Vader persona). It’s also a very good way to distract us from the full truth, which is of course that Darth Vader is actually Luke Skywalker’s Uncle Owen, now an undead zombie.6

  A story doesn’t even require a core mystery component to utilize misdirection. In Die Hard, Hans Gruber misdirects both the audience and the other characters by simply lying—he says that he is a political terrorist acting out of principle, when really what he means is, “The only principle we hold dear is greed, because we’re thieves.”

  The movie further misdirects us about the effectiveness of the police and the order (disorder, really) of the FBI. The story feints, going a different way than you expect. You don’t think McClane is going to dump a body on top of a police cruiser because that’s just not a thing people do. Sometimes misdirection is simply the act of letting the status quo inform the expectations of the audience. If the audience only knows turning left, going right will be a shock and a revelation. If the audience only knows rogue cops not throwing corpses onto patrol cars—well, you get the idea.

  The point is, that’s how we can generate surprise.

  The rabbit’s here, the lady’s gone, Grandpa Gary is in pieces.

  Story as stage magic.

  Et voila!

  THE JOKE

  My son, whom we call B-Dub, became aware of the concept of a “joke” a little over a year ago, when he was around four years old. We were sitting at a diner, and he said, “I want to tell you a joke.”

  My wife and I looked at each other with curiosity and surprise. Note that every day with a small child is like that scene in Jurassic Park where the velociraptors learn to open doors. The boy suddenly telling us that he knew what a joke was—well, that was new. It is, in a sense, a formative instance of him not just being funny, but trying to be funny in a mechanical way. Plus, jokes are themselves mini-stories, so this was exciting. We said, “Sure, go for it.”

  B-Dub’s joke was …

  … drumroll please …

  “Daddy, you poop fire out of your butt.”

  Pause.

  Beat.

  Rimshot, cymbal crash, sad trombone.

  That was it. That was the joke.

  Now, to be fair, it’s pretty much the perfect joke for a four-year-old. Does it have poop? Check. Does it have butt? Check. No pee, but okay, that can be forgiven because at least you get fire, and I guess fire is funny? It’s not so much funny for me, because I was the one apparently pooping said fire, and as a person who has in his past eaten too much Taco Bell,7 I can assure you: Pooping fire is no joke.

  Still, I thought, here’s an opportunity to explain to my son about jokes. I said, “Jokes have a certain format, and at their simplest level are questions you ask that have a funny answer.” Then I gave what is arguably the most classic, and also the utter worst, joke ever:

  Why did the chicken cross the road?

  To get to the other side.

  I’m never really sure if the chicken crossing the road is one of those so-called “anti-jokes,”8 or if it’s funny because it plays off “the other side” as a pun. Meaning, the chicken crosses the road and gets hit by a car, thus fulfilling its avian destiny of getting to some kind of chicken-friendly heaven.

  Either way, my son didn’t laugh, but he got the general idea. And we also went through knock-knock jokes, another concept that’s easy to explain—you knock on the door and someone funny is on the other side, and also, there’s wordplay?—but is harder to teach in execution.

  B-Dub said he wanted to try again.

  He had a new joke, he explained.

  “Go ahead,” we said, eager to see what would come out of his mouth.

  “Why did Daddy poop fire out of his butt?” B-Dub asked.

  We gave the call-and-response refrain: “Why?”

  “Because the chicken crossed the road.”

  Aaaaaand that was his joke.

  It doesn’t make any sense but, hey, some jokes don’t have to make sense. And at least he got the format right!

  A joke ostensibly works like a magic trick: Whether it’s a knock-knock joke or a longer joke or even a whole comedy routine, you set up expectations about the world and then you (once again) twist out of the grip that holds you and screw up the status quo. This time, though, the subversion of the status quo is meant to be funny, ironic, or somehow absurd.

  A joke is a story. A very short story, with just one or two zigzags before the climax. It has no falling action, no denouement.9

  But some of the things that work for jokes work for larger stories, too, even if those stories aren’t supposed to be funny.

  First, as said, a joke needs to be short. The longer it goes, the more it rambles, the less effective it is. A joke works because the listener has very little to keep track of—the details are all right there in the setup, no abacus or spreadsheet necessary. Stories can often ramble, stray, and become confusing. Clarity is king in a story. We want to be able to keep track of it all.

  Second, a joke leaves a lot unsaid. It works because it plays off of things we already understand about the world. We know what a bar is. We understand people knocking at doors. We grok apples and oranges and cows and chickens, and many other things we see fit for humor. Jokes speak to that larger understanding—or, in some cases, to narrower groups or subcultures that nevertheless share a complete and common understanding. If they don’t have that understanding, the only response will be: “I don’t get it.”

  Put differently, a joke about Einstein only works if the person knows who Einstein was. (Note: Racist, sexist, and otherwise bigoted jokes use this in the worst way, playing off of not just shared understanding, but shared prejudices.) Context and familiarity matter, and they matter in the stories we tell, too—if people cannot relate, or cannot be made to relate to the characters or the setting or the situation, they’ll be left scratching their heads and saying the same damn thing: “I don’t get it.” Every joke has its audience, and you tell it to them. Every story has its audience, too.

  Third, rhythm matters when you’re telling a joke. You can’t just blurt it out. You need to bring the pauses, you have to speak in a relaxed way, you have to feel the comic timing. Stories rely on timing and rhythm. Just like a joke, you can’t blurt out a story. You lead in. You tease. You have to know the right time to take a breath and withhold the “punch line”—a punch line being a twist or a climax within the book. It’s also true that you have to use the right words in establishing that rhythm. Big words and awkward sentences will kill a joke dead. And they can kill a story dead, too—you want clarity, you want a story that’s as easy to slip into as the water in a warm tub.

  Finally, a joke needs to do its job. A joke needs to be funny. It’s great if it’s also thought provoking or somehow profound, but those are not the uttermost functions of a joke. A joke that’s not funny is not a joke. Now, a story is different in that a story doesn’t need to be funny. That said, a funny story needs to be funny. A sad story needs to be sad. An adventure or a thriller needs to be exciting, and a scary story needs to be (drumroll, please) scary. Going in and telling a story means knowing what the story needs to do, and then tweaking it to do that. Comedians don’t just blurt out hilarious shit all day. They aren’t joke robots. They craft their humor. They practice their bits on stage and in front of people; they tweak the timing, they change the silences and applause breaks, they fidget with word choice. And a story is like that, too. Sure, it sounds natural and spontaneous, like you’re just some erupting story volcano, but the truth is, stories are practiced entities. The best tales are those that have gone through countless drafts and countless retellings to get that precious bowl of bear porridge just right.

/>   ON THE SUBJECT OF RHYTHM

  The definitions of rhythm are abstract. A definition from Dictionary.com: “the pattern of recurrent strong and weak accents, vocalization and silence, and the distribution and combination of these elements in speech.” Another definition (this one from Wikipedia): “movement marked by the regulated succession of strong and weak elements, or of opposite or different conditions.”

  These are useful in abstraction. But rhythm is so damn important to both writing and storytelling that intellectual abstraction can muddy the waters in terms of helping us understand what it is and why we need it. Instead, look to three things:

  HEARTBEATS. A heartbeat is not an unchanging metronome. You have a pulse, and it goes up when you’re excited and slows when you’re calm.

  STORMS. A storm is not merely the white noise susurrus of a steady rain, but rather a rise and fall in wind, a sudden flash of light and tumble of thunder, a heavy downpour slowed by a break in the maelstrom.

  SONGS. A song is not just the same sound again and again: A song may start slow, then speed up, or vice versa; it may introduce new elements, new beats, new syncopations and sounds.

  Rhythm for us must be this: not simply a repeated pattern, but a pattern that is predictable until it is not. In writing, rhythm works to give us a long sentence followed by a short one, a bunch of smaller words and then a big ol’ fancy word. Rhythm in storytelling is about establishing trust and a lack of trust. It should feel as natural as our beating heart, or a stirring storm, or a song heard on the wind.

  Stories are music and lightning and blood.

  SPOKEN STORIES

  Let’s go back to my father. Like I said in the intro, he was a bona fide storyteller, even as he failed to really write or even read much. You know people like him. Maybe you are people like him. (You also know people who are the opposite of that. People who share boneless, clunky stories where nothing ever really happens, and you’re thinking the whole time, How do I get out of this? Could I just run away or do I need to puke in my hands first? Oh god please, someone text me or call me so I can say I have an emergency root canal I have to get to.)

  I think I’m better now at telling stories in person than I used to be, though I’m much more comfortable telling stories using my brain and my fingers rather than having them spill out of the blabbering, blubbery bone-cave that lies hidden by my beard-nest,10 and one of the ways I’ve improved is by observing people telling stories. I’ve tried to figure it out—how do they do that? What works?

  The things that work for spoken stories also work for written ones, at least in part. Writing a book, a comic, a movie, whatever, they all have one thing in common: They are part of the cultural competition for dwindling time. They’re here to entertain us and provoke us or, in a larger sense, to be interesting. All of us are like squirrels surrounded by nuts of various sizes, shapes, and flavors. We can, at any point, ditch the book we’re reading to go watch Netflix, to check Twitter, to pick up a comic book, or to dick around on Facebook. We can play a video game, or nap, or wander into the woods like Sasquatch. We are inundated with options and opportunities to entertain and amuse ourselves.

  If you’re standing there, telling someone a story, they might not be rude enough to check their phones or suddenly turn heel and walk away from you because their Boredom Meter got filled up, but all the same, you’re under pressure to entertain them. To be interesting. To have a point, any point, for fixing them with your gaze and sharing this tale.

  A story told to someone standing in front of you demands some of the same panache as one that’s written down. I sometimes like to make up stories for the Tiny Human, B-Dub, and *whistles* a five-year-old forms one of the most brutal, unforgiving audiences ever. You bore that kid, he’ll make a poop noise with his mouth. A five-year-old has no such presuppositions of rudeness. He’ll either give you a look like you’re trying to teach math to a dachshund, or he’ll just get up and walk away to go do something, anything, else.

  You have to be interesting.

  Consider the value in writing as if you need to entertain a five-year-old. You would have to keep the story moving. Ducking and feinting. Not just up and down, but left and right. Remember that earlier discussion about a story being less a mountain to climb and more a roller coaster to ride? That. You gotta be funny and inventive and quick on your feet. It’s not enough to stand there and tell this kid about pirates who want a treasure. There have to be robots—or maybe butt-robots since, again, he’s five. Just as he thinks he knows where the story is going, you have to misdirect, and then pull the rabbit out of your hat to surprise him.

  That story from the introduction? Where my father smashed his pinky and then had to get it cut off? That story is still interesting enough if it’s just, “I smashed my pinky and then the doctor cut it off.” As a short, one-sentence tale, it flies. But when you’ve got a kept audience, and you want them rapt, the fact that the story has more going on is a value-add, right? It’s in the gory details: smashed in a log splitter, drove self to hospital, didn’t want to pay the full price, went out to truck and got bolt cutters out of the back … and snippety-snip, like pruning a branch from a tree.

  It also shows you something about the character of my father without telling you. From the tale, you know he’s tough. You know he’s so bullheaded that he could probably win a head-butting contest with an angry moose. (Another story for another time is when my father wrestled a whitetail buck—a pet of ours named Rudy—to the ground, hog-tying it, even with two broken ribs from the deer’s antlers.) You also know that my father is, in a word, thrifty, and that he distrusts the medical establishment to boot.

  The details, the unspoken character components, the fact that the story is not a straight line to the end but has that vital twist (his reasonable thriftiness taken to unreasonable extremes when he cut off his own pinky rather than letting the doctor do it, an organic kink in the tale that lines up with the character that my father was)—that’s what keeps people rapt.

  It keeps them rapt when standing in front of you.

  And it keeps them reading your book, or your comic, or watching your movie. So, when you’re writing whatever story it is that you’re writing, imagine that someone is standing there, listening. Imagine you have to keep them there, fixed to that point—this is a game, and you’re the player, and the Scheherazadian goal is to keep them engaged. No, not engaged: compelled.

  1 Though maybe it should be a kinky sex move.

  2 Those tiny house shows are an addiction of mine, by the way. An easy drinking game is to take a drink every time a prospective buyer seems surprised that the tiny house is, gasp, tiny. You’ll be black-out drunk after one episode.

  3 It was George Carlin who famously said, “Life is a series of dogs.”

  4 Spoiler warning: It might be out of my own ass. (I mean, not literally, because ew.)

  5 I sometimes play a game of misdirection with my son: If I’m trying to tickle him, I move in with the left hand, and as he’s trying to fight that one off, I go in with the right. Works every time. Of course, he’s five, and if this still works on him when he’s thirty, we’ve got a problem. Also, it’s probably weird if I’m still trying to tickle him when he’s thirty, so there’s that.

  6 Turns out, that’s incorrect—apparently, Darth Vader is Luke’s Dad? Whoa.

  7 You don’t “eat” Taco Bell so much as you “rent” it, and then return it to its natural habitat.

  8 An “anti-joke” is a joke that is funny because it’s not funny.

  9 It’s like cheap, hurried sex—it happens fast, and hopefully everyone has a good time.

  10 I know, I could just say “mouth,” but god, what fun are words if we cannot stack them absurdly atop one another, pssh, c’mon.

  Interlude

  THE SECOND RULE

  The second rule is:

  Nobody puts Baby in the corner.

  Goddamnit. That … that doesn’t sound right.

  Hold on, hold on.<
br />
  *shuffles papers*

  Ah. Oh! Ahem. Sorry, just need a moment to course correct, here.1

  The second rule is (drumroll, please):

  Character is everything.

  What I mean is this: A story can exist without a character, but only in the way that a human body can exist without a brain or a heart. You take those things away, the body remains a body, and it remains, by some definition, a human one. It just isn’t alive. It has no purpose, it has no thought, and it certainly has no soul.

  The reason we read stories is ultimately a selfish one. On the surface, we want to be entertained or enlightened, but deeper down, we’re looking for a mirror. We want to see our stories reflected back at us. Changed, maybe. Tweaked in some way, or reflected in reverse. Possibly we’re looking for a larger mirror—one to reflect not just our individual stories, but the story of who we are collectively, the story of where we are in place and time, a story to make sense of things.

  At the heart of all of that? People. We connect to people. We build bridges to them. Empathy is king: We are putting ourselves in the stories of other people and relating their stories to our own experiences and ideas. People are everything.

  Hell, we are people.

  And people are characters.

  (Now, to clarify, characters do not need to be people. Whether it’s the toys in Toy Story or the piglet of Babe, characters need merely be characters, not human beings. You could write a book about a walking, talking, magical diaper, as long as you give the diaper an arc and some agency.2)

  A story without characters is a table without legs. It’s still a place you can put your stuff, but it has no elevation. It is without its purpose.

  We do this thing where we believe the story is greater than the character, but the reality is that the character or characters provide the reason for the story in the first place. We’re like Yoda riding on Luke’s back—we experience the story with and through the characters who are telling the tale or living that narrative.