Damn Fine Story: Mastering the Tools of a Powerful Narrative

by Chuck Wendig

  I guess he got to missing having animals around—whether he missed their innocent animal natures or the persistent need to clean up a variety of droppings amidst the cacophony of their many barnyard-like sounds, all that snorting and mooing and cockadoodle-dooing. So one day he came home from work.

  And he had four geese with him.

  Canadian geese.2

  Those who know anything about Canadian geese know that they are the King Assholes of the Bird World. Some birds are nice, and other birds are assholes, but Canadian geese take the crown and scepter of the Asshole Kingdom. They are loud. They shit green caterpillar-like turds everywhere. They will chase you.

  And it’s this last point that proved a problem for us, because one day my mother came home from her job in the early afternoon and was promptly chased from her car to the top of an empty gas tank by a gaggle of surly geese. She didn’t even make it inside the house—she ran, they ran after, and she jumped up on that big piece of metal in an effort to stay safe from the honking flock of murder birds.

  Now, I don’t know where my father procured these geese. I do not know why he decided to bring them to haunt and harangue our family. But bring them he did, and on that day, they kept my mother up on that old empty tank for three hours, circling her like a tribe of feathered butchers, ready to use their wings to karate chop her dead. (Fascinating point of fact: A goose can indeed chop with its wing, and the rumor is that they could even break a young child’s arm with such an attack.)

  I was trapped inside the house with my grandmother, forced to watch this.

  It is, quite literally, one of my earliest and most vivid memories.

  Eventually, my father came home and chased the geese away.

  Later, we had a freezer full of goose meat.3 Which, by the way, is viciously tough dark meat, more akin to steak than to the wan white meat of a chicken, and it requires judicious marinating in soy sauce (not to mention the occasional gentle bite to make sure you don’t chomp down on a shotgun pellet and break a tooth).

  The geese were a misstep, but from there, my father brought home a series of strange animals for us to raise:

  Peacocks (one killed by raccoons)

  White pheasants (all killed by a fox)

  Guinea hens, which are pinheaded, derpy-birds who will wander into the road and get hit by cars (which these did, and got dead)

  Rabbits (not sure what happened to them, but we didn’t eat them)

  Horses (not strange animals, admittedly, but one was named Gretchen and the other named Gremlin, and eventually we sold them)

  A pond full of sunfish, bass, and catfish, all of which my father could summon to him simply by walking to the shoreline with a handful of bread to throw (to my knowledge, the fish are still in that pond even to this day—perhaps they are even immortal4)

  One more chicken, a paranoid white rooster my father brought home just before he left for vacation—a rooster who scratched up my car and crowed at 3 A.M. every morning and who would follow you at a creepy ten-foot distance, tut-tutting at you like a prudish schoolmarm (I shot that chicken with a .410 shotgun, which turns out was exactly what my father hoped I’d do.)

  But the most consistent animals on our property were the white-tailed deer. We bought two as fawns, Rudy and Flower, and we raised them in our house until they were old enough to go out to the pen, which comprised a good portion of our farm property, as well as a stable. Those two were like pets, and even at the age of six or seven I could go in there and run around with the deer like they were dogs. They’d come up and chew on your sleeve or your hat. They were sweet.

  Rudy, though, had a habit of getting out. He’d take his rack of antlers, lock them into the fence, and then give a good corkscrew twist—

  He’d open the portal, then he’d waltz out.

  Mostly to eat the clover on the other side.

  More times than I could count, I would walk outside and see Rudy just hanging out there. When this happened, Dad would go over, grab his antler, and gently walk him back into the pen, then tie up the hole with heavy rope until there was time to replace that length of the fence. One time he ended up going on walkabout, and my father had to wrestle him into the bed of a truck. That required hog-tying the deer. Which left my father with a couple broken ribs for it—not because Rudy was violent, but because you really shouldn’t hog-tie a live buck whitetail. (But, as you have learned of my father, that’s the kind of guy he was. Tranquilize the animal? Nah, just rope him like a cow. Doctor? Nah, just cut off the damn finger your own self.)

  We introduced a couple other deer in the interim, and as it turns out, deer make more deer, and after several years, we went from two deer to thirty-six of ’em.

  We had a whole herd. A herd, it turns out, without much purpose except to stand there and look pretty and eat corn and grass and poop everywhere. Which is their purview and their right, but given that we weren’t opening a zoo and—to my surprise—not selling them for food, we eventually got rid of them.

  My father sold them to a game preserve.

  But again, that itch to raise animals was in him.

  So, two more animals came to live with us:

  A pair of elk. One cow, one bull.

  The cow elk was named Lady.

  The bull elk, well, that one my father called Sir Loin.

  Yeah, I know.

  Thing is, elk are not like whitetails. Whitetail deer are happy, if occasionally skittish, animals. They jump and run and play. Sure, the bucks can get territorial, but raised in captivity they were all pretty pleasant to be around.

  Elk are not like that.

  Elk—bull elk in particular—are brutes. Or, at least, Sir Loin was. They’re big bastards, too—like a horse, if a horse was bristling with musk and muscles and had a skull topped with siege weapons. Walking past the fence was like sitting in a shark cage—bang, Sir Loin would hit that fence like a Great White. He’d also stand there, stare at you, and masturbate. And here you might be saying, “Well, Chuck, how do elk masturbate?”5

  I discovered that the elk was masturbating because my father pointed it out.

  “See that?” he said.

  “See what?” I asked.

  He pointed to the elk’s undercarriage. “That.”

  There, the elk was taking his elk thing, his wanton beastly manhood, and was aggressively flexing that turgid bull wang in such a way that it was flopping up and down like a fish on a dock. It slapped against his belly again and again, and then would occasionally pause to spray fluid.

  It was then I realized what was happening.

  “He’s jerking it,” my father said, explaining too late what I had already figured out. And that was the end of that conversation.6

  The elk was an unhappy fixture. We’d gone full circle, it seemed: The elk, like the geese, was a grumpy, violent animal that my father had hoped to tame.

  Then came the day I stepped out of my door and I saw the elk standing there.

  Not in the fence.

  But rather, outside of it.

  He didn’t see me, so I quickly ducked back inside the trailer. (I had come back home a few years after graduating college, and until I found my own place was living inside a double-wide trailer at the bottom of our property, just ten feet or so from the shark cage—I mean, elk fence.)

  I called my father at work.

  He said he’d come right home, but I was to “keep an eye on the elk.” Reason being, the farmland we once had to ourselves had become developed all around us. All around were houses. In those houses were families. Hell, the very corner of our property was a communal bus stop for schoolkids. I assumed my father was not particularly excited at the thought of having Sir Loin gore a couple of second graders, so he beseeched me to call out of my day job and stand vigil, on “PLEASE ELK DON’T KILL ANY NEIGHBORHOOD CHILDREN” duty.

  So, I went back outside and hid behind my trailer, spying on the elk. Where the elk went, I followed, staying at a minimal distance to make sure the musky mas
turbating antler beast did not catch wind of me. (Turns out, Sir Loin had not sharpened his instincts in captivity. Not once did he notice me.)

  My father finally came home, and by then the elk had wandered out behind the old barn, to the back field, where he was munching on grass.

  Behind my father’s truck came another pickup: It was my uncle.

  My father said, “The three of us are going to get him back in the pen.”

  I blinked and swallowed hard. “What?” I asked. I said, “That can’t be right. We should call somebody.” I didn’t know who, exactly. Are there Elk Police? Do we call in SWAT? A sniper? Are the guys from Jurassic Park looking for work?

  Dad said, “Nah, we can handle this.”

  Then I looked at his pinky finger, the one he cut off himself, and I thought, oh. Oh.

  A hasty, ill-formed plan arose.

  My father got out three items:

  A set of my uncle’s ski poles

  A rope

  A semiautomatic Remington 1100 12-gauge shotgun

  He handed my uncle’s ski poles to, well, my uncle. He slung the rope over his own shoulder.

  And then Dad handed me the gun.

  Now, I am not unfamiliar with how to use a firearm. I grew up in a hunting family, and my father in his spare time did gunsmithing and got his FFL (Federal Firearms License) to sell guns to friends (and local police), so I knew the ins and outs of this particular shotgun. Just the same, it had been a while. I’d gone off to college where, as it turns out, not once did I need to hunt up some dinner. I probably hadn’t discharged a firearm in a decade.

  “I still think we should call somebody,” I protested.

  Dad ignored it. “If things go hairy and that elk comes at any of us, you need to shoot it,” he said. “And it’s big, so you’ll need to shoot it a few times. Maybe more.” He told me to “just keep shooting it” until, I dunno, it stopped killing my uncle and masturbating violently.

  The plan was this:

  My father would lasso the elk’s antlers.

  My uncle would prod it with a ski pole toward the back gate of the pen.

  And I would shoot it, if it came to that.

  And so we approached the elk. We approached this elk the way the nascent paranormal investigators approach the scary librarian ghost in the original Ghostbusters film. My father had already tied the lasso like he was a cowboy (yippie-ki-yay motherfucker), and my uncle had one ski pole in each hand.

  I stood there with a loaded shotgun, safety off, praying to whatever god would listen that I did not accidentally shoot my Dad or my uncle.

  Step by step, we encroached upon the elk.

  Sir Loin snorted. He lifted his head in alarm. The smell hit me—the musk that came off him was a heady, bestial stink. Like an old carpet soaked in sweat and left out in the sun on a humid day. His fur bristled and his front legs stiffened—a sign he was about to charge, the way he often charged the fence.

  I raised the gun.

  My uncle got behind the elk.

  My father twirled the lasso like an old cowboy.

  Whish—the rope looped around the antlers. My father tugged and tightened. My uncle jabbed with the ski poles.

  And I thought, Here we go. We’re all going to die. Or at least, they’re all going to die and I’m going to have to explain this story to the police.

  The elk, though, didn’t charge. He did not move forward but, rather, backward. He reared his head back, resisting the rope—and then with every ski pole stab to the elk-butt, Sir Loin inched forward. My father pulling. My uncle ushering. And me hoping that it would fast come time to put the gun down.

  Foot by miserable foot, we walked the elk to the gate.

  It was already open. All we needed was for him to go through it.

  And then my father did the unthinkable.

  He grabbed the monster by the nose. He literally stuck his fingers into Sir Loin’s nostril holes like he was dealing with an errant bowling ball rather than a snarling, masturbating hell beast.

  I tensed up. I got the gun to my shoulder.

  The elk, cowed, marched into the gate like a truant child returning to school.

  My uncle closed the gate. And that was it.

  Later—years later, and not months—we had a freezer full of elk meat.

  So, that’s the story. The last story of this book.

  Now, let’s take a look at it.

  What did I do? What was the shape of it? Did it have a theme? Was there a protagonist with a problem? Did plot take a backseat to character? Were there motifs? Metaphors? Was there a point to be made?

  I have no idea. And that, maybe, is the last and final lesson:

  I tell this story just to tell the story. I tell it because it happened and because I like it and people seem to like to hear it. I don’t tell it to share any great meaning—though I suppose it has a little shape to it (beginning and ending on a freezer full of meat), and I suppose it reflects somewhat the character that my father was (a real do-it-yourselfer, or “thrifty” if you want to put it mildly). You might even argue that the problem that faces him in both this story and the story of his missing pinky finger is a problem that continued on to the end of his life: My father died from prostate cancer, which might not have killed him if he’d gone to the doctor earlier. But he didn’t have insurance—preexisting condition clauses are nasty work—and he didn’t want to pay out of pocket, and when he felt a lump, he thought himself good enough to diagnose it as a hernia and not cancer. But it was cancer, and a year later, he passed on. He died in my arms, and I felt his last pulse-beat flutter in his neck before it stopped like a broken clock.

  Though the story may have shape, though it may have character and theme, I don’t tell it for those reasons. I don’t share it for any great meaning or reason.

  I just tell it because I hope it’s a damn fine story.

  Sometimes a story is just a story. Sometimes you tell it because it needs to be told. Sometimes you don’t care about theme or character; sometimes you don’t care about tension or pacing. The story is the story, and you tell it the way you know it. And that’s okay, too.

  1 Not a literal carousel of farm dogs and cats, unfortunately. But now I want that.

  2 Technically, “Canada geese,” but we don’t call them that around here, and it sounds weird so I won’t bow to your taxonomy!

  3 A total coincidence, I’m sure.

  4 They’re probably not, though.

  5 That or you’re saying, “I did not buy this book expecting to be heralded with tales of masturbating elk, and I am not happy.” Which is fair, I think. Either way, you bought the book, and here we are.

  6 It echoes one of the earliest and only sex conversations I ever had with my father. I was out on our front porch and he came out, stood there for a little while, then pointed up into a tree. “See that?” he said. “See what?” I asked. “Those squirrels.” Sure enough, there were two squirrels, and they were humping with such vim and vigor you had to believe that they believed it was their job to repopulate the entirety of squirreldom. My eyes went wide, and my father said, “Always wear a condom,” then walked away. So for me, the-birds-and-the-bees was less about birds and bees and more about elk masturbation and the unsafe sex of squirrels.

  Appendix

  50 STORYTELLING TIPS

  If you’re bored, we’re bored.

  Remember ABI: Always Be Interesting.

  Ask yourself the vital question: Why now? Why is this story happening now? Why do we, the audience, need to see the story that’s happening now—what is the value of us entering the world at this point in time? This will help you figure out the shift in the status quo that lead us here. It’s not just about an inciting incident, but about the prominence and urgency of the problem.

  Characters must earn their victories.

  Characters also earn their failures and losses.

  If your characters are getting in the way of your plot, good. Let them. They are the plot. The camera f
ollows them; they don’t move in front of the camera. Assume it’s like a documentary: They are the subject, so let the tale unfold in their wake, not in their absence.

  We care about characters we understand, so it’s your job to make me understand your characters.

  Be funny sometimes. Even if just a little. Even in the most dire, dour circumstances, a little humor goes a long way. It can lighten our load as the audience, and it can further highlight its opposite: The darkness is given sharper lines with a little contrast. We don’t understand grief without happiness. We can’t grasp the light without the dark. We don’t grok hot dogs without hamburgers. Hot dogs and hamburgers are opposites, right?1

  Humor is one of the hardest things to get right in a story. Here’s a tip: Jokes aren’t necessarily jokes to the characters. What’s funny to you might very well be serious to them. A factor of absurdity and contrast can go a long way to making something funny—a lot of the things John McClane does in Die Hard are not meant as jokes. He’s relieving his own tension, trying to find some kind of tough-guy normalcy in a shitty scenario. It’s absurd that he has these one-liners, or paints HO HO HO on a dead guy’s sweatshirt, or complains about shoe sizes. But it works. In Jurassic Park, a dinosaur blows snot on a little girl. It’s not funny to her, but it’s funny to us because we’re horrible people. Ahem. More to the point, we like the silly framing of it—it’s a moment of wonder, where she’s reaching out to touch a dinosaur with a hesitant hand and—achoo, fffppppbbrt, dino-snot, ha ha ha, stupid child, covered in saurian mucus. Laugh at the stupid mucus child.

  A scene is multipurposed: It moves the plot, it tells us more about the characters, it dials up or dials back the tension, it sets the mood, it whispers the theme through a keyhole.