by Chuck Wendig
Characters are not role models, and stories are not lectures.
Likability is less important a factor in your characters than relatability. We need to relate to them and grok their problem. It’s not about wanting to sit down and have a beer with them; it’s about being able to live with them for two hours, or a season of TV, or the breadth of a whole novel. Forget liking them, but do remember that we have to live with them. If all else fails: Just make them interesting.
Interestingness is not only important, but it covers a great many sins. A book can fall down in a lot of places, but as long as it’s interesting, we will keep on reading. A book with the most nuanced character arcs and finely tuned plot won’t matter one whit if it’s dull as a dead hamster.
The beginning of a story asks questions and answers none. The middle of a story answers questions in a way that arouses more questions. The end of a story is about answering all the questions except for one or two that will keep the audience thinking.
The stakes of a story are what can be gained or lost. We must discover them early and be reminded of them periodically—never let the audience forget what’s on the table. Something is on the chopping block, and we need to see whatever it is squirming there under the raised cleaver.
End scenes interestingly. Which is to say, end on a question or an unresolved conflict. Give the audience a reason to turn the page or get past the commercial break.
Always hold something back. Always make them want just a little more. Tease satisfaction, but be hesitant to deliver it. This is true for both the characters and the audience.
Stories are a combination of entertainment, enlightenment, and exasperation. You want them to be excited, you want them to feel awakened, and you want them to feel emotional.
If you’re having trouble finding focus for your story or figuring out where it goes, learn the value of outlining. Outlining can look however you want it to look—a tentpole outline, a detailed “beat sheet” identifying every beat in the story, an Excel spreadsheet. Even when you’re in the middle of the story, you may feel suddenly lost—so outline the road behind and the path ahead. Try it. Just goddamn try it. Don’t look at me like that. I know you don’t want to do it, but life isn’t always about doing the things we want and none of the things we don’t. I don’t want to have to go to the DMV or the post office, but sometimes we just have to swallow our medicine and quit grousing about it. *flicks you on the nose*
Reveal too little and the audience will feel lost. Reveal too much and they will feel safe and bored.
Safety is the enemy of good storytelling. It shouldn’t last. And I mean that inside the story, not outside. Please don’t chase your audience around with a Weedwacker. Metaphorically, yes. In reality, no.
Read outside your genre. Reading only in your genre is how you get the Human Centipede effect (ew, I know, but shut up) where you digest the material and simply, um, excrete it back into the story. Nothing new is added. It’s just a reiteration of what came before. So read broadly.
Also read outside your medium. Storytelling is different in different places, but there are common bones in these ol’ skeletons. Prefer novels? Read comics. Like TV? Read a TV script. Play video games? Try to find transmedia experiences and game narratives outside what you find on your Xbox. Identify that shared anatomy. Learn how the bones work and turn together.
Characters must make mistakes. But they cannot only make mistakes. They must have triumphs, too. A story isn’t an endless array of failure and disaster—we must have some sense of success to understand why success must, above all else (and against all odds), not be lost. Further, characters who only make mistakes become intolerable to us. We start to actively root for their failure if we cannot see in them the potential for success.
It’s okay if your story is therapy for you. Just don’t let it read like therapy. It’s still gotta read like a story.
Write confidently. Confidence is engaging. What I mean by that is this: No waffling. The story is assertive—it moves along, it doesn’t dally. Everything feels purposeful and driven. If you’re afraid, the audience will know. They can smell fear, just like bees and coyotes can.2
Two simple words add up to one of the most valuable questions in a storyteller’s cabinet of mystery: “What if?” When in doubt, ask those two words. Let them unspool possibility. What if this person perishes? What if the plan goes awry? What if you go right when the audience expects you to go left? Challenge yourself and the choices you have made for the characters and for their plot.
Treat the setting as if it is a character. No, it’s not sentient—it does not have wants and needs, but, to go back to what we established in the second chapter, it does have problems like characters do. The setting, the storyworld, should have its own problem, or maybe even several problems. Are those problems in line with those of our characters? (Parallel.) Or do they run counter? (Perpendicular.)
The best villains are the ones we adore despite how much we hate and fear them. We should adore them, and we should understand them.
When in doubt, mess with the sequence of events. Change the narrative order of operations. Nobody said a story had to be told in a straight line from start to finish. Some of the best are not. The pieces are movable. So move ’em.
When in doubt, mess with the audience. Make them think a character is dead. Give them a dream sequence. Fool them with red herrings. Dangle untruths and misdirection. Let the narrative ground they walk on while reading the story feel dreadfully unsteady.
Of course, too much of that tinkering and the audience will rebel. They’ll find you and beat you with your own book. You can go too far. You can do it too often. Or you can mess with them using a clumsy hand. Trust me, I’ve done it well, and I’ve done it poorly. The times I’ve done it poorly still earn me angry e-mails. I see you, [email protected].
The story is you, and you are the story, but that can’t be obvious. You’re a ghost haunting the rooms of this house, not an actual inhabitant. Once the audience perceives your presence, the illusion is ruined, the bubble pops, and they’ll walk away, uncomfortable.
Point of view is our gateway in—both what the characters see, and what they believe. They are the lens through which we view the story. It is through them that we contextualize mystery, conflict, drama, tension. It limits what can be known and what must be known. POV saturates every level of narrative—particularly in prose writing, where the POV affects the mechanism of language and revelation. It’s less distinct across other formats: Games may be first-person or third-person (more in line with prose, curiously), whereas comics and film/TV tend to handle it more obliquely. Either way, always think about who is telling this story, who is seeing it, who is translating it for the audience. Who is our proxy? Or are they all proxies?
A narrative is like an investment. The more you convince the audience to buy in, the longer they’ll stay. The more time they spend in your story, the greater their overall willingness to see where it goes. It’s like this: In a book, if they read a page, they’ll read to the second page. If they read to page two, they’re in till page four. The longer they go, the more their investment in the story multiplies. If they make it halfway … they’ll probably finish the story. That’s not to say you shouldn’t concentrate on making the whole story as amazing as you can make it—but it is important to know that you can’t count on them staying with you through a soft opening in the hopes of it getting great later. Tell a great story right from the beginning.
Nothing wrong with breaking your story up into segments. Shatter it into its constituent bits. Parts, books, chapters, sequences, episodes, whatever. Maybe you use these so that the reader can see them (PART THREE: THE REVENGE OF FRONG THE DRAGON-MURDERED). Maybe you spackle over the seams so that the separations remain unseen. But a story is easier to envision when it’s less a sprawly, monstrous thing and more a thing you can get your hands around. For strangling.3
Storytelling is often an exploration of cause and eff
ect. Action and consequence. And this is the blood and bone of storytelling. Character wants shit, does shit, shit happens. Character discovers character is not the only character in the world and is in fact in a universe dominated by many other characters who want shit, too. They clash and interact until climax.
The climax is the consequence of all that has come before in the story. Everything crashes together. The chickens all come home to roost, except there isn’t enough room for all these chickens. Also, the chickens are bloodthirsty zombie chickens. Because I say so.
Characters don’t know what the plot is. So don’t ever expect them to follow it. We can feel when characters are forced from their own program because authors are overwriting them with the Plot Program. It feels gross. Characters only know what they want and what they’re willing to do or lose to get it.
The audience knows when you’re wasting time. Characters act in the straightest line they can imagine. They have a problem, and they aim to solve it directly. Too many stories have their characters uncharacteristically complicate their own quests. That’s not to say characters are perfect. Far from it. Their solutions may be wrong. Their problems may be overwhelming. They can be fragile and faulty people. But we also know when they’re wasting time because the plot needs them to. This is the equivalent of padding the word count on your term paper. Don’t do it.
More to the point, characters are more interesting when they are smart and capable instead of dumb and pliable.
Distrust plot formulas or preconceived story shapes. They’re useful when they’re useful. They’re dull, lifeless prisons when they’re not. Note that I didn’t say not to use them. Simply distrust. Better yet: Take the formulas you are given, then smash them with a hammer. Rearrange them to see what that earns you, and play with the parts. Rearranging the puzzle pieces will allow you to see if you can make a new, more compelling shape. Formula is safe. We want to be unsafe. Storytellers take risks.
A story must feel urgent and necessary.
The audience wants to do work. It’s why we don’t have to do all the heavy lifting. It’s why the storyteller doesn’t have to give every detail or answer every question. The audience sees the gaps and wants to fill them in—they want to feel invested, like they are a part of the story. How we let them do that is by giving them room to mentally and emotionally invest. So leave gaps. Show them doors you never walk through. Don’t overexplain yourself and what’s going on—make them come to you. Make them do the work.
Storytelling is a series of promises—some broken, some fulfilled. Know which is which, and know why each must be the way it must be. Fulfill more promises than you break.
No story is right the first time, and that’s okay. The illusion of a stage magician needs practicing. So does a joke or a comedy routine or a song or any kind of performance. A story is a performance. Practice it. Rewrite it until it’s right. Don’t worry about obliterating the magic. This doesn’t obliterate the magic because stories aren’t magic, even if they feel that way.
The best stories make us feel giddy and afraid—not only when we read them, but when we’re sitting there writing them, as well. If you’re not feeling anything while writing it, ask why. Take a step back. What will make you care more? What excites you or thrills you? What feels forbidden about the story, and can you make it happen?
When in doubt, blow something up. Boom. Metaphorically or literally. Er, within the story. Please don’t go blowing actual stuff up.
Don’t cheat. We know when you’re cheating us. When you break the promises of the narrative, when you give us something too easy, when you shortcut the story or force the characters into decisions we know they wouldn’t make all for the convenience of story … that’s cheating. We can smell it like we can smell a dead fish in the glove compartment. Don’t cheat. Take the time. Do the work. Cross all your narrative t’s and dot those storytelling i’s, damnit.
Finish it. Always finish it. No matter how unsure you are. No matter how unsteady it makes you feel. The only way out is through. Finishing the work teaches you how to finish the work. An ending is one of the most important parts of a story, and you only learn to write them by writing from the start to the finish. Bonus: Finishing what you begin feels good. It gives you a little dopamine release. It offers a tiny widdle brain tickle. If you have problems finishing a big story, first try to finish a smaller story. Learn the pattern. Build a ladder out of what you finish. Don’t worry about failing. We all fail. The only way you lose is by quitting.
1 Pssh, don’t bring your food snobbery over here. I’m the boss of this book.
2 That’s just science.
3 What? I didn’t say strangling. You said strangling. You monster.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chuck Wendig is the New York Times best-selling author of Star Wars: Aftermath, as well as the Miriam Black thrillers, the Atlanta Burns books, and the Heartland YA series, alongside other works across comics, games, film, and more. A finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer and the cowriter of the Emmy-nominated digital narrative Collapsus, he is also known for his popular blog, terribleminds.com, and his books about writing. He lives in Pennsylvania with his family.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First and foremost, I have to acknowledge all the readers who come to terribleminds.com—though the blog is ostensibly for me and about me first and foremost, they press me and challenge me with great questions, comments, and ideas, and have only helped refine how I look about writing and storytelling—and further, how I communicate my thoughts about writing and storytelling.
I also need to thank a lot of the writer-friends (originally mistyped as “writer-fiends,” and I nearly left it that way) who have appeared at the blog over the years: Delilah Dawson, Adam Christopher, Andrea Phillips, Elsa Sjunneson-Henry, Kevin Hearne, Stephen Blackmoore, and others.
Thanks too to Phil Sexton at Writer’s Digest for helping me get this book out into the world, and my agent, Stacia Decker, for getting it into his hands in the first place.
Finally, thanks to Stephen King for On Writing.
Because, c’mon.
C’mon.
*kisses fingers*
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Damn Fine Story. Copyright © 2017 by Chuck Wendig. Manufactured in the United States of America. All rights reserved. No other part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published by Writer’s Digest Books, an imprint of F+W Media, Inc., 10151 Carver Road, Cincinnati, Ohio 45242. (800) 289-0963. First edition.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
ISBN-13: 978-1-4403-4838-9
Edited by Karen Krumpak
Designed by Alexis Estoye
Production coordinated by Debbie Thomas