Story Fix

by Larry Brooks

  The source of your reader’s emotional engagement is dramatic tension stemming from conflict. This is conflict that arises from the core thread of the story—drama you have created because stakes are attached. That experience is tense for the hero and tense for the reader rooting for that hero. Without dramatic tension, your story will be static, and before long it will die.

  The Core Story

  In the previous chapters we learned about the importance of understanding your core story. Not the backstory, not the inner demons of the hero, not the subplots, not the various episodic side trips and experiences and dreams of the story, but the core dramatic spine, first and foremost. A novel that jumps from one dramatic question to another, none of which arise from the core story, is problematic and will be quickly rejected. This alone may explain your rejection, and if so you may now know what to do about it: Respin the narrative around a single dramatic pursuit that takes front-and-center priority throughout the arc of the story. Because you are telling that story.

  The core drama constitutes the hero’s pursuit of a solution to a specific threat or problem, and/or the quest to seize an opportunity. Either of those has consequences, which is the source of reader empathy. The core story poses a dramatic question, generically stated as this: “Will the hero achieve X?” with X standing in for what the hero needs or wants. If X doesn’t happen, it will yield dark consequences.

  Lisa needs a kidney for her child. Her philandering husband lost his job, and they’ve lost their health insurance. The child has a rare blood type. They have recently arrived in the United States from a third-world country and have no relatives or friends. In fact, they’re in the country illegally.

  This is a riveting premise because the stakes are so high and the opposition to the wife’s goal so dire. The reader will care about this, at least if she has a beating heart and a soul, and especially if the writer has drawn the characters vividly and sympathetically. The reader roots for a positive outcome and remains captivated because the route to the end is not obvious. Lisa must do something to create a positive outcome, and her efforts will be heroic.

  That’s the dramatic setup. But we’re not done yet. It’s certainly a dark and antagonistic situation, but there is no villain yet, no bad guy. So let’s create one.

  When Lisa goes to a local government agency for help, she reveals that she is in the country illegally. The case officer is a by-the-book, cold-blooded bitch who is prejudiced and angered by undocumented citizens being in “her country.” And so she makes it her personal mission to not only prevent Lisa from getting a dime of government assistance but also to have her and her daughter deported as soon as possible.

  Now you have a core story—not just a profile of Lisa and her situation but something Lisa must do. A plot. Anything other than a focus on this plot hits the pause button on the core storyline and is therefore a diversion. Too much backstory and too many subplots detract from the energy of the core plot and the emotional resonance for the reader. She has an important mission—a quest—before her. A villain blocks her path. The clock is ticking as her daughter’s condition becomes grimmer by the day. And while she has a sympathetic doctor who helps the poor, that guy can’t solve the core story problem because the evil government case worker is waiting to shut down the physician’s practice if he even sneezes in that direction. And if Lisa falls for the doctor … well, that would make a nice subplot, but including this is a bad idea if it takes over the novel, changing lanes from the former core plot to a new one featuring the doctor as a love interest. Such a subplot needs to serve the core story spine, not distract from it.

  This balancing of core story and subplot is a skill set, one that can either get you published or explain why you were rejected. When writers try to give equal—or even too much—attention to a subplot, even when it involves the hero, everything slows down. Balance doesn’t mean equal airtime; it means maintaining the core story as the primary narrative and then artfully weaving in any subplots in a manner that adds to either reader empathy or dramatic tension, or both.

  The core story creates the primary source of dramatic tension. In this case, it needs to be a plotline that isn’t just a focus on a character but rather allows the character to emerge, face her demons, and summon her true strength, genius, and motherly ferocity with courage. The plot becomes the catalyst for character to emerge.

  If your story is character focused to the extent that readers have trouble finding or engaging with a core dramatic story unfolding in the story’s present time—a plot—give them something more to root for. Readers can’t root for the past, via backstory. A backstory is what it is, and readers can’t hope for it to change. But they will root for a drama set in the present that engulfs the hero, and that should be the focus of your core storyline. Readers won’t simply be observing, which is what character-centric stories with a lot of backstory ask them to do, because the character in the present tense is all they have. If you have discovered that your story is too character driven, or that it lacks a core story and therefore dramatic tension, then you may have just found its Achilles’ heel. Now you have something to fix, something to revise. Now you have hope.

  Using the expectations and tropes of your chosen genre as a guideline (meaning that your romance novel shouldn't have a mystery as its core story; it needs to be a romance), you develop and focus on a dramatic spine told in the present. This core story asks a compelling dramatic question and elicits reader empathy and support with a hero’s goal that is blocked by a villain or antagonist. Pressure and urgency are in play, and, most of all, stakes drive both sides of the race to attain the goal.

  Inner Needs as Core Story Motivation

  It’s time to define your core story. What does your hero want and need? What blocks his quest to attain it, and what is at stake?

  If your answer is “inner peace” or “happiness,” or another vague or ambiguous term, it’s likely not strong enough. Your character needs an external quest, something to find and engage with, to defeat or achieve—whatever is required to succeed in that quest. When your character overcomes the external quest, then he’ll have happiness and peace, which is wonderful. But that isn’t the same as a core story quest with happiness and peace as the primary stakes. Happiness is the desired outcome, not the dramatic stakes. You’ll need to generate an external means and strategy that create a goal, which, if reached, will allow him to access and embrace the inner peace he seeks. In that context, inner peace is the goal, not the means. And a core story is always about means, because a core story is always about what happens, not just what the outcome is. Internal growth and satisfaction work best as the results of the quest, not the path the hero treads to get there.

  I encourage you to read that last part again, because so many writers—newer writers in particular, who have a high vision for a story that deals with psychological healing—get it wrong. They try to make the search for happiness the road, when in fact it is better positioned as the destination. The better story focuses on the journey itself.

  Be clear on this: The core story is about what the character needs to do and accomplish to obtain peace and happiness.

  Maybe your view of your core story has already changed based on this chapter alone. So let’s see. Right now, on a separate sheet of paper, define your core story.

  The Core Dramatic Question

  Determining the core dramatic question is easy if you nail down the core story. The question will be some form of this: Will the hero succeed in the quest as defined by the core story? Will she defeat the villain and overcome the odds against her?

  It’s easy to overthink the core dramatic question, but it’s actually often simplistic, despite a core story that is anything but. It boils down to success or failure. The stakes determine the degree to which readers will engage emotionally, which translates to the degree to which they root for the successful outcome in context to the degree to which they fear for the safety and well-being of the hero based on the con
sequences of failure. This is precisely why characterization is so critical, and yet it supports my contention that character is driven by, and thus subordinate to, a compelling core story question. Plot gives the hero something to do and the reader something to root for. That’s the whole ballgame right there, also in simplistic, yet almost unfailing, terms.

  In our last example, the core dramatic question is: Will Lisa find a kidney for her ill daughter in time to save her? Will she thwart the efforts of the evil case worker to have her deported?

  The answer is either yes or no—or some surprise-twist hybrid of the two. The plot is deep and layered, but the dramatic question isn’t. It comes down to win or lose.

  Knowing this clarifies the author’s primary job: to suck readers into the hero’s quest on multiple levels, make them live and feel the journey itself, make them fear or respect the consequences (stakes) that drive it all, make them fear and loathe the villain, and make them hang on every scene—because they have been made to care about the hero—so they can see how it turns out. That recipe is as old as paper itself and just as powerful today as it has ever been.

  It’s amazing, really, when you consider the obvious simplicity of the author’s task, which truly never varies, versus the complexity of pulling it off over three or four hundred pages. This explains why multiple drafts are almost always involved. It also explains the need for revision: Somehow, the author—either unwittingly or in ignorant defiance—has departed from that prescribed path.

  The magic of a core question is in its unspoken next step: How will she do this? Your job is to make readers care about this question. They are rooting for her. They have empathy for her plight because they can relate to it. That’s the math: concern for the character, plus fear and engagement with any jeopardy that confronts someone you care about. Readers immerse themselves in this journey as if it were their own. They feel it. They fear and despise the wicked case worker in our example story. They hear the ticking clock. They dry the tears of Lisa’s frightened daughter. They hug Lisa in the dead of night as she weeps in the bed of a government-funded high-rise apartment building, where a friend—a minor character created to give Lisa a shoulder to cry on and act as a sounding board—is letting her sleep until the friend has to go back to prison in a few weeks for breaking her parole.

  All of this unfolds in context to that simple core question: Will Lisa get to remain in this country? Will she find a kidney and save her daughter? Will love survive it all?

  Is your core dramatic question as compelling? Is it in context to the character’s quest, the antagonism, and the stakes? Or is the question smothered in a series of episodic, anecdotal documentaries of “stuff that happens to your hero,” included for the misguided purpose of attempting to show us as much of your hero’s life and inner self as possible?

  If the latter describes your core dramatic question, this may explain the rejection e-mail tacked to your bathroom wall or wherever you keep the rejections that have come your way.

  Now you know. And knowing is the key to reversing this trend.

  Let’s see how much of this has sunk in. As an exercise, beneath the definition of your core dramatic story that you jotted down earlier, write down the core dramatic question. If it’s clearer now, more compelling, a win-or-lose proposition relative to a core hero’s quest to solve a problem and/or attain a goal, then you are probably on the right track. Bravo to you if that’s the case, because this single issue of core story focus, when fumbled, sinks more stories than most authors realize.

  The Critical Role of Stakes

  When you land on a compelling dramatic core story and the dramatic question it poses, you’ve already defined the stakes. The reader should know, early on, what the consequences of success or failure will be. If you’re still only vaguely defining the stakes of your story as “happiness” or “peace” or “to find himself in a cold, cruel world,” congratulations—you’ve just found the probable weakness in your story. Those stakes aren’t strong enough, because they are outcomes rather than proactive actions. Good stories are always about the decisions and actions characters choose rather than the exploration of desires and needs the character does not act upon.

  Lisa’s story quest, in this context, isn’t merely to make her daughter healthy and happy. That’s the ultimate goal, the point of her quest, the outcome she seeks to attain. The stakes are the “why” of seeking the outcome (consequences of either success or failure), and those stakes attach to the action as much as the goal. This is because the goal depends on the action taken—that’s where the drama resides. The story needs to be primarily focused on action in a narrative sense. You can’t spend four hundred pages writing about what she wants and all that it means, but you can spend 390 of those pages writing about how she engages with the journey to obtain her goal.

  If that’s not how you’ve handled the tradeoff between the hero’s goal and the hero’s action in your story—with a significant focus on the journey that illustrates those actions and confrontations, with the stakes vividly and viscerally established—then you just may have found one of the reasons your manuscript isn’t getting the response you hoped for. The fix is at hand, based on your understanding of the actions-in-pursuit-of goals narrative dynamic.

  In our example, Lisa’s quest and the actions she takes are all about finding her daughter a healthy kidney and a way to get it. The narrative shows that journey, rather than dwelling on the reasons why, because those reasons were vividly implanted in the story back in the Part One setup quartile. This is what she must do to save her daughter. A healthy daughter is the desired outcome. The stakes apply to both. But make no mistake, the core story’s dramatic quest and the dramatic question that arises from it are about what she must do and achieve to get there. As the author of the story, this is your sweet spot.

  The big mistake here would be to dive too deeply inside Lisa’s head to simply expose her angst and worry and fear, without including the forward movement of her proactive efforts to solve the problem at hand.

  That’s a huge story-saving subtlety. It’s the difference between a story that works and a story that will disappear in a crowd of other overly character-centric genre stories.

  Let’s commit your new understanding to paper. Write down the stakes your hero is playing for in your story. Whatever you write is the hero’s goal. The success-or-failure proposition of this goal becomes your core dramatic question.

  Now, beneath that, write down a summary of what your hero does in pursuit of the goal, the major campaigns and efforts and confrontations she must navigate along the path toward resolving the dramatic question. (Bullet points work well here.)

  Hopefully, armed with this new and enlightened awareness of what this means and why it is important, you may have just identified—and perhaps repaired—any weakness in this regard that has been holding the story back.

  Dramatic Tension Leading to Resolution

  The sum of the core story, the core dramatic question, and the stakes, as well as the conflict they create, expressed as the actions and confrontations that manifest along the path toward the goal, determine the level of dramatic tension in your story. You create a character with need or opportunity. You launch a quest to attain it in the presence of an antagonistic force with something significant at stake, which causes the hero to take action and confront the obstacles. This results in the hero’s final crescendo of courage, proactive strength, and cleverness that overcomes the obstacle and resolves the situation.

  The hero achieves the goal of her quest as a direct result of her decisions and actions and the outcome of specific confrontations. (Or she doesn’t attain her goal, despite all of this. It’s your story, and you can end it how you please. But be careful to not betray your reader or the integrity of the story’s thematic intentions.)

  Things get clearer, if not easier, from here.

  When you have a compelling concept that has imbued an engaging premise with something inherently intriguing,
something that promises the reader a dramatic, empathetically emotional experience because it meets the criteria for an effective premise … when you are totally focused on a core dramatic story rather than a character profile or a biographical chronicle … when that core story asks a juicy dramatic question with vivid and urgent stakes … when you can define those stakes and they make your skin itch because you can feel their weight … when all of these elements are clear and ready to fire on all cylinders … then your work in pinning down the rest of the narrative challenge becomes more focused and accessible. No longer will you be rambling through a forest of episodic randomness driven by inner turmoil, still searching for a core story.

  Everything that follows in this chapter assumes you have gained clarity about your core story and that it meets the given criteria. If you aren’t there yet, spend some time on your definition of your core concept, its dramatic question, the stakes that hang in the balance, and the specific strategies and actions your hero will take to confront an antagonistic force (villain, threat, or obstacle) standing in his way. Wring as much tension and emotion from this as you can, and change what you must to make sure these bases are covered in a compelling way.

  Vicarious Reader Experience

  In a cool sort of way—one you should never take for granted, because you are responsible for this—a vivid vicarious reading experience is a given in a story that features an empathetic hero’s quest with comprehensible, relatable, significant, and urgent stakes and a villain we fear and despise. In other words, vicarious reader experience is directly linked to and dependent on the presence of dramatic tension.

  But there’s one more narrative ingredient you need to consider and implement to achieve a high level of vicarious experience. It’s the stark, detailed, sensual, tactile, provocative, thrilling, scary, sexy, dark, joyous (or whatever it needs to be) story world within which all this drama and emotional engagement will transpire.