250 Things You Should Know About Writing

by Chuck Wendig

  You as storyteller are a malevolent presence blocking the character's bliss. You must be a total asshole. Imagine that the character is an ant over here, and over there is a nugget of food, a dollop of honey, and all the ant wants is to trot his little ant-y ass over to the food so that he may dine upon it. Think of the infinite ways you can stop him from getting to that food. Flick him into the grass. Block his path with twigs, rocks, a line of dish soap, a squeeze of lighter fluid set aflame. Be the wolf to his little piggy and huff and puff and blow his house down. Pick him up, put him in the cup-holder in your car, and drive him 100 miles in the opposite direction while taunting him with insults. The audience will hate you. But they'll keep on hungering for more. Will the ant get to the food? Won't he? Will he find his friends again? Can he overcome? Primal, simple, declarative problem. You are the villain. The character is the hero. The audience thirsts for this most fundamental conflict of storyteller versus character.

  13. The Code

  Just as a storyworld is beholden to certain laws, norms, and ways, so too is a character: every character has an internal compass, an invisible set of morals and beliefs that comprise their "code." The audience senses this. They know when a character betrays his own code and violates the program -- it's like a glitch in the Matrix, a disturbance in the dream you've crafted. That's not to say characters can't change. They can, and do. But a heroic fireman doesn't one day save a cat from a tree and the next day decide to cook and eat a baby. Changes in a character must come out of the story, not out of thin air.

  14. A B C

  The law of threes. Find three beats for your character -- be they physical, social, emotional -- with each beat graphing a change of the character of the course of a story. Selfish boy to exiled teen to heroic man. From maiden to mother to crone. Private, Lieutenant, General. Knows everything, everything in question, knows nothing. Birth, life, death. Beginning, middle, end.

  15. Boom Goes The Dynamite

  Blake Snyder calls this the "Save The Cat" moment, but it needn't be that shiny and happy. Point being: every character needs a kick-ass moment, a reason why we all think, "Fuck yeah, that's why I'm behind this dude." What moment will you give your character? Why will we pump our fists and hoot for him?

  16. Beware The Everyman, Fear The Chosen One

  I'm boring. So are you. We don't all make compelling protagonists despite what we feel in our own heads, and so the Everyman threatens to instead become the eye-wateringly-dull-motherfucker-man, flat as a coat of cheap paint. The Chosen One -- arguably the opposite of the Everyman -- has, appropriately, the opposite problem: he's too interesting, a preening peacock of special preciousness. Beware either. Both can work, but know the danger. Find complexity. Seek remarkability.

  17. Nobody Sees Themselves As A Supporting Character

  Thus, your supporting characters shouldn't act like supporting characters. They have full lives in which they are totally invested and where they are the protagonists. They're not puppets for fiction.

  18. The Main MC, DJ Protag

  That said, they don't call your "main character" the MC for nothing. Your protagonist at the center of the story should still be the most compelling motherfucker in the room.

  19. You Are Not Your Character, Except For When You Are

  Your character is not a proxy for you. If you see Mary Sue in the mirror, put your foot through the glass and use that reflection instead. But that old chestnut -- "write what you know" -- applies. You take the things that have happened to you and you bring them to the character. Look for those things in your memory that affected you: fought a bear, won a surfing competition, lost a fist-fight with Dad, eradicated an insectile alien species. Pull out the feelings. Inject them into the face, neck, guts, brain and heart of the character.

  20. Fugged Up

  Everybody's a little fucked up inside. Some folks more than that. No character is a saint. Find the darkness inside. Draw their imperfections to the surface like a bead of blood. You don't have to give a rat's ass about Joseph Campbell, but he was right when he said we love people for their imperfections. Same holds true for characters. We love them for their problems.

  21. A Tornado Beneath A Cool Breeze

  A good character is both simple and complex: simplicity on the surface eradicates any barrier to entry, and complexity beneath rewards the reader and gives the character both depth and something to do. Complexity on the surface rings hollow and threatens to be confusing: ease the audience into the character the way you'd get into a clawfoot tub full of steaming hot water -- one toe at a time, baby.

  22. On The Subject Of Archetypes

  You can begin with an archetype -- or even a stereotype -- because people find comfort there. It creates a sense of intimacy even when none exists. But the archetype should be like the leg braces worn by Forrest Gump as a kid -- when that kid takes off running, he blasts through the braces and leaves them behind. So too with the "type." They'll help the character stand on his own until it's time to shatter 'em when running. Oh, and for the record, Forrest Gump was a fucking awful movie. In short: worst character ever.

  23. Dialogue Over Description, Action Over Rumination

  Don't bludgeon us over the head with description. A line or three about the character is good enough -- and it doesn't need to be purely about their physical looks. It can be about movement and body language. It can be about what people think, about what goes on in her head. But throw out a couple-few lines and get out. Dialogue is where a character is revealed. And action. What a character says and does is the sum of her being. It doesn't need to be more than that: a character says shit, then does shit, then says shit about the shit she just did. In there lurks infinite possibilities -- a confluence of atoms that reveals who she is.

  24. Take The Test Drive

  Write the character before you write the character. Take her on adventures that don't count. Canon can go suck itself. Fuck canon. Who cares about canon? Here I say, "to Hell with the audience." This isn't for them. This is for you. Joyride the character around some flash fiction, a short script, a blog post, a page of dialogue, a poem, whatever. Test her, try her out. That sounds porny, but what I mean to say is: cut off her skin, wear it, and dance around the goddamn room. Which leads me to...

  25. Get All Up In Them Guts

  Know your character. Every square inch. Empathize, don't sympathize. Understand the character but don't stand with the character. Get in their skin. The closer you get, the better off you are when a story goes sideways. Any rewriting or additional work comes easy when you know which way the character's gonna jump. Know them like you know yourself; when the character does something under your watch, you know it comes justified, with purpose, with meaning, with intimate knowledge that the thing she did is the thing she was always supposed to motherfucking do. Unrelated: I really like the word "motherfucker."

  25 Things You Should Know About… Plot

  1. What The Fiddly Fuck Is "Plot," Anyway?

  A plot is the sequence of narrative events as witnessed by the audience.

  2. The Wrong Question

  Some folks will ask, incorrectly, "What's the plot?" which, were you to answer them strictly, you would begin to recite for them a litany of events, each separated by a deep breath and the words, "And then..." They probably don't want that. What they mean to ask is, "What's the story?" or, "What's this about?" Otherwise you're just telling them what happened, start to finish. In other words: snore.

  3. A Good Plot Is Like A Skeleton: Critical, Yet Invisible

  A plot functions like a skeleton: it is both structural and supportive. Further, it isn't entirely linear. A plot has many moving parts (sub-plots and pivot points) that act as limbs and joints. The best plots are plots we don't see, or rather, that the audience never has to think about. As soon as we think about it, it's like a needle manifests out of thin air and pops the balloon or lances that blister. Remember, we don't walk around with our skeletons on the outside of our body, which is go
od because, ew. What are we, ants? So don't show off your plot. Let the plot remain hidden, invisible.

  4. Shit's Gotta Make Sense, Son

  The biggest plot crime of them all is a plot that doesn't make a lick of goddamn sense. That's a one way ticket to plot jail. Do not pass GO. Do not collect $200 dollars. Do not drop the soap. The elegance of a great plot is that, when the events are all strung together, there exists a natural order as if this was the only way they could fit together. It's like dominoes tumbling. Your plot is not a chimera: random parts mashed together because you didn't think it through. Test the plot. Show people. Pull the pieces apart and ask, "Is there a better way?" Nonsense plots betray the potency of story.

  5. The Quintessential Plot

  The simplest motherfucker of a plot is this: things get worse until they get better. A straight-up escalation of conflict. It goes from "Uh-oh, that's bad," to, "Uh-oh, it's getting worse," to "Oh, holy shit, it can't get any worse," to, "I think I maybe fixed it, or at least stopped it from being so totally and completely fucked." When in doubt, just know that your next step as a storyteller is to bring the pain, amp the misery, and escalate the conflict. That's what they mean by the advice, "Have a man with a gun walk through the door." You can take that literally, sure, but what it means is: the bad news just got worse.

  6. In Life We Avoid Conflict, In Fiction We Seek It

  Fiction is driven by characters in conflict, or, put differently, the flame of fiction grows brighter through friction. A match-tip lights only when struck; so too is the mechanism by which a gun fires a bullet. Impact. Tension. Fear. Danger. Need to know what impels your plot forward? Look to the theme of Man Versus [fill-in-the-blank]. Man versus his fellow man. Woman versus nature. Man versus himself. Woman versus an angry badger riding a unicorn. Find the essential conflict and look for events that are emblematic to that.

  7. Want Versus Fear

  Of course, the essence of the essential conflict -- the one below all that Wo/Man versus stuff -- is a character's wants versus a character's fears. Plot grows from this fecund garden. The character wants life, revenge, children, a pony -- and that which he fears must stand in his way. John McClane must battle terrorists to return to his wife. Indiana Jones must put up with snakes and irritating sidekicks to uncover the artifact. I must put up with walking downstairs to make myself a gin-and-tonic. Everything that stands in a character's way -- the speedbumps, roadblocks, knife-wielding monkeys, ninja clones, tornadoes, and sentient Krispy Kreme donuts sent from the future to destroy man via morbid obesity -- are events in the greater narrative sequence: they are pieces of the plot.

  8. Grow The Plot, Don't Build It

  A plot grows within the story you're telling. A story is all the important parts swirling together: world, character, theme, mood, and of course, plot. An artificial plot is something you have to wrestle into place, a structure you have to bend and mutilate and duct tape to get it to work -- it is a square peg headbutted into a circle hole, and you're the poor bastard doing all the headbutting.

  9. The Tension And Recoil Of Choice And Consequence

  An organic plot grows like this: characters make decisions -- sometimes bad decisions, other times decisions whose risks outweigh the rewards, and other times still decisions that are just plain uncertain in their outcome -- and then characters must deal with the consequences of those decisions. A character gives up a baby. Or buys a gun. Or enters the dark forest to slay Lady Gaga. Anytime a character makes a choice, the narrative branches. Events unfold because she chose a path. That's it. That's plot. Choice and consequence tighten together, ratcheting tension, creating suspense. Choice begets event.

  10. Plot Is Promise

  Plot offers the promise of Chekov and his gun, of Hitchcock and his bomb under the table. An event here leads to a choice there which spawns another event over there. Foreshadowing isn't just a literary technique used sparingly: it lurks in the shadow of every plot turn. Plot promises pay-off. A good plot often betrays this promise and does something different than the audience expects. That's not a bad thing. You don't owe the audience anything but your best story. But a plot can also make hay by doing exactly what you expect: show them the gun and now they want to see it fire.

  11. Let Characters Do They Heavy Lifting

  Characters will tell you your plot. Even better: let them run and they'll goddamn give it to you on a platter. Certainly plot can happen from an external locus of control -- but you're not charting the extinction of the dinosaurs or the lifecycle of the slow loris. Plot is like Soylent Green: it's made of people. Characters say things, do things, and that creates plot. It really can be that simple. Authentic plot comes from internal emotions, not external mechanics.

  12. Chart The Shortest Point Between Beginning And End

  One way to be shut of the nonsensical, untenable plot is to cut through all the knots. If we are to assume that a plot is motivated by the choices and actions of characters -- and we must assume that, because who else acts as prime mover? -- then we can also assume that characters will take the most direct path through the story as they can. That's not to say it'll be the smartest path, but it will be forthright as the character sees it. No character creates for himself a convoluted path. Complex, perhaps. Convoluted? Never. Characters want what they want and that means they will cut as clear a path to that goal as they can. A convoluted, needlessly complex plot is just the storyteller showing off how clever he is. And no audience wants that. Around these parts, we hunt and kill the preening peacocks and wear their tail-feathers as a headdress.

  13. On The Subject Of "Plot Holes"

  Plot holes -- where logic and good sense and comprehensible sequence fall into a sinking story-pit -- happen for a handful of reasons. One, you weren't paying attention. Two, your plot is too convoluted and its untenable nature cannot sustain itself. Three, you don't know what the fuck is happening, and maybe also, you're drunk. Four, the plot is artificial, not organic, and isn't coming out naturally from what the characters need and want to do. Five, you offended Plot Jesus by not sacrificing a goat. You can't just fix a plot hole by spackling it over. It's like a busted pipe in a wall. You need to do some demo. Get in there. Rip out more than what's broken. Fill in more than what's missing.

  13. If The Characters Have To Plan, So Do You

  Many writers don't like to outline. Here's how you know if you should, though: if your characters are required to plan and plot something -- a heist, an attack on a moon bunker, a corporate take-over -- then you're a fool if you think these imaginary people have to plan but you don't. This is doubly true of genre material. A murder mystery for example lives and dies by a compelling, sensible plot. So plan the plot, for Chrissakes. This isn't improvisational dance. Take some fucking notes, will you?

  14. Set Up Your Tentpoles

  A big tent is propped up by tentpoles. So too is your plot. Easy way to plan without getting crazy: find those events in your plot that are critical, that must happen for the whole story to come together. "Mary Meets Gordon. Belial Betrays Satan. An Earthquake Swallows Snooki." Chart these half-dozen events. Know that you must get to them somehow.

  15. The Herky Jerky Plot Shuffle Pivot Point Boogie

  You've seen Freytag's Triangle. It's fine. But it doesn't tell the whole story. This is the Internet. This is the future. We have CGI. We have 3-D. Gaze upon the plot from the top-down. It isn't a linear stomp up a steep mountain. It's a zig-zagging quad ride through dunes and jungles, over rivers and across gulleys. You're a hawk over the quad-rider's shoulder -- watch it jerk left, pull right, jump a log, squash a frog. More obstacles. Greater danger. Faster and faster. Every turn is a pivot point. A point when the narrative shifts, when the audience goes right and the story feints left.

  16. Plot Is The Beat That Sets The Story's Rhythm

  Plot comprises beats. Each action, a new beat, a new bullet point in the sequence of events. These establish rhythm. Stories are paced according to the emotions and moods they are prese
ntly attempting to evoke. Plot is the drummer. Plot keeps the sizzling beat. Like Enrique "Kiki" Garcia, of Miami Sound Machine.

  17. Every Night Needs A Slow Dance

  I know I said that plot, at its core, is how everything gets worse and worse and worse until it gets better. Overall, that's true. But you need to pull back from that. Release the tension. Soften the recoil. Not constantly, but periodically. Learn to embrace the false victories, the fun & games, the momentary lapses of danger. If only to mess with the heads of the audience. Which, after all, is your totally awesome job.

  18. The Name Of My New Band Is "Beat Sheet Manifesto"

  You can move well beyond the tentpoles. You can free-fall from the 30,000 foot view, smash into the earth, and get a macro-level micro-view of all the ants and the pill-bugs and the sprouts from seeds. What I mean is, you can track every single beat -- every tiny action -- that pops up in your plot. You don't need to do this before you write, but you can and should do it after. You'll see where stuff doesn't make sense. You'll see where plot holes occur. Also: wow. A Meat Beat Manifesto joke?