Damn Fine Story: Mastering the Tools of a Powerful Narrative

by Chuck Wendig

  Now, in some cases, telling you the end is how you generate the question—and the question is everything, as it’s what pulls you through the tale.3 In a certain story, if I tell you the ending first—that the protagonist died and maybe even who killed him—that creates new questions. Why did he die? What caused his death? Who killed him, or if we already know who, what was the motive for that murder? Again, the arrangement maximizes my ability as a storyteller to make you think and feel. If I had told you up front that the dog finds his owner, I would have undercut the only question I could really bring you in that short tale; if I tell you about a murder, it generates new questions. The arrangement of the story should be there to generate questions rather than offer quick answers.

  The arrangement of your story—how you tell it and in what order you present the sequence of events—is key to all of this. It matters so much, it can ruin the best story and elevate the worst.

  Let’s see how.

  SPOILER WARNINGS

  Please hold still while I get up on my soapbox.

  *struggles to climb up on a soapbox*

  Man, soapboxes are slippery. Probably all that soap. Whatever. I’ll stay down here and just yell really loud.

  DO NOT SPOIL STORIES FOR PEOPLE. Don’t ever do it. Be nice. Be thoughtful. Don’t tell them what happened on that show, or in this movie, or in the pages of that comic book or novel. It’s disrespectful to them.

  And it’s disrespectful to the storyteller. Because here’s the deal: That whole arrangement thing I’m talking about in this chapter? It’s intentional. We write the stories we write in such a way so as to provoke mystery and conflict and reaction. We want people to walk the maze. But when you spoil something, you short-circuit that. You knock down walls and let them walk straight through to the big moments—moments we work hard to orchestrate. You cut through tension we worked to escalate. You ruin it. It’s like telling how a magic trick works before anybody has the chance to see it. It’s like pooping in the soup. Don’t poop in the soup. Stop that. Be nice.

  Respect the story.

  UNITS OF NARRATIVE MEASUREMENT

  If we want to talk about arrangement, we have to talk about the pieces being arranged. We need to get on the same page and understand exactly what the building blocks of narrative are.

  The units of narrative measurement are these, from smallest to largest:

  BEAT. A beat is a moment within the story that comprises, roughly, an action or a dialogue or some other consequential moment. Example: The moment Leia gives R2D2 the Death Star plans at the fore of A New Hope is a beat. So, too, is when John McClane drops a dead body out of a window onto Al Powell’s cop car.

  SCENE. A scene is a collection of beats held together by a relatively consistent setting (meaning, it doesn’t tend to leave the setting). A scene tends to have a common purpose in that it advances the story in one direction and does not cut away from that setting, cast, or purpose. In The Empire Strikes Back, one scene is when both Luke and his Tauntaun are mauled by a gropey Wampa and dropped into the snow. In The Princess Bride, the entire swordfight between Inigo and the Man in Black comprises a scene (with each “move” in the fight—physical and rhetorical!—being a beat).

  SEQUENCE. A sequence is an agglomeration of scenes that smush together to form a larger common purpose. You can be more flexible with setting and location here—the different scenes in a sequence will jump location and include different characters. In The Empire Strikes Back, several scenes go toward the act of finding and rescuing Luke from the Wampa—the rebels learning Luke didn’t come back, Han going out into the snow, the docking doors closing (and Chewie’s oh-so-mournful Wookiee wail), Luke saving himself from the Wampa, Han sticking him inside a steaming sack of Tauntaun innards, and Rogue Two finding them the next morning. These are all individual scenes that go toward the “Luke Rescue” sequence. What follows is the “Empire Attacks Hoth” sequence—snowspeeders and stompy AT-ATs4 and escaping transports. Each sequence is built of scenes, fills a larger narrative purpose, and has its own rise and fall of tension.

  ACT. An act is a larger chunk of narrative meat that represents the story moving in one direction until it pivots in a new direction. In other words, each act establishes its own status quo and when that status quo is shattered, a new act begins. Sometimes acts are separated by a huge shift in location, or time, or even in the cast or characters or theme that binds it all together.

  In Die Hard, the first act takes John (and us, by proxy) through the discomfort of flying, landing, getting a limo, going to the party, meeting all the new people, finding his wife, and on and on—it establishes the new status quo for him, which is being a New York cop trapped in a building full of California executives. And then the film shatters that status quo when Gruber and the Gang show up, and McClane is called to action in his bare feet. That marks the beginning of the second act. And that second act goes until another shift in the status quo—John has alerted the police, he’s stolen the detonators, and Gruber’s mission is now not only to break the locks on the safe but to hunt down McClane and those detonators. Every act is a pivot, a major transitional point where the stakes are either seriously raised or transformed into something else. An act breaks when the status quo shifts in a big way—big enough to reshape the narrative, the stakes, the threat.

  So, to recap:

  Beats build scenes.

  Scenes build sequences.

  Sequences build acts.

  And acts build a story.

  Now, some of these terms come out of theater and film. There, the building blocks have concrete benefits—you need definite signals to know when locations should change, when you need to block different action on the stage, when different characters enter or exeunt, and so on and so forth. In theater, especially, these changes aren’t always clear to the audience—stage sets have their limits—so the notes of “Scene” and “Act” in the programs help them follow along. Further, modern film is given over to a theoretical (not always practiced) pattern of the dreaded (gasp) three-act-structure. You get eight sequences packed into three acts, with a series of predefined beats and scenes along the way.

  And TV, well, it has its own act structure, which might be limited depending on the network where it will air—for example, a lot of television is given over to commercial breaks, and further, a lot of television is paid for by those commercial breaks. As such, television is sometimes written around those breaks—an episode is structured in just such a way to keep you there through the break. An individual act is the space between one commercial break and the next, which is why each act tends to end on a so-called “act-out,” where you get some moment of tension or mystery or shocking revelation—OH MY GOD STEVE IS DEAD, WHOA THE CAR JUST CRASHED, WOW SHE’S ABOUT TO LEARN A SECRET ABOUT MARY—so you are hungry enough to come back to the story once the commercial break is ended.5

  The number of commercial breaks, therefore, determines how many acts fit into the episode, and different networks have different numbers of commercial breaks.

  Some television shows don’t have commercial breaks at all, and so the act breaks are given over to greater flexibility, which is why, maybe, a network like HBO or Netflix creates what is perceived as a higher, more artful form of storytelling. (This isn’t universally true, of course.)

  Comics, too, operate a bit like television. The structure is episodic but doesn’t have to contend with the invasiveness of advertising. (Yes, a comic has advertisements present, but getting past them requires no more investment than flipping the page.) There, each comic essentially serves as a single act, getting us from the start of the issue to the end, and ideally bridging out in a way that makes us eager to buy the next issue—putting it on our pull list at the local comic book shop. Comics too sometimes follow a “W” format, in which we alternate between action scenes and non-action scenes (which could include character development, dialogue, clue-finding, plot revelations, etc.) to keep the story moving at a brisk pace. (The “W
” shape is just meant to show the jagged up-and-down of action/non-action—each peak is action, each valley subtracts the action.)

  What about theater? Well, Shakespeare’s plays were five acts long. Some plays are three (first act: exposition; second act: complication; third act: resolution). Others are seven. Others still are just one act (aka, the one-act play, a loose equivalent of a short story in dramatic form).

  And films are given over to a theoretical (not always practiced) pattern of the dreaded (gasp) three-act-structure. You get eight sequences packed into three acts, with a series of predefined beats and scenes along the way. In practice, they generally have four acts, not three, with the longer second act broken in half by the midpoint of the story.

  The acts in a three-act film structure work out to 25 percent/50 percent/25 percent of the story, respectively (or, in a two-hour movie, thirty minutes for the first act, sixty for the second, thirty for the last). As in theater, film roughly follows a path of exposition for the first act, complication for the second act, and climax for the final act.

  In novels … well, novels don’t technically have acts at all, in the sense that novels are given over to no rigorous format. That said, certainly we’ve seen books whose chapters are arranged into larger sections, and one could argue that these constitute acts. And one could further argue that each chapter equates to a scene or a sequence. As with most arrangements, the acts pair together, pivoting into each other until culminating in the final act. Sometimes three, sometimes five, sometimes seven. Really, it demands as many acts as you choose for it to have. A book with a more mythic narrative might have architecture that looked like this:

  Intro → Problem/Attack → Initial Struggle → Complications → Failed Attempts → Major Crisis → Climax and Resolution.

  Some novelists or screenwriters cleave to the monomyth, which takes us through Joseph Campbell’s seventeen steps of a hero’s journey—and very roughly adds up to this structure, divided into three acts:

  ACT ONE: DEPARTURE

  The Call to Adventure → Refusal of the Call → Supernatural Aid → The First Threshold → Belly of the Whale.

  ACT TWO: INITIATION

  The Road of Trials → Meeting with the Goddess → Temptation → Atonement with the Father → Apotheosis → The Ultimate Boon.

  ACT THREE: RETURN

  Refusal of the Return → The Magic Flute → Rescue from Without → The Crossing of the Return Threshold → Master of Two Worlds → Freedom to Live.

  You can see this shape in pop culture storytelling all the time. George Lucas used it in Star Wars (A New Hope is literally about Luke’s departure from the world he knew, The Empire Strikes Back is about his initiation into the Jedi arts, and the third story is literally called Return of the Jedi.) Harry Potter is another version of a character who is called to adventure but refuses it (or rather, has it refused for him by his horrible adopted family, the Dursleys), only to be drawn to the adventure anyway, entering a world of magic and mystery where he must navigate issues surrounding his parents to defeat an ultimate evil.

  Beyond Campbell, there’s also Vladimir Propp’s thirty-one-step morphology of the folktale, which I’m not going to extrapolate here because we all have better things to do.6

  Size breeds complexity, too, so the larger your story—even if it’s just a series of smaller stories or episodes—the more you have to consider how exactly the arrangement will best serve the tale and the audience. And yet, paradoxically, as complicated as the arrangement may become, at the end of the day it’s still easy enough to break down into three parts:

  First: Intro, Problem/Attack

  Second: Initial Struggle, Complications, Failed Attempts

  Third: Major Crisis, Climax, and Resolution

  Or, even simpler, it breaks down to:

  Beginning.

  Middle.

  And End.

  It’s all very simple.7

  What, exactly, is the point of telling you all this? Will it help provide you with a blueprint by which to design your stories? Maybe. It can. You wouldn’t be the first writer to use the Monomyth to tell a story, and certainly not the last. The point, though, is less about these very specific patterns and more about how there are a great many very specific patterns and none of them needs to be very specific to you. You can use them or discard them at your leisure. You can borrow from one and from another and find your own way through. You can also ask yourself: How exactly could the story shape of a comic book influence the story shape of a novel, or vice versa? The goal is to simply have you consider these things: both that story is flexible and also that familiar patterns emerge through these divergent shapes.

  THE COURSES OF DINNER

  Meals tell stories, too. Not overtly, of course—it’s more that you’re trying to escalate and complicate the flavors and, often enough, bring some kind of narrative to the meal. (“This meal will explore the spiritual significance of the halibut and the ennui that plagues all the fish under the sea.”)

  An eleven-course dinner might look like this:

  Amuse-bouche → aperitif → appetizer → palate cleanser → main course → cheese → palate cleanser → dessert → coffee → digestif → coma.

  The point here is not to give you a model to use to specifically shape the story, but to understand the rhythm of shaping a story, and to see how a story rises and falls, to see how it builds to one taste and then changes directions.

  ANATOMY OF A SCENE

  Bricks can build houses just as beats can build stories, but at the end of the day, it’s not the individual bricks that matter. It’s how they add up. And the bricks of a story add up to two vital architectural components of a house: They make walls, and (via the walls) they make rooms.

  Every room is different and has different functions, but each is subject to a few fundamental truths that make them effective: They need doorways in and out for access. They need enough space to perform function. They need vents for heating and cooling. They need a stable floor, a trustworthy ceiling, and so on and so forth.

  Scenes are also like this. Each scene is different. They have different functions. But they also have some traits in common that generally make them more effective, and these traits should be kept in mind:

  A SCENE ALWAYS HAS CHARACTERS. Or, at least one character. A scene without characters is a photograph of scenery. (Note: There is an argument that I’ll make later that suggests a good way to handle your setting and your storyworld is to treat them very much like characters too, to earn you as much juice from the squeeze as possible.)

  A SCENE ALWAYS HAS PURPOSE. When telling a story, there exists the stuff going on right there upon the page, and then there exists the stuff way above it, in the clouds, in your storytelling head. You need to know why this scene exists. You have to know what the scene does and how it earns its place. Defend it. Identify not why it must happen but rather why the audience needs to see it. (Remember: A story is as much about what the audience doesn’t see as what it does. We can define plot as the sequence of events as revealed to the audience, so what you include needs to be purpose driven.) Is it telling us something about the characters? Is it moving events forward with a necessary tentpole moment? Is it delivering a key piece of information to the audience—and to the characters, as well? A scene needn’t merely have one purpose, either. It can pull double duty. It can say something about theme as well as move the plot forward. It can give us a crucial character moment while also reinforcing mood.

  THE CHARACTERS IN A SCENE ALSO HAVE PURPOSE. They’re not simply set dressing. They don’t just stick their thumbs up their no-no holes and stare blankly into the camera. Make it a point to identify what every character in a scene is doing and what their priorities are: What are their goals? Do they serve a role true to themselves, and do they also have a role in the action on the page or on the screen? One way to help you identify their goals is to get to the next item on the list. …

  THE SCENE ALWAYS HAS A PROBLEM. And
I don’t mean a problem like a flaw—it’s not the Death Star, you don’t need to design a wall outlet that some precocious young Jedi janitor can blow up with a Force-powered Swiffer mop. I mean that just as every character has a problem to solve, so too is a scene given over to some kind of problem, conflict, question, or drama. A scene without conflict is a scene without tension … which is to say, a scene that gives us no reason to read it. What are the obstacles? What is the driving push and pull that gives us cause to keep on through the scene? Note: The problem may or may not be related to the characters’ own, character-based problems. Further, the scene may or may not solve the problem intrinsic to it—the problem may persist or may even become worse.

  A SCENE HAS A BEGINNING, A MIDDLE, AND AN END. It has an arc of its own. It has shape. And in this way, you’ll start to see that a scene is a microcosm. Just as you might note how an individual atom is not all that structurally different from our entire galaxy, you might also note how the structure of a scene needs to somewhat mirror the shape of a story. More to the point, a scene is not just a vignette. It isn’t a snapshot in time or a meandering moment. It starts, it gains momentum and complexity, it has stakes and problems, and then it ends, carrying us to the next scene.

  THE SCENE SHOULD BEGIN AS LATE AS POSSIBLE. Meaning, it doesn’t begin until something happens. It begins when it needs to. That’s vague, I know, but ask yourself when writing a scene: Can this start deeper in the thick of things? Can you trim some of the fat from the front of it? Some scenes gain tension by playing out—seeing characters build up and into the scene, slowly, surely. There exists strategic value in giving a scene some oxygen—some room to breathe. (More on that a little later in this chapter.) But it’s also vital not to waste the audience’s time. If a scene jumps in too early—imagine if A New Hope started ten minutes earlier, before the Empire attacked—it not only wastes the audience’s time, it also takes up space in a novel or a script that could have gone to more impactful, eventful storytelling. You want to maximize the narrative potential of the piece, and that means being judicious about giving a scene just enough room: Too much room and the audience will find themselves wandering, lost and bewildered, uncertain of the purpose.