Damn Fine Story: Mastering the Tools of a Powerful Narrative

by Chuck Wendig

  And it is our imagination that cultivates the greatest suspense. In that downtime grows impatience, fear, and excitement for what’s to come. It might be conflict, drama, more questions, more answers, or maybe bears—we don’t know, maybe bears will come and eat us.15

  We use the arrangement of elements to achieve this. You can play with them to see what effect they earn. Longer beats at the start of slower scenes might start to coalesce into faster beats, tighter scenes, more exciting sequences. That’s the most traditional arrangement, classic to most action or adventure movies. Though that’s not to say it’s all plodding and dull up front—Die Hard starts with a slower pace (in heartbeat terms, a calmer pulse) and goes up from there, but A New Hope begins in the thick of things, with the attack on the rebel ship: We start right off with a pretty fast pulse, and then it only accelerates, as here come lasers and stormtroopers and a brutal Sith lord with his Dark Side voodoo.

  Great thing is, there exists no one pattern, no one arrangement, that earns you the best outcome. You gotta play with it. You have to experiment. It’s like songs—some get right into it, others build up the tempo slow and easy, others stay slow the whole time and use that to languidly smother you underneath grief and sorrow. A kick-ass rock anthem might bring it down right in the middle, pulling back on the tempo—same way a roller coaster climbs its hill slowly and with dreadful, steady ease, building surely to the fast downward acceleration you know is coming.

  This works at the microcosmic level and at larger levels. You play with fire and oxygen. You establish a rhythm by staggering beats, but you also do this by staggering scenes and sequences. Generally the simplest direction is one of escalation—although that also depends on how we define escalation.

  Escalation means the intensification of events: Things get more intense, more violent, more heated, more whatever. A classic real-life version of escalation is the battle between two neighbors.

  At our first house, a row home where we were, erm, uncomfortably close to our neighbors, we went outside one morning to discover a series of inexplicable things.

  THING 1: several pink paint stains on our front door, as if applied by paintball

  THING 2: a poster-board sign staked into our neighbor’s lawn—a sign written in hasty scrawls of permanent marker depicting an ill-scribbled person with a handgun shooting little hyphenated pee-pee bullets, and above that person, a message: BEWARE NUM ONE GOD

  THING 3: a cinder block in the middle of the road outside our house

  My wife and I were left staggered by this bizarre trio of elements and objects that didn’t quite … connect. Paintball stains? Creepy sign? Cinder block?

  This, then, was a moment of oxygen in the story as we stood there contemplating what had happened. Were we attacked? Did someone shoot our door, leave a scary sign on our neighbor’s lawn, then put a cinder block in the road?

  Fearful, we knocked on our neighbor’s door—our neighbor was a woman, a decade or so older than us. She came out, and instantly I knew something was off, because when her gaze flicked over the series of inexplicable things, at no point did she seem concerned. We said, “Look, look,” and we swept our arms out as if to behold this series of inexplicable things, and she laughed.

  Our neighbor said, “I put those there.”

  “The cinder block?” we asked

  She nodded. “People drive too fast on this road.”

  “The sign?” we asked.

  She nodded. “I was warning people to stay off my property.”

  “The paintball splats?”

  “Oh that wasn’t me,” she said. Turns out, our neighbor had gotten into an entirely different escalating battle with some kids who had at some point thrown a plastic soda bottle onto her lawn, and she chased after their car with a rake. They returned with paintball guns, accidentally hitting our house instead of hers. Her gun-carrying God16 sign—and to a lesser degree, her cinder block—were messages to these vengeful litterers.

  Up until that point, we had no reason to believe she was in any way a concern to us—she always seemed nice and, frankly, fairly together. She lived alone, sometimes with a teenage granddaughter (who was also very nice). But now, a new picture was forming: a picture of someone who, to convince people to slow down, would put a cinder block in the road. Someone who, to dissuade litterers, would threaten both GOD and GUNFIRE. Someone who invited paint-ballers to paint ball her damn house.

  This was just the beginning.

  One day, we caught people trespassing on our property, looking at our lawn furniture in our backyard in case we wanted to “sell it.” Turns out, they were friends of hers who felt comfortable enough to wander onto our yard and size up our stuff for potential sale.

  We responded by putting up a fence.17

  She responded by putting up a fence all her own, sandwiched tight against our fence, which cost her money and time and did nothing except shrink her yard by a couple extra inches.

  She had plumbing work done, and the plumbers would show up at 9 P.M. and work till the middle of the night, banging and hammering. We asked her to stop, and she just got louder, even after the plumbing work had been completed: playing music, stomping around, banging into things. Worse, one night she decided to burn a giant bonfire in her backyard—and, to be clear, our yards were about ten-people wide. We’re not talking palatial estates, here. The fire was less than five feet from our very wooden, very flammable fence.

  We called the fire department, which came and put her bonfire out. They cited her, because as it turns out, it’s a really bad idea and against code to hold a conflagration pyre when your backyard is roughly the size of a postage stamp.

  Next day, we caught her spraying our flower beds with weed killer.

  Thankfully, at that point, by calling the police, we were able to cut that situation off at the knees. But we could’ve kept responding. And responding would’ve meant escalating, and escalating would’ve meant … I don’t know, honestly. Broken windows? Rabid squirrels loosed into the other’s kitchen? It’s not hard to see how that gets worse and worse until it’s two neighbors locked in orbital bombardment.

  Another real-world example of escalation isn’t the war between neighbors, but rather the war between nations. War begins with a border dispute, escalates to an assassination, and next thing you know political alliances are being tested, old enemies rise from the shadows, and oh shit, hey hi hello, now it’s a World War. And please note: These escalations are driven by people, always by people—just as the escalation in your stories should be driven by characters, not by external events.

  The most straightforward version of escalation occurs in Die Hard. We begin the movie with the tension of a man whose marriage is under siege going into a viper’s nest of smarmy executives—and from there, it’s just a layering of bad thing on top of bad thing. John McClane has victories, but those victories (in true storytelling form) do not de-escalate the tension—rather, they intensify the problem. Every victory McClane gains offers a new complication: He escapes, but he has no shoes; he gets a machine gun and, later, the detonators, but this only triggers a violent hunt to find him; he summons the police, but the police and the FBI only heighten tensions because they are either inept or overly aggressive. This goes on and on—the explosion McClane sets off early in the elevator shaft is clearly an escalation that deepens the tension because:

  It’s a literal explosion that does damage to the building and takes out terrorists.

  It foreshadows what would happen if all those bombs were to go off, thus raising the stakes and hinting at the massive boom that arrives in the third act. and

  It also tells us what stakes are on the table for the terrorists, because they desperately need those detonators—which means they’re going to come at McClane all the harder to retrieve them. His life is about to get a whole lot worse.

  In that movie, the tension ratchets in a direct, exponential way. It’s rung after rung of a ladder in the steady climb to the top—if only so i
t can throw Hans Gruber off to his death.

  Now, on the other hand, let’s take a peek at The Empire Strikes Back. In ESB, the escalation is not so clean an ascent. We begin with the tension of Luke and the Wampa, which escalates to Luke almost freezing to death, which escalates to a gigantic battle that unfolds on the icy mantle of Hoth. To go back to the shape of narrative, it shows a story that begins with a sharp rise to conflict—

  And then it falls quickly from that peak.

  Meaning, all that happens in the first act. It is arguably a story shape that would encompass an entire story, one that ends with a massive battle. But ESB gets the battle out of the way early. The fire that burns so bright is suddenly smothered, and we finally get a big gulp of oxygen. The movie slows down a bit. It focuses on the characters, on their relationships, and all the while, that oxygen primes the pump for more tension, not less. It draws the story out like a tightening cord—even though it’s not all about big space battles, just the same, there’s no slack in that rope.

  It can do this in part because we already know these characters, so there’s not a lot of time needed for introducing them and their problems. Here, we get Han and Leia on the asteroid, we get Luke training with Yoda, we get the gang converging upon Cloud City—and during this large expanse of the second act, we are still treated to spikes of tension releasing through action (space slug! escaping the Empire! Yoda is riding you like a monkey, young padawan, and doesn’t think you’re up to the task of being a real Jedi!), but those spikes never exactly rise to the level of the larger battle at the fore of the film.

  But that’s okay! Because ESB is playing with a different kind of escalation. Just because the escalation isn’t as traditional as the escalation present in Die Hard (which is more physical in that the danger lies in the possibility of McClane’s body being perforated by lots of bullets), that doesn’t mean ESB isn’t escalating—it just moves in a different, and more personal, direction.

  (Speaking of different directions, it’s worth again reminding ourselves of the image of a roller coaster: a three-dimensional ride that is sometimes about going up slowly, sometimes about going down swiftly, but other times about whipping right or left, corkscrewing through the air, or turning us upside down when we think we should be right-side up.)

  The conflicts within ESB deepen and thicken like a good sauce on simmer—and we can start to see the transition from galactic conflict to the more meaningful one of interpersonal conflict. Yes, of course the film still gives us the standard physical threats—we get space fights and meteor slugs and R2 gurgling into the mire—but the escalation is in the movement of the characters. Han and Leia pinball off each other as romantic tension ratchets tighter, and Lando enters the picture as an agitating element (suave, shifty, you’re not sure where he stands). Luke and Yoda seem perpendicular to one another, too—Luke’s impatience clashes with Yoda’s wisdom, and both of them doubt that this Skywalker kid can really pull off being a Jedi. All that comes to a head on Cloud City. Luke bails on the little gremlin to save his friends. Lando betrays them to Vader, and, as a result, Han gets turned into a coffee table. But these escalations are also revelations: Luke realizes that his friends are more important to him than his training, Leia realizes she’s in love with Han, C-3P0 realizes he’s in love with R2-D2.18 Those revelations are like the victories McClane experiences in Die Hard: They serve to complicate their problems rather than eradicate them. They add to the maze rather than subtract from it.

  And then comes the bunker buster bomb of the final duel between Luke and Vader, where Vader reveals the truth: that Obi-Wan is Luke’s father because Obi-Wan had a scandalous affair with Padmé Amidala—

  *is handed a note*

  Okay, I am assured that’s not how it goes.

  Whatever.19

  Point being: Though the actual ending is not as physically epic as the conclusion of the first act—given that there are no stompy AT-ATs or exploding shield generators—it is significantly more emotionally epic. The escalation is present, just with a different (and arguably more meaningful) emphasis. We have left the need for a showy ending behind and made it very much about the characters’ own journeys. The stakes have not merely been raised, they’ve been transformed by these revelations. And it sets the stage for the final act of the original saga: Return of the Jedi, where an insurgency of slavering rat-bears helps bring down the Empire so that they can have a steady supply of canned food in the form of stormtroopers.20

  Also in contrast to Die Hard, ESB lets the beats play out longer toward the end—the events don’t come fast and furious. We are given far more oxygen than the fire consumes. Moments where Luke and Vader are stalking one another—or simply talking. Moments building up to Han dropped into a block of carbonite. Moments of rescuing Luke from the bottom of Cloud City. The film gives us these moments to create tension, not to rob it from us: It has not absolved the threat, for the sword of conflict still dangles over the proceedings, but when things slow down, we are given time to pause and consider the blade hanging above the characters’ heads.

  And, in a way, above our heads as an audience.

  Because we don’t want to see Luke hurt. We want Vader vanquished. We want them to rescue Han from his ice cube before the credits roll.

  But we don’t get any of that. Luke is hurt. Vader wins the duel, even as he loses Luke. They don’t save Han—Han’s gone, baby. The movie uses the slower, more ponderous moments at the end to ratchet tension tighter—

  And then it never really lets it go. We end the film still tense. We exit it with questions, with fears, with grave uncertainty.

  It’s all in the arrangement. It’s how you stack the elements, how much oxygen you pump in, how much fire will feed on all of it.

  THE QUESTION MARK, THE PERIOD, AND THE EXCLAMATION: OR, THE POWER OF QUESTIONS AND THE DANGER OF ANSWERS

  *appears at your front door on a stormy night with a long, scraggly beard and a mad glint flashing in the eye*

  I COME FROM THE FUTURE WITH A DIRE WARNING.

  I HAVE READ YOUR BOOK.

  … OR RATHER I TRIED TO READ IT AND THEN PUT IT DOWN AND WENT TO DO SOMETHING ELSE.

  BECAUSE IT WAS SUPERBORING.

  YOUR BOOK WAS KILLED!

  AND IT WAS EXPOSITION THAT DID IT! EXPOSITION MURDERED YOUR STORY! HEED MY WARNINGS! BEWARE EXP—oh hey, sorry, I had my caps lock stuck again.

  What I’m trying to say is, exposition and backstory are, well, I hesitate to say they’re bad or wrong, because they’re not. They are useful tools when used appropriately, but more often, exposition and backstory are real roadblocks.

  To understand why this is, we need to understand a bit more about traversing the geography of narrative and what we can do to speed up travel, slow it down, and lure the audience through the story like a witch promising candy to children.

  Imagine, if you will, that a story can have a lot of geographical features, much as our world does. It has mountains and valleys, it has rivers and highways, it has tracts of city and empty fields, it has wide seas and dread deserts. And though no individual feature of your story’s geography is inherently troublesome, some geographical features are easier to navigate than others.

  A river will pull you along if you travel with it, or block you if you come to cross it. A highway, too, though man-made, is an avenue of movement. A mountain is an obstacle, but a dramatic and exciting one—jagged peaks and avalanches and probably yetis!21 A desert can have hidden beauty, but it can also be a long slog through unrelenting sands and in blistering heat. You can only take so much desert before needing a respite.

  Some aspects of a story pull the audience along, accelerating them through the narrative. Other elements put on the brakes. They slow things down. (Remember fire and oxygen?)

  Dialogue, for instance, tends to be a lubricating component. Dialogue greases us up like a wiggly pig and launches us down the chute. Dialogue is best when it’s a slide, not a staircase. But the shape of dialogue matters. Faster
, shorter bits of dialogue speed us up. Slower, more ponderous dialogue—expository dialogue in particular—slows us down. Exposition in general runs the risk of becoming the desert mentioned earlier—an unremitting tract of sand, a long slog through heat where the payoff for the audience is uncertain.

  The shape of the story in general is like this, too—faster, punchier elements in a tighter arrangement are snappier, swifter, whoosh. But the more you bloat and bulge the tale, the slower it goes.

  And that is not automatically a bad thing. As noted in my explanation of fire and oxygen, sometimes we need to slow the story down. The Empire Strikes Back slows down at the end because we need time to consider the weight of what’s happening—it allows the physical and emotional dread of Darth Vader hunting Luke Skywalker to build and the revelation to hit us right in the gut.

  But you want to do this willfully, with great purpose.

  Exposition is less necessary than you might think. And, in practice, it often ends up feeling more like crossing the desert than hiking and climbing a beautiful mountain—it feels like a chore, a burden put upon the audience.

  Here’s why: Questions, like dialogue, move us through a narrative. The audience is a junkie, we as storytellers are the dealers, and our product is mystery. I’ll say it again: The question mark is shaped like a hook for a reason. It drags us forward. It is like the rapids of a river or a mudslide down a mountain—we can’t help but want to know answers.

  Ah, but the opposite side of that is also true: Just as questions give the story forward momentum, answers to those questions halt that momentum. A question draws us in, and a period forces us to stop. This is literally true at the sentence construction level, isn’t it? A joke works by asking us a question and making us want the punch line; the question mark is the lure of continuation, the tantalizing mystery to be unraveled. The answer or the punch line always comes with a period—and that’s it. Game over, man. The journey has ended. The answer has completed the exchange. It’s not the promise of a juicy hamburger on the plate: It’s the ketchup-smeared apocalypse that remains. The burger is gone. We’re full now, thanks.