Damn Fine Story: Mastering the Tools of a Powerful Narrative

by Chuck Wendig

  Exposition is not a question.

  Exposition is an answer.

  Worse is when exposition provides an answer before we’ve even had the enticement of the question. Exposition is almost a spoiler incurred by the storyteller: Before we’ve had a chance to care about the mysteries present, the potential of those mysteries is already ruined by overdrawn explanation or backstory. Once again, it becomes clear:

  Arrangement matters.

  Exposition up front, before questions are asked or pondered, is like telling us at the fore of Star Wars that Luke and Leia are Darth Vader’s kids. (Don’t get me started on how prequels actually do this—in fact, prequel material to any story is often exactly this, exposition for the sake of exposition, only there to retroactively undercut mystery with a nonessential story, and usually, if I’m being cynical, made solely to make someone money.) It robs the chance of tantalizing the audience. It removes the seductive joy of mystery, of not knowing what’s around the corner. It’s like a haunted house where someone has already mapped out all the scary parts before you ever get in the door.

  Never give the audience more information than they need to progress through the narrative. And by “more information,” I mean explicit explanations via exposition. If we envision our narrative as a house and, to get to the next room, the audience needs a key to proceed, give them the key. And that’s it. Stop there. You don’t need to keep going. “Here’s a key, and a burlap sack full of nickels, and a baby dragon, and by the way here’s how the thermostat works, and the trash guy comes on Tuesday mornings, and wait hold up here’s a copy of Moby Dick, let’s read it together.”

  It’s okay that the reader or viewer only has the key to get themselves to the next room. It’s perfectly awesome that they don’t know what to expect, or that they can look around this room and the next and have questions about what they see. Not everything needs to be explained, so don’t give an explanation if they don’t need one. And when an explanation is necessary, give them as little exposition as you can, as quickly as you can muster.

  Exposition is about a thing that already happened. It’s backstory about a person or a place—it’s writ, it’s wrought, it’s done. You only need to go through exposition if not having that information will be confusing to the audience—or if you’re performing some act of misdirection as per stage magic. (When Obi-Wan sits Luke down and is all like, “Luke, your Dad was a really cool dude who totally got killed by that shiny jerk, Darth Vader,” that’s a piece of information that 1) we need, and 2) is misdirection.22)

  Treat exposition like you’re having sex with a swamp creature.23 It’s crass and shameful and should be done as hastily and as hurriedly as possible.

  The best exposition is the kind that leaves us asking more questions.

  Because, again, questions are everything.

  Once upon a time, when I was a Baby Writer who thought he knew everything (as opposed to now, where I am a Petulant Adolescent Writer who thinks he knows most things), I said:

  “Conflict is the food that feeds the reader.”

  Meaning, above all else, you need conflict.

  And now, I’m going to disagree with myself—or, rather, I’m going to change my opinion just slightly:

  “Questions are the food that feeds the reader.”

  Further, I’ll note that conflict is just another question. What I mean is this: Imagine the simplest, most brutal form of conflict. Let’s say it’s just two characters bare-fistedly punching the king-hell out of each other. Whap, whomp, biff. A bloody, pugilistic brawl.

  Why does that matter? Why does the brawl engage with us? Okay, ideally we’d have some sense of the characters—who they are, what they want, why they’re pounding the boogers out of each other—but even without that. Let’s say we just flipped on the TV and saw two characters whaling the poop out of one another.

  The very nature of that struggle is one of question. The outcome is uncertain. Who wins is unknown. The circumstances surrounding the fight are a question, too. And even when one character does win, that is a resolution that potentially leads to more questions—will the loser survive? Will the winner be a good winner, or will he kick the poor bastard when he’s down? Did the fight resolve anything? Will a rematch occur? Is everyone even okay, what with all that blood and rage?

  Conflict is in itself a form of question. Implicit in every conflict, in every breach of the status quo, are a bundle of uncertainties.

  Will our hero persevere?

  Will she conquer her demons or be herself conquered?

  Will she live, will she die, will she love, will she cry?

  Will she get her revenge, will she get a donut, will she get eaten by one of those insurgent rat-bears?

  We just don’t know.

  And that’s why conflict works.

  Because, damnit, we want to know.

  The question is one of your most fundamental building blocks—and key to the arrangement of your story.

  THE MYSTERIOUS MISTS OF MYSTERY: OR, THE POWER OF QUESTION-DRIVEN PLOTTING

  To repeat: Questions are the food that feeds the audience. Or, to be more precise: Answers feed the audience, and questions keep them hungry. And boy, howdy, do we want them hungry! We want them hungry enough that they keep coming back for another nibble—but we don’t want them so mad with hunger that they put the book down or turn the show off. Storytelling is an act of delivering satisfaction in the most meager doses possible. It’s a tightrope act—you don’t want them overfed, you don’t want them underfed. Always hungry, never starving.

  Now, plotting a story—whether you outline it on paper or inside your own skull cave—is the act of moving the story forward, step by step and scene by scene. It is, loosely, the act of determining the sequence of events as it is revealed to the audience. Not just what happens when, but the arrangement of those events and how the revelations stack up. An outline becomes this is revealed, then that, then this other thing, now the end.

  The problem is that, when we approach it this way, we run the risk of a disconnected, external plot taking over the narrative. Plot ends up being this giant, Godzilla-shaped, kaiju thing, grumpily staggering through the cityscape of your characters, stepping on everything and knocking shit down and carving its own cataclysmic swath through the careful architecture and urban planning you’ve created. We don’t want that. We don’t want event-driven plotting. We want character-driven plotting, where the agency of an individual character pushes and pulls against the agency of all the other characters. Then the story that’s told is not so much a clean line as it is a web—tug here, feel it there—a constant balancing and rebalancing.

  How do we get there? How can we plot and scheme that out? How do we take a ground-level, organic approach to plotting?

  First we take LSD and wander naked into the jungle to find and fight the Jaguar King and then from there—

  Wait, whoa, that’s not right at all. I’m so sorry.24

  No. What I mean to say is that we begin with questions.

  Two kinds of overarching questions drive a story:

  The questions that drive the characters.

  The questions that drive the audience.

  In one sense, the two are linked—the questions that drive the characters should also drive the audience. The reverse is not necessarily true: The questions that drive the audience are not necessarily the same ones that the characters need answers for, nor are they questions the characters may even be aware of. This is the power of dramatic irony, which is not irony as we (or Alanis Morissette) understand it, but rather a narrative conceit where the audience knows something the character doesn’t. Dramatic irony again reveals the power of arrangement: We the audience know Who Murdered Dave even as Mary searches for the killer. We have been given information she has not, and so the suspense is less about the question of a murderer’s identity and far more about when Mary will catch on and what will happen to her in her search for the answer. It’s what I like to think of as the
suspense of scuttlebutt: tension driven by our having unique information, as if we’ve heard a secret that we weren’t meant to know. This happens to us in reality sometimes, right? We know that Steve cheated on Betty, but Betty doesn’t know yet, and suddenly we’re face-to-face with Betty and panic ensues. Oh shit, omg, what does Betty know, does she suspect anything, what will happen when she finds out, will they get divorced, what will the kids do, will this break up the group of friends we have, will she cut off his head with hedge clippers and mount his skull on a flagpole?

  It’s the suspense of having information but not yet knowing the consequences. We have an answer, but not an outcome.

  More to the point, we have an answer that just created more questions.

  And those are the best kinds of questions to ask: questions that generate more question marks than periods or even exclamations.

  So! Back to it—two kinds of questions at the fore, questions for the character and questions for the audience.

  Let’s start with questions that drive the characters.

  Character Questions

  These are small story questions—they center upon the smaller story of the individuals that populate the tale. They are given over to the same necessities already laid out so far in the book: What is the character’s problem? How does that character intend to solve this problem?

  It begins almost like a game with pieces on a board. Or, if you’re a superdorky dork face like me, a bit like a session of Dungeons & Dragons. You’ve got these characters existing independently from one another, and now they’re about to intersect—so what happens? You’re trying to game the narrative for maximum emotional impact, which means the journey of each character through the maze should meet the journey of every other character—they travel together (as noted, parallel) or intersect as foes (as noted, perpendicular), and a story unfolds. Imagine that you’re writing A New Hope.

  Luke Skywalker, in search of adventure and wanting to leave his boring sand-bucket planet, is trying and failing to convince his Aunt and Uncle to let him leave—and then here comes a pair of droids, who initially intersect with him at a perpendicular angle. They crash into his story, and they complicate it.

  Luke meets the droids. His role is to keep them trapped (fitted with restraining bolts, remember). Their role is to find Obi-Wan.

  Questions arise. How will the droids get to Obi-Wan? Answer: Artoo completely manipulates Luke. He plays a snidbit (snippet + tidbit) of Princess Leia’s message, which leaves Luke with more questions. (Note: Artoo is totally playing the role of storyteller here by enticing Luke along.) And then Artoo promises more of the recording only if he can have his restraining bolt off. Luke takes it off, and Artoo still withholds the message. Which not only tantalizes Luke further, it also affords Artoo the chance to escape.

  Like on a chessboard or in a roleplaying game, these characters have each tried to outmaneuver the other, sometimes willfully, other times unconsciously. Each gets a turn where we the storyteller can ask, how will the character pursue his goals in spite of obstacles and complications? Once Artoo escapes, we must ask: How will Luke respond? While obviously he could choose not to pursue, that would place Artoo’s escape on his head. And we already know something very important about young Luke Skywalker, don’t we?

  He is in search of adventure.

  And so he goes off in search of the escaped droid. He has given into adventure, which leads us to ask: What’s out there? Will he find the droid? Is the droid destroyed or stolen? We’ve already established that the droid is looking for Obi-Wan (aka “Old Ben”) Kenobi—who is that hermit, really? Will the droid find who he’s looking for? It is also established that danger waits in the wilds of Tatooine in the form of barking Tusken Raiders—whose very name implies a quest of their own (they are raiders, so they want supplies or food or slaves). Their quest intersects with Luke’s—violently, I might add—and then Obi-Wan appears, with his quest crashing into the intersection of Luke and the Tusken Raiders.

  The narrative in fact grows more complicated with the introduction of Obi-Wan Kenobi. We know he exists because the story has introduced us to these questions: Who is Artoo looking for? Old Ben. Who is Old Ben? Some old hermit living outside of town. We don’t know much more than that, but what answers we have are intriguing—and incomplete answers draw us in. Furthermore, it means when he does show up, he’s not just some deus ex machina—a hand of god appearing out of nowhere to save our sand-crusted flyboy and his two dirt-caked droids. We already know he’s out there, a part of the plot, a question waiting to be answered. So when he shows up, it’s organic and expected, not random and unwarranted.

  From there, the characters push and pull on each other in ways that agitate and move the story along. Plus, the characters are given questions—some we can intuit, some that are more boldly placed into the narrative—that drive them. Who is Luke’s father? How will Han deal with the debt hanging over his head? Who is the princess, and how will Luke and Han rescue her? Each answer creates more questions and problems.

  Put differently, every answer to every question—every solution to every problem—has consequences.

  Questions have answers, and answers lead to more questions. These chain together, ultimately, into a story. And they chain together in a way that is consequential—meaning, they’re not simply this happens, then this, then this, but rather, each effect is preceded by a cause.

  Or, put differently:

  An action taken by a character in pursuit of an answer and/or a solution has:

  an opposite or perpendicular reaction (“but then!”) and/or

  a consequential or parallel action (“because of!”)

  Let’s look back at Luke leaving his desert igloo to chase after the wayward droid into the badlands of Tatooine.

  You could easily write that as: “Luke goes on a wild goose chase after a wandering droid and because of that is attacked by a pack of ugly Tusken Raiders, who live out in the fringes of the Tatooine desert. But then Luke is saved by Old Obi-Ben-Wan What’s-His-Name, who also lives out there.”

  One thing leads to another. One action taken in pursuit of a goal or a question leads to another, not because the plot lines up that way (“and then”), but rather because of cause and effect—because of consequence.

  Eventually, of course, a story draws to a conclusion. It has to end. And that’s when you start introducing answers that don’t create more questions. That happens because the characters are all closing in on their goals. They are close to solving their problems, often at the expense of (or in opposition to) one another. You don’t want to let more snakes out of the can than you can kill, after all, lest the audience be left feeling unsatisfied and bereft of answers. (Though a story also needn’t ever answer all the questions. It’s good to leave a few outstanding … just to keep the audience’s noodle turning after they close the book or the credits roll.)

  Those are character-driven questions. They begin with individuals, then move to questions about relationships—how those relationships begin, evolve, and conflict in the form of drama.

  What about audience-driven questions, though?

  Audience Questions

  These are questions that sort of … linger behind the scenes, that drive you, the storyteller, and that urge the audience onward, but that exist beyond the ken of the characters. These are detail-driven questions.

  Audience-driven questions don’t necessarily apply to the characters because the characters ostensibly already know—or just don’t care about—the answers. A show like Game of Thrones or Lost or Westworld has a ton of world-building questions implicit: Some of them beg us to ask about an individual clue; others are more seamless and beg us to ask about the culture of dragons or how the robot hosts work or, wait, did I just see a polar bear? What does the polar bear eat? Is the polar bear friend to, or enemy of, the White Walker zombie horde? What are the sexual customs of the Polar Bear Kingdom? Am I mixing up my storyworlds again? Should I stop ruminating on
the sexual customs of Polar Bear kings and queens? Probably, but so what, you don’t control me, reader.

  You also have thematic questions at play. Though we’ll talk more about theme in a later chapter (poke, poke, keep reading, or just flip-forward to the Theme chapter on page 178), the audience is subject to deeper questions. These questions might be, “What is the role of love in a harsh world?” “What does it take to turn a hero into a villain or vice versa?” “Why is Chuck still going on and on about the royal fornications of a Polar Bear Kingdom, and doesn’t he know that’s not even a thing? Why is he so weird? He’s still eating that candy bar and staring at me, and I’m calling 9-1-1.”

  Audience-driven questions are not the bread-and-butter, meat-and-potatoes of your narrative—they cannot sustain it. And shows that try too hard to sustain that (looking at you, Lost) forget to place at the fore the questions that urge the characters to action. Just the same, they are worth your consideration, more as a flavor component rather than the part that delivers the most nutritive value.

  THE SCREW AND THE NAIL: THE BUILDING BLOCKS OF FUN FICTION

  Maybe you’re wondering what specific moves are in your arsenal—certainly all these game metaphors, whether we’re talking chess or D&D, could use some particulars. In chess, the knight can move in an L-shape. In D&D, a rogue gets bonuses to backstab.