Damn Fine Story: Mastering the Tools of a Powerful Narrative

by Chuck Wendig

  What “moves” do your characters get inside a story?

  More specifically, what strategies can you use to tweak the narrative, to up the stakes, to build investment in the story on the part of the audience?

  Now, before we begin the list, know this: None of these should drop out of nowhere. All should have buildup—not be forced into the narrative like cramming a square peg in a round hole or, worse, like shoving a skunk through a mail slot. We are aiming for organic inclusion. Anytime we embrace one of these moves, we want to first ask three questions: Would a character really do that? Does it make sense? And is there evidence to support it?

  Not to get all intellectual, but a story is like an academic paper. Each piece must be supported by and proven within the work. When a character decides to betray another, it can surprise us as audience members, but it must not violate what we believe about that character. It either has to be supported or even foreshadowed by the character’s words and actions up until that point, or it has to make sense retroactively as the story goes on. These litmus tests are vital so as not to make the audience feel like the spurned, betrayed party.

  What follows is a list of twists, tweaks, and tickles you can include to jab shock prods up the story’s nether region (bzzt!) and move the characters along. These techniques are especially useful when you’re in the long slog of the mushy middle, which is an easily preventable (or at least escapable) tract of septic swampland that could threaten to fill the middle chunk of your story, the one strung between an exciting beginning and a thrilling end. Some of these are directly character driven. Others serve more as narrative mechanics, but their use should remain organic and bound with the characters, their problems, their limitations, and their motivations. All are meant to create tension, build mystery, and energize the story. Use them well—stories are built from these kinds of moments.

  The Building Blocks of Tension

  ALLIANCE: Two characters align. Easy peasy—this one is the bread-and-butter of fiction (genre fiction in particular). Frodo and Sam meet Aragorn. John McClane joins forces with Al Powell. Luke Skywalker grows a band of heroes and friends to go against the Empire. Sometimes, too, an alliance is about a previously perpendicular relationship turning parallel, like Aang the Avatar joining up with Prince Zuko to defeat the Fire Nation in Avatar: The Last Airbender.

  BACKED INTO A CORNER: A character forced into an unwinnable situation—trapped by circumstance or by the movements of other characters—becomes unpredictable and all the more interesting. (Consider the character of John Rambo, who in First Blood is a killing machine trained by the military and ends up on the lam from local police. When cornered, he digs in and becomes an insurgent soldier in his own land. His entire story is built off this building block.)

  BETRAYAL OF ANOTHER: Characters in pursuit of their own quest or problem may betray one another, and this adds tension. This can be selfish, like Han Solo bailing on Luke, Leia, and the Rebel Alliance at the end of A New Hope, or more dire, like when Harry Ellis decides to (try to) smarm Hans Gruber to save his own tail. It can also be a crescendo moment, one that is both physically and emotionally climactic, such as when Darth Vader goes pro wrestler on his master, Palpatine, tossing him into that giant space toilet, or whatever it was.

  BETRAYAL OF ONESELF: Characters are very, very good at screwing themselves over and standing in their own way. In fact, this is the primary mode of tragedy. We speak about tragedy in day-to-day life as if it’s nothing more than a sad event—but in storytelling, tragedy is about a character accidentally orchestrating his own downfall. (Think Oedipus, Hamlet, Charlie Brown. Yes, that’s right, I just said “Charlie Brown.” Fight me.25) Anakin Skywalker in the prequels is a tragic figure who betrays himself—by trying to solve his problem, he actually triggers the problem instead. Anakin desires to save his love and the galaxy, and so he falls to the Dark Side in search of the power to protect everyone, and that fall helps him hurt (and kill) his lover and doom the galaxy to an autocratic rule under that wretched old goblin-man, Palpatine.

  BETRAYAL OF WHOLE DAMN AUDIENCE: Put differently, this is an unreliable narrator situation. Not to reveal too much, but eventually we learn who Tyler Durden in Fight Club and Keyser Söze in The Usual Suspects really are, and we realize that we (as the audience) were sold a lie. Both Durden and Söze are not what we believe them to be, and the very reason we have bad information is because of the narrator: the nameless protagonist in Fight Club, and Verbal Kint in The Usual Suspects. Narrators can be unreliable because they are cunning or because they are cuckoo bananapants. Either way, they can betray the audience by dint of delivering bad narrative data.

  BLOW THEIR DAMN MINDS: That moment in a story when a character’s entire paradigm shatters and their head practically explodes with new awareness of their situation? It’s not just a twist for the sake of a twist; it’s a twist because it very specifically targets a character’s worldview (with the goal of curb-stomping it). Think when Neo learns the truth of The Matrix, or when Luke learns about Vader, or when Jon Arbuckle realizes that the orange cat, Garfield, has been a figment of his imagination this whole time.26 Whoa, brain explodey!

  CHANGE OF SETTING: Changing location in the story keeps it fresh. Every narrative has the probable side benefit of introducing unfamiliar places, people, and situations, and a shift in setting exploits that benefit. The Star Wars movies tend to each visit three primary places—ESB shows us Hoth, Dagobah, and Cloud City, for instance—and each place is tied very explicitly to the plot and the characters. We start out on Hoth, Dagobah is the home of Yoda, and Cloud City is Lando’s location. That means each location change is not simply for the sake of introducing a new place, but also to tie it to the journeys of our characters. The entirety of Die Hard is largely contained to Nakatomi Plaza and its surrounding environs, and so the change of setting comes when McClane works his way through its levels, from the executive suites to the unfinished floors to the various shafts and ducts.27

  DECEPTION: Lies are delicious cookies when it comes to the fictional food that feeds the audience. Lies hold power and create tension when they are spoken (if we know them to be lies through the mechanism of dramatic irony), and they also create that tension when they are revealed as deception. Obi-Wan telling Luke stories about his father is a narrative we don’t recognize as a lie until later. But when Loki—throughout mythology or in any Marvel comics property ever—says something, we assume it’s a lie, and that gives his every word tension. Because we don’t know. We don’t know what’s a lie, what he’s hiding, what the consequences are. And it’s perfectly emblematic of his character. Now, a character shouldn’t lie just to lie. It should be purposeful and within character, and by that I mean written within the character’s spectrum of motivation, and not just to give the plot some pizazz.28

  DIFFICULT (OR IMPOSSIBLE) CHOICE: You might also call this “torn between two horses.” Remember how we give characters problems? How they have wants and desires and fears? Pit them against each other. Force the character to make a choice—she really wants to SAVE HER HUSBAND and SAVE HER CHILD, but she can only do one. She really wants to KILL THE VAMPIRE or EAT THAT DELICIOUS HIPSTER DONUT SHE PAID LIKE TWELVE BUCKS FOR. Whatever. Point is, the character has competing desires, and inside the labyrinth of the story she has to make a choice to go left or go right. Can’t do both. Tension is born. Need examples? Luke has a choice in ESB to continue his training or save his friends. The consequences of each are somewhat dire: If he keeps training, his friends may die. If he abandons his training, he may encounter Vader before he’s ready, and he may then die or fall to the Dark Side. A danger to this is when authors force a false choice—meaning, the character has other avenues, but the author forces the character not to see them. Anytime the audience feels smarter or more mature than the characters is not ideal, and if you’re going to sell this kind of dichotomy, it has to be done for good reason. It either has to be logical or emotionally relevant. A logical choice means the audience
won’t see a third and obvious path you’ve chosen to neglect mentioning. An emotional choice means that the audience will accept a bad decision because that’s who the character is—certainly, bad decisions are the bread-and-butter of fiction, and we don’t want to keep those off the table. They just have to make sense for the character.

  ESCALATION: Characters may escalate tensions on their own for their own benefit or as an effort to solve a problem. I like to think of this as the chaos reigns! option, and it’s one you see often enough when you’re playing a tabletop role-playing game like D&D. Inevitably, one of the players decides to have their character do something completely batshit wacky—first because it solves a problem, and second because it complicates the story and makes things interesting. It’s the “there’s a rat in the house so I summon a demon to kill it” situation. It’s a lot of fun, and it works well with certain kinds of characters. John McClane in Die Hard routinely takes a chaotic way of dealing with problems, which really only intensifies things: He blows up an elevator shaft, he throws a corpse out a window, he taunts the terrorists with bloody sweatshirt messages. He creates chaos as he solves problems, and hot damn is it fun to watch!29

  FALSE IDENTITY: Fiction is brimming with false identities. Darth Vader! Tyler Durden! Verbal Kint! Sometimes it’s that people are hiding and pretending to be someone they’re not. Sometimes it’s a case of mistaken identity, as in The Wrong Man, The Big Lebowski, and North by Northwest. As with a lie, the tension can come from us already knowing the person isn’t who they claim or from the discovery of a true identity.

  FALSE VICTORY: Let’s say it again: The storyteller’s job is to be a jerk. You’re a monster. You’re not the audience’s buddy. You literally have the job of dangling candy in front of them and then yanking it away—or worse, as in this instance, replacing the candy with a dead fish or a goat’s eye or something else horrid. This has the out of the frying pan and into the fire component to it—a character thinks they’ve escaped danger or won some victory when, in reality, the reverse is true. They screwed up. Things are now worse. Smooth move, Ex-Lax. In The Matrix, Neo finds the Oracle, and not only does he not get satisfying answers from her, the trip is also a trap set by Cypher—some of the crew dies, and Morpheus sacrifices his freedom to allow Neo to escape. An upward beat turns sharply downward because the Wachowskis (sibling writer-directors of the movie) are brilliant monsters who know how to manipulate us. John McClane in Die Hard is constantly turning the tables on the terrorists—only for it to blow up in his face (often literally).

  FAST-FORWARD: Time leaps are less a narrative trick determined by characters and more by you, the storyteller, but they remain effective for suddenly launching ahead beyond audience expectations in certain types of stories. TV shows, comics, and novels are better at this than films because films have limited narrative landscape in which to work, and you’ll see it in Battlestar Galactica, Lost, even Parks and Recreation.30 First, this serves to destabilize the audience—they thought they were on safe ground, and now they’re not. The audience learns not to trust you, the storyteller, and that is a natural and necessary source of tension—the tension between the teller of the story and its recipient.

  GOOD CHARACTER, BAD DECISION: Suspense is created when a character we love makes a decision (or takes an action) that we hate. Buffy Summers gives Angel a moment of bliss and later has to banish the Evil Angelus—and we hate that, even though she had no other choice. When John McClane gives Hans Gruber a gun because he thinks Gruber is really an escaped hostage, we cringe—though, of course, McClane has a secret plan of his own there, doesn’t he? The bad decisions characters make expose them to danger, and so it fosters tension in the audience.

  GOT DEAD, OOPS: Have you ever known anyone who has died? A friend, a family member, a public figure? George R.R. Martin killed them. He hunted them down and ended their story because that’s the kind of monster he is, the kind of monster that kills characters. He is Death Personified. One day you, too, will die, and as you pass from this realm to the next, the man ushering you beyond the veil will be George R.R. Martin. What I’m trying to say is that it is a perfectly viable move to kill off a character, and it does indeed increase tension—and, further, it can engender surprise when you kill off a main character, like, say, Ned Stark in A Game of Thrones. That tells you the storyteller is serious business and not to be trusted. One caveat, though: Killing characters just for the sake of doing it starts to feel exploitative over time. It might be apropos for horror films, but too much of it and the audience will become aware of the storyteller actively trying to mess with them instead of responding to the death as a natural and organic part of the unfolding story. It’s the difference between death as a consequence of choices made and death JUST BECAUSE IT’S PLOT-TASTIC FUN. You’re a monster, not a sadist. Further, sometimes leaving a character alive creates more interesting consequences and implications than offing them.

  GOT HURT, OW: Pain is a powerful source of tension. Hurt a character, and if we care about that character, we get worried. John McClane is put through the ringer in Die Hard. So is Martin Riggs in Lethal Weapon. If we’ve done our job well and the audience cares about the character, then they will care about the character getting hurt. They want the character to not be hurt, and so it’s your job to create that tension. Note, though, that causing them physical pain has to be a thing that comes prepackaged with ramifications for that character: The pain is not just set dressing. It’s not cosmetic. When John McClane gets hurt, it’s clear that he’s hobbled.

  LOVE, TWOO WUV: Love is a powerful source of tension and an essential building block of fiction. Because we know, soon as you mash up two characters and make them go kissy-kissy woogy-woogy, then it becomes part of the stakes. It’s part of the pool of chips in the middle of the poker table, and we know that it can be lost. Love provides us a variety of options for creating suspense. First up is the very popular will-they-won’t-they component, where two characters skirt around the idea of falling in love but circumstances keep them from doing so, and the audience keeps biting their lip hoping it’s going to happen. Then there’s the love triangle maneuver—or the trickier-to-pull-off move, the love rhombus—where multiple characters push and pull on each other romantically, emotionally, and sexually, so the audience doesn’t know who will end up with whom. Finally, you’ve got the fear of shattered love, where two people meet and fall in love, and now the audience is just waiting for the giant boulder above their heads to come crashing down and either kill one of them or at least separate them and end the relationship. A film that has a version of all three of these sources of tension is the masterful The Princess Bride, by the way. Go watch it right now. Never don’t watch that movie when you have the chance.

  MISDIRECTION: Misdirection is something we always do as storytellers, admittedly, but it’s also something that can be a literal part of the story that’s unfolding. Think about how murder mysteries and heist films routinely try to get you to believe that so-and-so is the real killer, or how they keep certain parts of the heist plan hidden from view. The best example of this is the novel and the film The Prestige, which is about stage magicians competing against one another. The story brims with characters misdirecting one another, and the storytellers misdirecting you. It is a brilliant head screw and also a film that perhaps serves as the best metaphor for storytelling I’ve ever seen—the events that unfold as part of the plot also nicely represent what it is to be a storyteller.

  MISUNDERSTANDING: Misunderstandings are the cornerstone of sitcoms—and pretty much any movie starring Ben Stiller. The awkwardness with which two characters fail to grasp what the other is doing or saying leads to comedy, and comedy is sometimes a form of tension: A joke leads us to feel shocked, awed, bewildered, wondering what hilarious or absurd thing will happen next. Seinfeld and Friends are two good examples of shows that reveled in misunderstandings.

  PROBLEM SOLVED, NOW WHAT: A favorite narrative move of mine is to give the characters what
they want, early. You establish a problem, you give off clues as to where the story is going by its end, and then you give the audience that solution—that climax—early on. When you do this, the audience is left reeling—they thought that the moment you just gave them at the midpoint was going to take the whole story. And now that the moment has come and gone, they’re cast adrift. The audience expectations must be rearranged and reconfigured, and that’s true of the characters, too. This occurs in The Matrix. Neo’s initial struggle is just to find out what the Matrix actually is … and though it’s something you would expect to take the entire movie to resolve, he learns the truth well before the midpoint of the movie. Television shows and comic books are also particularly good at this—it’s more essential, in fact, to the narrative model of the genre. You don’t know how many seasons or issues you’re going to get, so you build in arcs and quests that conclude as they go, a constant rise and fall of plots and problems. A show that does this very well is Orphan Black, which is about a young woman who discovers she is one of several clones. It has mysteries packed into it similar to, say, Lost, but unlike that show, it doesn’t waste its time in delivering answers. In fact, Orphan Black routinely answers big questions and solves problems while simultaneously using those solutions and answers to up the stakes further and create more dramatic tension.

  REVERSAL OF CIRCUMSTANCES: The technical definition of peripeteia in Greek tragedy is exactly this: when a character’s circumstances change to their opposite. A character who had everything loses everything, or a character who had nothing gains everything. A character who hunts vampires becomes a vampire, or a character who is allergic to bees is filled with bees and becomes the Bee Queen of Sacramento. Or something. The most on-the-nose example of this would be Trading Places, where the rich and the poor (Dan Ackroyd and Eddie Murphy, respectively), um, well, trade places. Angel in Buffy the Vampire Slayer reverses his circumstances at least once every fifteen minutes, bouncing between Evil Angelus and Good Angel. Spike does it, too, though with far less magical enforcement, and Willow also does it and—wow, that’s actually a cornerstone of the show, isn’t it?