Damn Fine Story: Mastering the Tools of a Powerful Narrative

by Chuck Wendig

  ROOSTING CHICKENS: You have surely heard the phrase “the chickens come home to roost,” yes? It’s an idiom that suggests, very simply, that your actions will have consequences. Negative ones, ostensibly, as the phrase is never used to indicate something good—it’s instead suggesting that karmic retribution is one of the constant laws of the universe. (Though why this is framed as your chickens coming home is beyond me. One suspects that if you have lost chickens, the best thing that can happen is that they come home to roost. Unless we’re talking about demon chickens? That would be bad, I suppose.) A more realistic, though perhaps more crass, version of this would be, “That’s going to come back and bite you on the ass.” Utilizing this particular building block in a story is not just about using the moment the metaphorical chickens come home, but also about how you build to that moment, because the audience tends to sense when comeuppance is on the menu. Storytellers pack in foreshadowing to essentially “warn” of the coming chickenpocalypse, and audiences pick up on those clues, and tension is created as a result. (Science fiction handles this particularly well—think Frankenstein, or The Fly, or time-travel films like Primer, Looper, or even Back to the Future. Characters routinely use or misuse technology for their own purposes and end up causing more harm than good. And then the story is either about playing this out or fixing the error.)

  SACRIFICE: A character’s sacrifice—meaning they give up something vital and valuable, even as important as their own life—is a huge, pivotal moment that plucks at our heartstrings and reveals a special nobility in the character in question (or perhaps a gifted, savvy malevolence!). Obviously then the most classic version of this is Darth Vader at the end of Return of the Jedi—he sacrifices his role in the galaxy, and ultimately his own life, to save his son and, further, to reveal his own virtue. This might be more common than you think: Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Mad Max: Fury Road, Independence Day, Titanic, Gran Torino, Aliens, V For Vendetta, Armageddon, Big Hero 6, Guardians of the Galaxy … and really I could do this for about two, maybe three more pages. Another version is when a character sacrifices his or herself, but the sacrifice doesn’t really “take”—meaning, they don’t actually go away. Look at Iron Man/Tony Stark in The Avengers, or Batman/Bruce Wayne at the end of the The Dark Knight Rises. Even some of the examples above play out that way. This is definitely a trope within comics and comic-based films, because in comics, characters are constantly dying and returning—or just failing to really die in the first damn place. It can become a little lazy, so the key is to either make it stick, to find a new spin on it, or to give the moment genuine consequence. A character who returns from the brink but isn’t actually dead should bring baggage with him—and, arguably, in the Marvel films, Tony Stark definitely accumulates some emotional baggage. He is a character who starts to change in those films, which is a welcome shift from how we usually treat comic book heroes.

  SECRETS EXPOSED: Part of the narrative bedrock is the expectation that characters withhold information from each other. Tension is created because we know this to be true, and when we receive hints of secrets, we’re engaged even more because we wonder: What is the truth, and when will it be revealed? Certainly I’ve kept secrets from you, dear readers. I have not told you, for instance, that I am the love child of Stephen King and Chuck Palahniuk,31 created in a lab underneath the city of Seattle. Wait, I just told you the secret, didn’t I? Damnit. PRETEND YOU DIDN’T READ THAT. Ahem. Anyway! In the Star Wars trilogy, both Obi-Wan and Yoda know secrets about the Skywalker heritage that they do not share with Luke. The show Lost uses this initially to great mastery—all of the characters have a cabinet of secrets that are revealed in portions to us through flashbacks, and then revealed differently to the other characters, and, for the most part, it works. When it does fail there (and could fail in your own story), it’s because a character keeps a secret more to preserve a plot point than to preserve the integrity of her own character. When we, the audience, detect that the secret kept has been forced, it leaves a sour taste in our mouth, like we’re sucking on an old sock.

  SECRET PLAN ALL ALONG: Frequently this is a villainous thing—like when a villain reveals, ha ha ha, this has been my plan all along, but it works for heroes, too, at times. A bad execution of this occurs in Skyfall, the James Bond film, when villain Raoul Silva confirms that “being captured” was really his plan all along—but the execution of that doesn’t hold up to scrutiny and requires such precision and luck that to accept it is to also accept that Raoul Silva is an actual fucking wizard. Maybe he’s Voldemort? I don’t know. A good example occurs in The Princess Bride because we get both the hero and villain version. At the fore, we see how the Man in Black turns the tables on the egotistical Vizzini when he puts poison in both cups, but we also see how Prince Humperdink arranged the whole kidnapping-and-murder of Buttercup to start a war.

  SEXY TIMES: In real life, sex often releases tension, but in storytelling, it tends to create it. Why is that, exactly? Because sex complicates the story. Characters often think they can make the beast with two backs and it won’t change them, but it does. Or they think they can do the ol’ rumpy-pumpy without falling in love or growing jealous … but oops, yeah, no, sorry. Or they expect that they can do the Lubrication Tango and that nobody will catch them in this forbidden act, especially not their loved ones, but eeek, ooooh, they’re going to find out, because that’s how stories work. More to the point, sex itself has a narrative swoop to it—a beginning, a middle, an end32—and, in storytelling, it is often part of a larger story. Sex always has a story, and it always shapes the story, in part because we shouldn’t put pieces into the narrative that don’t affect the narrative. Sex in the film Juno leads to a baby for the teen protagonist. Sex in horror movies often invokes a kind of moral and mortal trigger—there exists an unspoken and practically puritanical rule that to have sex in one of those films is to invite and even deserve death by the monster. Nearly every movie about an affair—from Fatal Attraction to Brokeback Mountain—is not just about the love and the romance, but about how sex confirms those things and is the trigger for consequence. The great thing about sex as a driver of tension is that so many outcomes are possible: love, jealousy, pregnancy, awkwardness, breakups, murder, stains, trapeze acts, clown paint, various squishing noises, inadvertent arousal on public transportation … okay, you get the point. But the larger thing to remember is that sex is not there to titillate the audience—sure, it can have that as a side effect. But it’s ultimately about character, and about the tension of what happens when you smush these two characters (or three, or five, or whatever orgy you have in mind) into sexy-sexy times.

  TABOOS AND TRANSGRESSIONS: Related to the above is when a character breaks an understood taboo, engaging in a transgression that we suspect will have consequences. Fifty Shades of Grey is an example—though BSDM erotica is full of far better, if less well-known, instances—of a character’s journey through sexual taboos. We expect that it will change her and affect her life in ways uncertain, and uncertainty breeds tension. Horror is full of taboo breaking, too: the cannibalism in Ravenous, the body horror of David Cronenberg’s films, the dinosaur creation and act of playing god intrinsic to Jurassic Park (which, yes, is a creature-feature horror movie). Even Star Wars has at its core a transgression: The Jedi order is dead, and study of that ancient religion is forbidden, and so when Luke Skywalker undertakes his quest to become a Jedi, we know it’s an act against the Imperial order. Superhero stories are often about breaking taboos—don’t go there, don’t do that, don’t touch that, don’t eat that, and then a character does, and becomes changed and superhuman as a result. Normal humans enter forbidden spaces and cease to be normal as a result. Cyberpunk fiction—really, any subgenre with punk in its name—often relies on going against the laws and norms of the social order, rebelling, and resisting to solve a problem.

  TELL THEM THE ODDS: This is a small but vital thing: If characters are up against danger, it helps to inform the audience just ho
w bad that danger is, and just how unlikely it is for the characters to triumph (or even survive). You can do this as a setting background detail or, more common, through one of the characters in the story—C-3P0, for instance, is famous for rattling off the odds, often at the worst possible time. (Which leads to Han Solo’s famous line: “Never tell me the odds.”) The movie 300 (also a graphic novel) has the odds right there in the title.

  TICKING CLOCK: The ticking clock is a classic. OMG THE BOMB IS GOING TO GO OFF.33 OH NO, THEY’RE GOING TO BLOW UP THE WORLD IN TWENTY-FOUR HOURS IF WE DON’T PAY THE RANSOM. IF WE DON’T DO THE THING BY SO-AND-SO TIME, THE BAD STUFF WILL HAPPEN. Look at Back to the Future, which uses a literal clock tower to mark the countdown to when Doc Brown has to utilize a single lightning strike (ironically hitting the very same clock tower) to help transport Marty back to the (wait for it) future.

  VIOLENCE, SWEET VIOLENCE: Characters fight. It is part and parcel to most genre fiction, and further, you’ll find it in comedies, dramas, everything. (The puritanical component of American storytelling often sidelines sex in favor of violence, oddly.) Violence is the most blunt form of conflict and tension you can create: Implicit in any fight or battle scene/sequence is the question of who will win, who will lose, and what the consequences of that outcome will be. (We talk more about fight scenes on page 168 of this book.) The worst type of violence is when a fight scene is inserted just to have one: It’s a false way of creating tension or delaying storytelling. Every fight should be tied to the problems the characters have. Every fight should have stakes on the table. Something to be won, something to be lost. A fight scene isn’t just about putting an obstacle in the character’s way—and that’s because other characters are not obstacles. Remember: Characters are not architecture, but rather, architects. They fight for love, for jealousy, for hate, for revenge. Good examples of fight scenes? Those in The Princess Bride are loaded for bear with meaning, dialogue, and character beats. The entire Star Wars saga does them well, too, and even the most threadbare stormtrooper attack serves as a reminder of the oppression existing at every turn in the galaxy. Every fight in Die Hard has the stakes packed into it—and so do the ones in Buffy the Vampire Slayer because, tee-hee, stakes. Get it? Stakes? Because stakes hurt vampires?34

  WE MIGHT LOSE: There comes a moment in many stories where the characters must face the facts: We’re going to lose. Whatever was to be gained will instead be lost. Whatever problem one hoped would be solved is now not only solved, but probably a lot worse. At the end of A New Hope, every X-wing run on the Death Star fails again and again—and this is amped up at the end of Return of the Jedi when we learn the rebels have been drawn into a trap. In Die Hard, we routinely watch John McClane run out of options—up until the very end, when he’s bloodied and out of (almost) all his bullets and Gruber has Holly. But this is about eking out a victory, scraping free from the narrow channel of Scylla and Charybdis35 to snatch a win from the slavering jaws of defeat.

  WE TOTALLY LOST: On the other hand, sometimes the heroes don’t get that win. Sometimes they lose. They have lost everything, or damn near to it. This can happen at any point in the story, really, though usually it is either a pivotal moment at the midpoint or a frame for the climactic ending. The end of The Empire Strikes Back shows Luke defeated, Han taken away, and Darth Vader mostly triumphant. We know Luke is the son of the tyrant, that the rebel alliance is in danger, and that everything they’ve worked for is now in question. The good guys lose. Now, that works because we know there’s another movie coming, and it serves as one part of a larger story—so even though it serves as the climax of that one film, it also serves as the midpoint of the overall saga, thus showing how each building block of a story has its own narrative arc and can connect to a larger story. Ghostbusters (the original in particular) has this major defeat come as a lead-in to the final climactic act. All the ghosts are removed from containment, Dana is possessed, the city has gone to Hell, and all they’ve worked for is in ruins. This motivates them to act.

  WE WON, BUT: Ah, the Pyrrhic Victory—aka, We Won, But It Cost Us A Lot, So Did We Really Win At All? This is when the characters technically solve their problem and end their quest, but in doing so, have been so hurt or have done such damage that the victory is at best a complicated one and at worst is totally hollow. Consider the monumental costs and changes to the characters in The Lord of the Rings. The world is saved, but the characters are transformed—and not always in the best way. Or again we might look at Ghostbusters—sure, it’s a comedy, but think about it. At the end of the movie, the ghosts are still free, a whole city block is ruined, and everything is a giant marshmallow mess. It’s silly, and that’s probably part of what makes it so fun—but the win was a rough one. So, too, with The Avengers or, really, most superhero movies that end with most of a city left in ruins. If you want a more somber, sober version, Saving Private Ryan is a great example of a film where the goals of the characters are ostensibly completed (they save the titular36 Private Ryan), but given all they sacrifice to accomplish that—well, it’s a victory whose cost is so high it’s hard to see exactly how it’s worth it. Not that “worth it” is the point of that story, to be clear, but it does neatly illustrate a Pyrrhic victory.

  MORE TENSION TALK TO TITILLATE AND TERRIFY

  Let’s back away from the individual building blocks and once again resume the 30,000-foot view. What, exactly, is tension?

  And how exactly do we cause it?

  Tension and suspense, at the barest level, are the intermingled emotions of excitement and fear that come from uncertainty. We don’t know what’s going to happen, or why something is happening, or what it means, and so we feel that dueling sense of anticipation and apprehension. And we have lots of ways to create suspense and tension, as detailed above.

  But at the heart of it all lies a greater, deeper source of tension.

  And that is the tension that exists between the teller of the story and its listener. It’s in the antagonistic relationship between writer and reader, between filmmaker and viewer, between game designer and player.

  The audience must never truly be sure of whether or not to trust you. They can’t hate you, of course—not the whole time—but even that is a source of tension. Look at it this way: If every day you walk to work, and every day a guy jumps out of the bushes at the same spot and hits you with a shovel, that creates tension in the short term because, okay, you know that here it comes, here comes ol’ Shovelface to give you a hard whonnnng to the chopper. But over time, that diminishes because the uncertainty has turned to certainty. You can plan for it. You can avoid it. You can be ready.

  Ah, but now imagine that one day he hits you with a shovel, and the next he gives you a hundred bucks. And then a hundred bucks the day after that, and the day after that he hits you with a shovel again. There’s no pattern. It’s random. Day after day, either money or shovel, shovel or money, and you never really know which is coming.

  Storytelling is like that. You’re not there to hurt the audience, but you’re not there to help them, either. Or, rather, you’re there to do both. It’s your job to mess with their expectations. You’re there to surprise, to delight, to disturb. To hurt and to heal. You give characters some victories, and then you deliver them some staggering losses. Sometimes you reward them or upset them in ways they didn’t even know they wanted, and other times it’s your job to hand the audience exactly what they expect. Sometimes you’re predictable—remember, the first few days of getting hit with the shovel are still tense precisely because you know what’s coming—and sometimes you’re unpredictable, because eventually you have to mix it up and stop giving them the same thing over and over again. With one hand you strike, with the other you soothe.

  Tension is created by showing the sword dangling overhead, and when the audience demands to know about it, you just shrug. “Who knows?” you say. “Maybe it’ll fall, maybe it won’t. It probably will. But we don’t know when.” And then you show the sword dri
fting lazily. You show the fraying ropes holding it up. But the suspense isn’t in the fall. It’s in all the moments before.

  To go back to the game metaphor from before, there exists a component of storytelling where it is you and the reader (or viewer, or whoever) sitting on opposite sides of a chessboard. You’re always trying to outwit each other. And sometimes you need them to outwit you—the audience needs that power, needs to be invested. They want to do work, and they want (sometimes) to be victorious. Other times, they want the shock of loss, the joy at being outplayed. And at those times you misdirect and distract, and as they’re thinking you’re moving your piece one way, you move it another and shock them with your prowess.

  But the trick is making all of this organic. It has to unfold naturally from the story—it’s not JUST you screwing with them. It’s you fucking with them within a framework that you built and agreed upon, a framework you’ve shown them, a place of rules and decorum. In this context, consider the game space. Like, say, a chessboard, or a D&D dungeon. The game space is an agreed-upon demesne. It has rules. It has squares. Each piece or character moves accordingly within those squares. It has a framework that everyone who has played the game understands.

  And yet, the outcome is never decided. The game is forever uncertain even within established parameters. Surprises occur. You might win. Maybe I win. That’s how storytelling operates best—we set up rules and a storyworld and characters, and you try to guess what we’re going to do with them. We as storytellers shouldn’t ever break the rules. Note: Breaking the rules in this context might mean conveniently leaving out a crucial storyworld rule (“Oh, vampires don’t have to drink blood; they can drink Kool-Aid”), or solving a mystery with a killer who the audience couldn’t ever have guessed (“It was the sheriff from two towns over who we have never before discussed or even mentioned”), or invoking a deus ex machina (“Don’t worry, giant eagles will save them. It’s cool”). You can still have chaos and uncertainty within the parameters—creating a framework, like building a house, doesn’t mean it cannot contain secrets and surprises—but you stay within the parameters that you created.