Damn Fine Story: Mastering the Tools of a Powerful Narrative

by Chuck Wendig

  Again, it’s why stage magic works as a metaphor when actual wizard magic does not. With stage magic—tricks and illusions!—you can’t really violate the laws of reality. But it damn sure feels like you do. Stories make you believe in wizard magic, but really it’s just a clever, artful trick. The storyworld is bent and twisted, but never broken.

  And, of course, your greatest touchstone for all of this is the characters, and their problems and places inside the storyworld.

  The characters will forever be your guide, if you let them. They are the tug-of-war rope, the chess pieces, the D&D characters that exist as a connection between you and the audience. They are your glorious leverage.

  SIDE TRIP TO TROPETOWN

  Tropes. Know what they are? You don’t? What’s that? It’s my job to explain it? UGH GOD, FINE.

  In storytelling, we have identified and continue to identify certain patterns and motifs within the narrative. This is especially true of pop fiction, which often relies upon tropes, or recurrent themes, the way a man with a broken leg relies upon a crutch. Your greatest online receptacle for these is TVTropes.org, which offers these patterns in great detail, across a wide variety of stories, genres, and media. You know how in slasher films, the slasher killer always gets up one last time even though you think he’s dead? Trope. You know how action movie characters say some glib shit before exploding the bad guy? Trope. You know how the bad guy will often explain his plan in needless detail to the hero, or how heroes always fall off buildings and land safely in dumpsters, or how a shotgun will blast a foe ten feet back and into some drywall with impossible (like, literally impossible) momentum? Tropity-trope-tropey-trope.

  Tropes are not universally bad, even though using them runs the risk of you relying on lazy storytelling techniques. You can use them to your advantage, too. If you take individual tropes and twist them, or use them in unexpected ways, you can surprise the audience. The audience has unconscious expectations—even if they’re not properly aware of tropes as a thing, they still can sense narrative patterns they’ve internalized. They expect the bad guy to give his villainous monologue. They expect that the handsome guy played by the popular actor is the hero. They expect dads to be dumb, nerds to wear glasses, that people who we don’t see die on the screen or on the page are probably not really dead at all.

  Here’s a way to look at it: Tropes (and to a degree, character archetypes, too) are not single dots on a line, but rather, are lines themselves. Bent lines, bowed into arcs—meaning that they have a beginning and an end. Or, put differently, a trope has a set-up and a resolution. The storyteller sets up the trope—like Babe Ruth pointing where he’s going to hit the homerun ball—and then completes it. The completion of the trope fulfills it and, further, fulfills the expectation. Problem is, there’s no surprise there. Ah, but this is where you, the storyteller, can perform a cool stunt maneuver. You can begin the setup of the trope—and then go somewhere differently in the conclusion. You can point to the stands like Babe Ruth, and then when the pitch comes, you smack the bat and drive the ball right into the pitcher’s crotch instead of way past the outfield.

  Examples:

  The bad guy explains nothing and commences right to the torture.

  Or the bad guy tells his plan, but it’s a lie—a carefully-constructed one meant to misguide the hero, and further, to misguide the audience.

  Or maybe the handsome hero guy in the story gets eaten by a bear in the first act.

  The dad isn’t dumb, the nerds don’t wear glasses and are the popular kids at this school, and the dead guy is totally dead.

  That last one is a good example, actually, because, let’s say you’re writing a murder mystery, and early on an important character dies offscreen/off-page—you can drop false hints about that person not only being alive, but also being the killer. Of course, it’s not true—but you can turn the audience’s expectations against them.

  One note, though: Some tropes are generally toxic and should be avoided at all costs (unless you really know how to turn them on their ear). Any trope that relies on shitty social messaging is one to cause worry. You know how MANLY MEN HEROES are often made to feel sad and spurred to action by a DEAD WOMAN? That’s an overused pattern (called “Fridging,” thanks to brilliant comics writer Gail Simone of the blog Women in Refrigerators) that relies upon the woman character having no agency and just being a prop to motivate the MANLY MAN’S MAN PAIN. You know that other thing, where you see a black character in an ensemble and you know that he’ll be the first to die? Yep. Crappy. Don’t do those things. Avoid them. And it’s easily solvable by giving all characters agency and treating them like complete individuals with their own problems, motivations, questions, quests, and the like.

  CHEKHOV’S ECHO

  Heard of Chekhov’s gun? It’s a principle put forth by Anton Chekhov, playwright and short story writer, where he says: “If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.” Some variations of it are about putting the gun on stage, giving it a theatrical bent. Either way, the point is the same: Something that appears now must appear again—no piece exists on its own, no piece is independent from the next.

  Translation: A story is not just a string of connected bits all lined up in a row. It’s not merely a sequence of events. It’s a series of echoes. Characters do things and say things, and this creates consequences. Elements and objects appear, and they have weight and meaning inside the story. There are causes, and there are effects. Each piece is a rock thrown into the water, and the story is about the ripples—and how ripples reach the shore.

  What Chekhov is saying isn’t about a gun—he’s saying the inclusion of a gun, or any element, must return. The echo must be heard throughout the piece. The gun is here now, so later it’ll come into play again—likely when it goes off and probably shoots someone because, as it turns out, that’s what guns are very good at doing.

  In Die Hard, think about the scene where Gruber and the Beautiful Blonde German shoot out the windows so that McClane has to run barefoot across a floor glittering with shattered glass. Now, think about how that moment echoes up at the front of the story: McClane is tense from a plane trip, so he learns a lesson to ball up his toes and press them into carpet, which he does when he finally arrives at the party—and boom, that’s when the terrorists arrive, and he doesn’t have time to get his shoes back on. Then, throughout the story, he’s actively looking for shoes. And he can’t find them. (He even makes a comment about every dead terrorist having feet like his sister.) The storytellers constantly remind us of this single, seemingly unimportant thing: no shoes, barefoot, no shoes, barefoot, until that crucial moment late in the film when he has to run across glass. They don’t just have him lose his shoes one minute and then run across glass the next; it’s a moment that’s been telegraphed early. The moments all echo into each other—ripples upon ripples, cause and effect, truth and consequence. It’s small, and it’s silly, but it’s beautiful when all the pieces like that feel utterly intentional, like they feed each other and were not just throwaway moments.

  Find the moments that echo. If they don’t echo, you must either make them or you must silence them. No piece of your story is an island.

  ABC: PLOTS AND SUBPLOTS AND SUB-SUBPLOTS

  The arrangement of a narrative is often singular in its focus: It details the peaks and valleys, dips and pivots, of a single story. But a single story needn’t be such a direct thrust. Imagine the metaphor of a roller coaster, but now weave in another roller coaster—perhaps even two rides that, sometimes, somehow become one, if you’re willing to bend your brain around that. In most cases, we refer to those as subplots—the main story is your A-Plot, and subsequent smaller plots are your B-Plot, your C-Plot, and so on and so forth. These plots may or may not be woven in together.

  This is fine, and nobody would fault you for looking at
narrative this way if you find it helpful.

  But I’m going to go a different way.

  Worry less about individual subplots, especially as an offshoot of that complicated word plot.

  Instead, assume (hopefully quite correctly) that your story comprises a number of characters, all of whom have their own problems and desires and, in the pursuit of solutions and answers, create their own stories. Sometimes these stories form the thrust of the larger narrative, sometimes they form smaller journeys—like taking an exit off a main highway for a while to see the sights. These smaller narratives are what you would consider subplots, but don’t worry about labeling them. Mostly the goal is to let them again be character originated and character driven. Just because they don’t become the main thrust of the story doesn’t mean they’re not important—especially not to the characters on those journeys, right? We don’t need to call them subplots.

  Instead, think of them as story threads.

  A thread is woven into the tapestry. And further, a thread is best when it’s not left hanging—meaning, these “subplots” will eventually tie back into the whole, binding with the narrative overall. They aren’t disconnected. They don’t hang loose. Take these threads and tie them to other threads—to the fabric as a whole.

  You can look at it this way: Every character has one main problem and then a series of smaller problems—as few as one or as many as you need. (Though again, heed the rule: Don’t let more snakes out of the bag than you can kill.) A main character or protagonist can take side deviations that address smaller problems—and you deal with these the same way we discussed in the last chapter. A problem has a solution, and in pursuit of that solution comes the potential for story. In Lost, all of the characters had side stories that spawned in part from their backstories—this gave them depth and complexity, and assured that not all of their problems stemmed purely from their present time on the mysterious island. Television shows, comics, and even novels tend to have more space than other media, and thus, greater opportunity to explore a character and her problems fully.

  The larger problem is the rope; the smaller problems are threads. Buffy’s desire to be a normal high school girl while having to fight vampires and having a vampire boyfriend—that’s the rope of the show. It’s the thing we use to grab hold of and pull ourselves through that narrative. But every episode yields new threads: Buffy’s relationship to her mother, to her teachers, to Giles the Watcher, and on and on. She has a lot of smaller problems that don’t dominate the show overall, but that dominate one episode or one season.

  (Some video games offer a nice angle on this, too. A role-playing game like Skyrim or Mass Effect—or even any game similar to Metroid—lets you take your character on a variety of “side quests” or ancillary missions to complete different goals, which might include getting a better weapon or answering a question about your backstory or defeating some ancient, irritable goblin king.)

  Also worth noting is that these story threads can interact much as the characters themselves do. So-called subplots can either intersect at a perpendicular angle, meaning they slam into the main story and affect it in a head-on-collision kind of way. Or they run parallel, meaning they may never tie in to the main story so as to actively affect it, but they still grow and change the character in interesting ways that passively affects the main story—or, at least, reflects upon it. And, just as with characters, these individual story threads can be neither perpendicular nor parallel, meaning they will eventually intersect, though not at a hard right angle—it will be more like two cars traveling on the highway changing lanes, gently passing and crossing one another. Some effect will occur, but until both cars need to take the same exit off of the highway, it’s just trading paint.

  Example? Well, in The Princess Bride, you know Inigo Montoya’s saying, right? You can say it with me now. Say it aloud, here we go:

  “HELLO, MY NAME IS INIGO MONTOYA, YOU STOLE MY SCOOBY DOO LUNCHBOX, PREPARE … FOR SPANKINGS.”

  *is handed a note*

  I am informed by my pop culture lawyers that this is actually incorrect.

  Apologies to all, and especially to William Goldman and Mandy Patinkin. Let’s try this again:

  “HELLO, MY NAME IS INIGO MONTOYA. YOU KILLED MY FATHER. PREPARE … TO DIE.”

  That line is integral to his story and, ultimately, sums up his quest. The background is that his father made a special sword for a very bad man, the six-fingered Count Rugen, and then Rugen killed the father and scarred the son. So Inigo devotes his entire life to mastering the blade in order to exact his revenge. It’s not the main thrust of The Princess Bride (though I’d maybe argue that Rugen’s comeuppance is the most satisfying moment in the whole movie), but as a story thread, it works perfectly. It’s neither perpendicular nor parallel—it slowly but surely moves toward the main plot, finally intersecting when he needs to rescue Westley from death to exact his revenge (and, of course, Westley needs Inigo to resurrect him in order to reclaim his love, Buttercup). Those two stories feed one another, clearly weaving together by the end—but the story threads aren’t antithetical or antagonistic, either. They dovetail and become one. Inigo’s story is essential to the story just the same.

  And therein lies another lesson.

  The decision to include a story thread—a “subplot”—is really about answering, “Is this essential? Does it add to the narrative? Does it shape the overall story and deepen our experience? Does it help to change or reveal one or several of the characters?” If yes, go for it.

  If no … then maybe you’ve a darling that demands to be killed.

  1 Green sea turtles

  2 I’m not sure exactly how you get the job of “Honu Minder,” and I assume it does not pay well, but what a fabulous-sounding job. “What do you do for a living, Dan?” “I ROPE OFF THE TURTLES TO KEEP THEM SAFE FROM SELFIE-SEEKING GLORY-HOUND TOURISTS. YOU MESS WITH MY TURTLES, YOU SLEEP WITH THE FISHES.”

  3 The question mark is shaped like a hook, after all …

  4 I pronounce this at-at, not ay-tee, ay-tee, and the people who pronounce it the latter way are monsters wearing human faces. WE ARE ONTO YOU, MONSTERS, YOUR COSTUME HAS BEEN EXPOSED AND YOUR MALEVOLENT RUSE IS AT AN END.

  5 A good example of this is in reality TV. When you watch a reality show, you will note that just as you’re about to get to a moment of revelation—who won this round of Food Battle? Which home will they choose on Houseboat Hunters? Which person will they vote to be covered in biting otters?—the cameras immediately cut to a commercial, leaving you hungry for more.

  6 Google is your friend!

  7 And all very confusing.

  8 pyoo-pyoo-pyoo!

  9 Pro-tip for the Empire: You guys might want to learn the value of euphemistic language. I think the “Values Reinforcement Sphere” would’ve gone over a lot better than the “Death Star.” Also, your Emperor looks like a wizened goblin-man, which can’t be good for your image. The Empire needs a serious makeover.

  10 Maybe all scenes of dialogue should contain awesome sword fights.

  11 Well, at least mine are sassy, I can’t speak for you.

  12 pyoo-pyoo-pyoo!

  13 Or an elbow. Stupid elbows.

  14 Aka C-3PO, aka Threepio

  15 Frankly, we probably deserve it.

  16 NUM ONE GOD apparently meant NUMBER ONE GOD, I guess indicating there are other, less significant deities she chose not to call upon in her invocation of rage.

  17 Good fences make good neighbors, according to Robert Frost.

  18 SHOW ME THE LIE.

  19 My head-canon is firm on this.

  20 Again I say, SHOW ME THE LIE.

  21 “Probably Yetis” is the name of my new band. And, yes, I’m stealing this joke from renowned science fiction author John Scalzi, and if he wants it back he will have to fight me for it.

  22 Once again I echo: “From a certain point of view.” One might think that Obi-Wan was not only telling a half-truth there, but also giving u
s something to think about regarding how stories are told and who is doing the telling.

  23 Sorry, I shouldn’t kink-shame.

  24 I do not advocate hallucinogens or nudity in any combination to jump-start your narrative process. But also, I’m not not advocating it.

  25 Seriously, if you can think of Charlie Brown eternally going to kick a football that is yanked away from him and not consider that tragic, then we don’t understand each other.

  26 Okay, that’s not actually a real thing, but it is one of the more interesting pop culture “fan-theories” out there.

  27 “Shafts and ducts” sounds oddly pornographic, and I apologize.

  28 Do people still say “pizazz” anymore? I don’t know if I’ve heard anyone say that word in years. I’m not sure I’ve said that word in years, even though I write it. I’m going to start saying it a lot now, and I hope you’ll join me. Pizazz!

  29 Pizazz!

  30 Aka, the greatest sitcom of all time, don’t you dare disagree with me.

  31 Though many also suspect I am the genetic hybrid of Alton Brown and the two Mythbusters (Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage). The real story is that I am a bag of tarantulas.