Damn Fine Story: Mastering the Tools of a Powerful Narrative

by Chuck Wendig

  32 ahem

  33 “There is a distinct difference between ‘suspense’ and ‘surprise,’ and yet many pictures continually confuse the two. I’ll explain what I mean.

  We are now having a very innocent little chat. Let’s suppose that there is a bomb underneath this table between us. Nothing happens, and then all of a sudden, ‘Boom!’ There is an explosion. The public is surprised, but prior to this surprise, it has seen an absolutely ordinary scene, of no special consequence. Now, let us take a suspense situation. The bomb is underneath the table and the public knows it, probably because they have seen the anarchist place it there. The public is aware the bomb is going to explode at one o’clock, and there is a clock in the decor. The public can see that it is a quarter to one. In these conditions, the same innocuous conversation becomes fascinating because the public is participating in the scene. The audience is longing to warn the characters on the screen: ‘You shouldn’t be talking about such trivial matters. There is a bomb beneath you and it is about to explode!’

  In the first case we have given the public fifteen seconds of surprise at the moment of the explosion. In the second we have provided them with fifteen minutes of suspense. The conclusion is that whenever possible the public must be informed. Except when the surprise is a twist, that is, when the unexpected ending is, in itself, the highlight of the story.”

  —Alfred Hitchcock

  34 SHUT UP, THAT WAS A GOOD JOKE, DON’T YOU JUDGE ME.

  35 Scylla and Charybdis are, mythologically, two sea monsters near one another—the first personified as a rock against which ships would crash, the other as a whirlpool that would swallow ships whole. Hence, traveling between them was a perilous journey with a very bad death near on both sides.

  36 I’m not proud, but I giggle every time I say this word.

  Interlude

  THE FOURTH RULE

  It is routinely accepted that the job of your story is first to entertain.

  That may be true enough—certainly if the audience is not captivated and held in thrall by the story, they might eject.

  But entertainment is also a pretty threadbare goal. I’d argue that it’s not enough merely to entertain. Also, entertainment as a goal sits right at the bottom of the barrel. We’re not jugglers. I’m not your court jester, and you’re not mine, either. As Darth Vader said in Star Wars: “Am I funny how, I mean funny like I’m a clown, do I amuse you? Do I make you laugh, am I here to fuckin’ amuse you?” I’m pretty sure it was Vader who said that. Maybe it was the Emperor1. Whatever. Toe-MAY-toe, toe-MAH-toe.

  Let’s thicken the stew, shall we?

  The best thing a story can do is, in this order:

  Make the audience feel.

  Make the audience think.

  Entertain the audience.

  Now, you could rightly argue that entertainment is actually a subset of the first one: You can make them feel entertained, and that’s true to a point; I just want to keep it separate so we maintain that entertainment is its own independent entity.

  So, let’s say you go to the movies.

  What’s the best outcome of seeing that movie? When you walk out of the theater, probably with some friends or a loved one or your family, what’s the ideal result? It’s when you walk out and the first thing you want to do is go somewhere, get a hamburger or a slice of pie, and hunker down and talk about it. And the first reason you want to talk about it is that the movie stoked your emotions. It played you like a guitar, plucking your heartstrings, making you sing sad songs, then happy ones, then triumphant ones. It ran you through a gamut of emotions, and you just have to share them. Then—then!—you calm down and get to the stuff that the movie gave you to chew on. It gave your brain something to do: Was so-and-so his father? What happened at the end could mean that the story isn’t over, that so-and-so isn’t dead, that the other guy was the murderer. What was the movie trying to say, was it that we’re all doomed, or that love will lead the way, or that cake is better than pie (what a vicious lie!)?

  The movie made you feel.

  And then it made you think.

  And now you wanna go talk about it with a mouth that you have wisely stuffed with pie.

  The worst-case scenario is that the movie just sucked. Didn’t pluck your strings, didn’t give your brain anything to do, didn’t even entertain you.

  The middle ground is that the movie entertained you.

  And only that.

  You sit there in the car after, and you and your film-going compatriot (a loved one, a child, a stray dog, a down-on-his-luck koala bear, a mop handle with a bucket on top of it) both casually shrug and half smile and say, “That was good.” But what you mean is, “That was fine,” as in the way you might describe a day where nothing went exactly wrong and nothing went exactly right. It’s a piece of white bread. It works for its purpose and tastes fine at the time, but leaves no lasting impression.

  Entertainment and entertainment only is exactly that—

  It leaves no impression beyond the moment in which it entertains you.

  It was funny. It was exciting. It was good.

  It was fine.

  But the best stories are the ones that hit you in your heart and in your head. The ones that make you feel, and the ones that also make you think.

  So let those be your goals first. Let entertainment follow.

  1 Correction: It was Artoo. You just couldn’t understand him with all the bleets and bloops.

  Chapter Four

  FIGHTIN’, FORNICATIN’, AND FLAPPIN’ THEM GUMS: ON CHARACTER INTERACTIONS

  At its most basic and bare bones, a story is this:

  Characters do shit.

  Characters say shit.

  Repeat until end.

  And even in that, there maybe exists a needless deviation—we often separate action and dialogue but, really, dialogue is action. Talk is a verb. To communicate is to do something, perhaps one of the most vital forms of “doing something” that we have available to us as humans.

  We often dismiss that, though, right? Oh, that’s just talk. We pretend like words are not meaningful, like they’re just hot air. But that’s not true at all. Dialogue and communication are as vital as any other action, and in fact contain layers—because dialogue can be savvier, more sinister, more affecting. Dialogue can convince us to take further action (think Iago manipulating Othello), it can be a lie (think Obi-Wan telling Luke untruths about his father), it can say things without ever saying things (the subtext of class warfare is present in a lot of Die Hard’s dialogue).

  Dialogue also has value in that it’s not just a single character acting alone; it involves characters communicating with each other. And damn, do we love dialogue! Dialogue is story lubricant. It’s a fast slide, not a creaky staircase. You ever watch an interview with a compelling subject? It’s just two people sitting in conversation, one asking questions, another answering.

  Watch a Quentin Tarantino movie and marvel at how much of the story is told through dialogue. Kevin Smith, too, and David Mamet. Smith’s first film, Clerks, is told almost entirely through dialogue, and with very little actual action. Same with Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross, which began life as a play and later became a film.

  A great deal of tension can be earned through simply letting characters talk.

  Carry it further, and you start to see how every interaction between two characters—fighting, flirting, arguing, screwing each other’s brains out—works in similar ways. They follow a certain weave and weft, they work with a certain flow. A fight scene and a love scene are a kind of conversation—and they follow similar rules. (Again, we must remember: The push and pull of question and answer will draw us eagerly through damn near any narrative.)

  Let’s unpack this a little bit.

  CHARACTER THUNDERDOME

  You have two characters. Or three. Or five. Maybe it’s two lovers squaring off to bang each other on the couch or yell at each other in the kitchen. Maybe it’s two boxers in the ring, o
r three sisters talking about plans to bury their recently deceased father. Could be it’s a trial, or a rally, or a galactic star chamber discussing the fate of the known universe.

  We begin with some base-level assumptions, which build on the rules we set for Anatomy of a Scene on page 93 of this book.

  EVERYBODY WANTS SOMETHING. This is true in life, and it is triply true inside your story. Characters come together, and they each have a perspective, a problem, and/or a desire. The interaction between the characters, whether it’s physical or vocal, or both, factors in this reality: that every character wants something. Which is to say—

  CHARACTERS INTERACT WITH PURPOSE. I treat most interactions between characters as a kind of power exchange … which is not to say that every character wants to dominate every other character, but simply that, in every interaction, a character’s purpose is on display. They want something, that something forms their motives, and the interaction is an expression, conscious or unconscious, of them trying to get it. It might be simply that a character wants comfort. He might want love or pleasure. Maybe he wants money, or revenge, or ego stroking. Maybe the characters want the same thing (parallel!) or are at odds (perpendicular). Maybe their motives are known to one another, maybe not. Assume that interactions are loaded for bear with purpose.

  INTERACTIONS CONVEY INFORMATION TO THE AUDIENCE AND TO THE CHARACTERS. We should come away from every scene between two characters having learned something. Maybe something small. Could be related to the characters and their problems or to the “larger story” of the plot. It might answer a question or introduce us to deeper mystery. But at no point should we, the audience, come away without learning something. Further, the characters should be able to learn something, too. Maybe it’s the wrong information, or maybe it’s an assumption, but the characters should leave the exchange with new information, even if the other doesn’t know precisely what that entails. Every scene of interaction is an opportunity to convey information—and more than an opportunity, I’d argue it’s a necessity. Use your narrative real estate!

  INTERACTION LEAVES EACH CHARACTER CHANGED. Every interaction is an opportunity for a status change. This never needs to be as dramatic as the shift in status quo you get marking the change at each act break, but we want the sense that every character is affected by the interaction. The worst shape of a story is a straight line because the straight line is a flat line, and a flat line means dead. You don’t want the characters to engage each other and come away unscathed, unchanged, precisely and perfectly the same. Two characters don’t bed each other and come out status quo. Two characters don’t argue or flirt without something happening in each of them. What changes can be how they feel about one another or, as above, the information they learn, or a physical injury that occurred as a result (groin pull?). It can be as dramatic as OMG FRIENDSHIP IS OVER or as subtle as you know, I don’t know that I trust you like I used to. It can be as extreme as “YOU KILLED MY FATHER, PREPARE TO DIE,” and as simple as the emotional reward from “That’ll do, pig,” in Babe.

  EMPATHY IS EVERYTHING. In defining my terms, I’m going to strain the dictionary definitions to fit my point a bit, but let’s assume that sympathy is about feeling bad for someone, and empathy is about understanding them. Empathy isn’t about agreeing—okay? It’s just about putting on someone else’s shoes and walking a mile in them, and then understanding why they’re mad at us for stealing their shoes. Your job as a storyteller is to have empathy for your characters. It is literally your job to understand them. Further, in a scene of interaction, it’s also your job to instill the audience with empathy for the characters. The interaction is there (in part) to help us understand them. Every interaction builds a bridge toward them and brings the audience closer to them. That doesn’t mean it’s designed to deliver sympathy. We don’t need to feel for them. We just need to get it. We need to get where they’re coming from, even if we hate it, hate them, hate everything they stand for. Empathy is about context, and an interaction helps provide that contextual understanding.

  EVERY INTERACTION HAS TWO LAYERS. The first layer is the visible, textual layer. It’s the fight, the trial, the argument. She says this, he says that, she does this in response, he reacts accordingly, and on and on. But a second layer lurks underneath: The exchange means something. There exists a subtextual component. A lot waits unspoken. Theme lurks in the wings. So much of an interaction isn’t about what they’re saying or doing—it’s about what they’re not saying or doing. It’s why they’re there at all. Look at it this way: When you ask a significant other how they’re doing and they respond tersely with, “I’m fine,” then you can be pretty damn sure that they are the farthest thing from fine. The first layer is what they said, but the subtextual layer tells us so much more. Even if they never crack open and spill what’s really bothering them, we still know—something is there.

  EVERY INTERACTION MUST BRING TENSION. Conversation is conflict. When we say tension, it needn’t be edge-of-your-seat, oh god I’ve just bitten my fingernails down to bloody nubs kind of tension. It doesn’t mean you clench your sphincter so tightly it could bend rebar. It just means we don’t know what’s going to happen. Characters interacting are engaging in an invisible act of tug-of-war. They’re pushing and pulling on one another. Sometimes the rope has slack; other times it’s taut as a strangler’s cord. But either way, the gulf between characters is one that carries and conveys tension. An interaction is a negotiation of sorts, and negotiations bring tension. And part of that tension comes from the fact that interactions bring mystery: As noted, we don’t know the outcome of an interaction until it happens, and so, throughout, we have questions.

  TIPS ON WRITING GREAT DIALOGUE

  Writing dialogue is easy in the same way that painting a picture is easy: Anybody can just slap paint on a canvas and say, “LOOK AT THESE PRETTY LITTLE TREES,” but that doesn’t make them Bob Ross. And anybody can smash dialogue into character’s mouths, but not everybody is Elmore Leonard or Toni Morrison, right?

  Let’s talk some tips that will help you refine your dialogue:

  JUST LET THEM TALK. Put two or four, or however many characters you need, right there on the page, and let them talk. Let them talk for as long and as much as you want. Don’t worry about how many words or script pages it takes up. They can have an epic conversation, and you are free to let it ricochet from topic to topic, whether it’s the problem at hand or a bad back or a cheating lover, anything and everything. But here’s the trick: That’s not where you stop. This is just a first draft, and you will need to pare the conversation down, down, down, until the shaggy beast is now a prim poodle. Look at it this way: It’s like digital photography. The great joy of digital photography for me is that I can take one hundred shots just to get one good image. Eighty of them will be garbage, nineteen will be questionable at best, and one—one!—will be worth keeping and displaying. I’m not suggesting that you will only keep one percent of the dialogue that you write, but I am saying that you should feel free to let the characters ramble, comfortable in the knowledge that you can trim, slice, and chop when it comes time to redraft the second, third, or forty-fifth iteration.

  ITS SHAPE DETERMINES ITS PACE. Think of the quick-witted, quick-tongued, and sharp-as-a-dagger dialogue of Shakespeare—or its modern variant, Gilmore Girls.1 Watch Shakespeare (or, again, Gilmore Girls) and note how the dialogue moves as quick as the snapping of one’s fingers, each line spoken with the whip-slash panache of a fencer’s épée. Then watch Oliver Stone’s JFK, and notice how the dialogue is heavier, weightier, more ponderous. This is true of almost any historical drama, actually—and that slowness of language slows the narrative, giving it the depth and density one expects history to possess. A single story can have both styles of dialogue, too: In Die Hard, a lot of the characters snap back and forth, like in the Hans and John dialogue noted on page 63 of this very book. But then you look at the scenes where McClane and Al Powell talk about themselves, and their dialogue ta
ps the brakes and eases the thrilling pace of the story. It needs to do that to deliver oxygen into the narrative—and, most vitally, to make us care about these two characters. Short, quippy bits wouldn’t give us enough. People don’t spill their guts to each other in short quips.

  TELLING IS SHOWING. It is one of those supposedly ironclad rules that storytellers should not tell us things—rather, they must show us things. And that’s true to a point. If you’re writing a novel, you don’t need to say, “Bob was angry,” because you can show him being angry—clenching his fists, his forehead veins throbbing, kicking his chair, whatever. And in a script, you might say Bob is angry, but the actor will demonstrate that onscreen (and in a comic, the artist would depict the emotion visually). And yet, dialogue is a huge part of storytelling—and in dialogue, characters tell each other things. The trick here, then, is to never have characters speak—instead, they convey information through hand gestures and interpretive dance and—*receives a note* okay that might not be right? Let me consult this other stack of notes here, hold on, hold on … ah! The real trick here is to avoid making a character’s dialogue clunky and expository. We don’t want them to needlessly explain (or rather, overexplain) things. The way a character talks—what words she uses, her cadence, her openness, or her reticence—speaks to more than just the words coming out of her imaginary mouth.

  AVOID ON-THE-NOSE DIALOGUE. Characters are not explanation machines, nor are they dispensaries of factual reality. They should constantly spill their genuine feelings or their plans. They should not exposit boldly or dully about what is actually going on around them. On-the-nose dialogue lacks subtlety and nuance, and is often totally needless. Often what’s most interesting about a character is what she doesn’t want to say. It’s all about what characters are keeping in, not what they’re letting out. Dialogue is at its most interesting when it acts as a power play between the characters, each trying to get the other to open up while simultaneously working to keep their own secrets or fears buried. What they don’t say is often as interesting as what they do.