Damn Fine Story: Mastering the Tools of a Powerful Narrative

by Chuck Wendig

  Is the saying “write what you know” a prohibition against straying into unfamiliar, unrelatable, and ultimately unreliable territory? Or is it an opportunity for the author to know more? Is it a locked door, or the key to open a locked door? Is it an invitation to authenticity, or a proclamation demanding you stay in your lane?

  I have no idea. I don’t even know who said it, originally, as it has been attributed to both Twain and Hemingway. What I do know is that it is either a piece of very good advice written poorly, or a piece of poor advice written elegantly. I know that a strict reading of it is nonsense. Any interpretation must favor the loosier-goosier approach of assuming that it is not a prohibition against going outside your authorial comfort zone but, instead, a call to look at your own experiences and find some way to use them—and when your own experiences don’t meet muster, to go have new experiences. Or, hell with it, just fake it.

  I suspect the advice is better when you expect it means to say, “Write what you understand,” with the unspoken addendum of, “If you don’t know what you’re writing about, go learn more stuff, you clod.” Those four words add up to an incomplete piece of writing advice that has plagued us.

  I say scrap ’em.

  And in the pantheon of MIGHTY STORYTELLING LAWS, replace it with this, which is certainly no longer and arguably no less open to interpretation, but hopefully it gets us to a better place:

  Write who you are.

  What that means is this: What you know isn’t much of a watermark for what you should or shouldn’t write. We know a lot of true things, we know a lot of false things, we have heads full of data both real and imagined. We can always go “know” more stuff because we are creatures who can read books and talk to other humans and have experiences. We’re covered on that front.

  Who we are is what matters most. And that’s because who we are is largely indefatigable—we can’t really help it. We are a bundle of thoughts and feelings born of both nature and nurture. We are a complex tangle of inaccuracies, inconsistencies, and ideas. We are bloated with certainties and haunted by uncertainties. We each have genetic code, but in a sense we have a memetic code,1 too: an uncharted map, an emotional genome, that informs us and completes us, even as we feel woefully incomplete.

  That’s what goes into your story.

  Your story is more than who you are, but at its core it’s still you. We are often wont to note how there are so few original stories, and that’s true—moreover, that’s totally fine. Because when telling any story, the one original thing that comes to the table is you. You are a unique arrangement. We are at our best as storytellers when who we are—the ideas we hold, the loved ones we’ve known, the places we’ve lived, the fears we have—helps to inform the stories we write. That’s how we put ourselves out there. Not by relying on data or information, not by worrying about what’s in our heads but, rather, about what’s in our hearts.

  Write who you are. Crack open your breastbone, grab your heart from its visceral mooring, and smash it into the page. Give it a few bloody twists just to make sure your heart print is firmly and forever smashed onto the page.

  Your stories are you, and you are your stories.

  1 The origin of the word “meme,” by the way.

  Chapter Five

  WHAT HIDES BEHIND THE WALLS: UNDERSTANDING A STORY’S THEME

  I had an eighth-grade teacher, and this teacher, in the span of a single year, made me

  decide to never be a writer, and then

  decide like hell I was damn sure gonna be a writer just to spite her.

  That spite was an important component in me wanting to be a writer, and it came from my observance—as a stupid eighth-grade student—that I knew things she clearly did not know. Because she was wrong about stuff. Provably wrong. And I don’t mean like, I was young, and I thought I knew better. I’ve been there, too, and more often than not, but I’ve learned (as one should) that most of the time when I thought I was being smart, I was really just being a smart-ass. But this isn’t that.

  This is like a math teacher telling you 4 + 4 = 9.

  Here’s what it was:

  I would write papers or stories, and I would use words that she would routinely tell me were not real words. “You made that word up,” she would say to me, yet again disappointed that I was apparently inventing a brand-new vocabulary for my work. Except I wasn’t. These were real words. And whenever she’d tell me this, I’d have to go and pull out the book where I found the word in the first place—sometimes in a story by an author we were reading for class—and point to it, petulant and angry. “Here is the word. It exists.” And she’d reluctantly adjust my grade, raising it slightly. I remember a particularly egregious example where I used the word rictus. I don’t know if I knew precisely what the word even meant, honestly, but I’d seen it in like, half a dozen horror novels, and so when I used it, she called me on it and again uttered that familiar refrain: “This isn’t a real word.” So I hauled out the book I was reading—pretty sure it was a Robert McCammon novel, maybe Swan Song—and with my index finger stabbed the middle of the page where the word lived, poke poke poke.

  Then she had the gall to say: “That writer just made that word up.”

  Which felt like a smack in the face. To me, what had been written was canonical. If you were an author and you wrote a book, what you did was holy writ. It was chiseled into the fundamental bedrock of language. You had earned your place and could not be laid low by the dismissive hand of my eighth-grade English teacher, goddamnit.

  But then I was like, Oh no, maybe that author did make the word up.

  This was in the days before we all had All the World’s Information tightly packed into an electronic talking brick in our pockets, so I couldn’t just whip out my iPhone and Google the word and wave it around triumphantly. This was like four hundred years ago, when you had to move the sack of flesh called a “human body” toward a book called a “dictionary,” and I had to haul out said dictionary and point to the evidence. Except our classroom dictionary was basically garbage. It was one of those smaller dictionaries, catechism size, the ones that cannot possibly contain the overgrown breadth and depth of the English language.

  It did not, in fact, contain the word rictus.

  Smug and having won this battle, she insisted that the red mark stay on my paper. A minus. A ding in the paint.

  Grr.

  I was haunted by this. Haunted first by the fear that writers were full of shit, just making up words willy-nilly,1 and second by the fear that there was no one to trust and that my teacher was somehow right (gasp). But I still felt a spark of hope. I had to believe that my favorite writer would not have led me astray with some nonsense word. It had to be real!

  So, the next day, I escalated the fight, and I went down to the ancient temple of knowledge called a “library,” and there I found the big-ass, mamma-jamma dictionary. You know the one. You’ve seen it. It’s big enough to bludgeon a stampeding wildebeest. It’s got words in there that have not been uttered by a human mouth in three centuries. It’s dusty and massive, and has the weight of a book written by the gods themselves.

  I flipped through it, page by arduous page, until I found it:

  Rictus (n): a fixed grimace or grin.

  Ha ha ha! Victory! Triumph! And I’d even used it correctly to describe the face of a desiccated corpse. (It’s a good bet that if I went through the public education system today I would’ve had mandated therapy, since I wrote an endless array of creepy horror stories.) I do not precisely recall how I was able to deliver the news to my teacher—again, I did not have a camera phone, and if I tried to put that book on a copy machine, I feared the copy machine would collapse like a house of cards. I expect I probably lashed the dictionary to the ass-end of a cantankerous mule and hauled it to the classroom, where I was able to declare my superiority and get that red mark removed.

  Some teachers—many of them in fact—will foster a love of learning in you. Others will make you h
ate the subject you’re studying, sometimes to the point of angrily finding a way to reclaim that subject for yourself.

  This teacher was clearly one of the latter.

  She did a very good job of making reading and writing and studying literature an act of misery. Everything had a hard-and-fast answer, and even great, wonderful stories—stories by Hawthorne, by Du Maurier, by Shirley Jackson—were deflated with the teacher’s pin. She dissected them not as you would a work of art, but more as you would an equation or an earthworm. HERE IS THE STORY’S ALIMENTARY CANAL, WHERE SHIRLEY JACKSON EXCRETES WORD SLURRY THROUGH THE NARRATIVE ANUS.2 We students read these stories and wanted to talk about how they made us feel, what they made us think, why the author wrote them—and she just wanted to dissect each story the same way, the same time, demanding hard-and-fast answers the same way you might demand of a student the dates of royal succession in England or a list of the American presidents in order. It was rote. It was dull.

  And one of the worst examples of this, one that did its damage for years to come, was the section she taught on theme.

  Even now, I can’t repress a little shudder.

  I confess, I fail to remember the exact details of what was taught, though I remember the basics. I remember her droning on, saying, “There are five universal themes,” and then listing them like a menu of options at an oil change place: “Man versus Man. Man versus Self. Man versus Society. Man versus Nature. Man versus Home Appliances.”

  (I might be misremembering that last one.)

  Every story we read, we had to apply one of these five literary themes—never mind the fact they’re more like “core conflicts” rather than “themes,” but pssh, whatever. With some stories, it’s easy enough, right? With Du Maurier’s “The Birds,” you’d say, okay, it’s man versus nature. With Jackson’s “The Lottery,” it’s man versus society. Right? Except on that second one, I remember hands going up and kids asking questions like, “But isn’t it also sorta kinda man versus man? Isn’t it man versus human nature? Given that the person stoned at the end of the story is a woman, why does it have to be man versus anything? Can’t it be woman versus man? Or woman versus society?”

  All those questions were treated almost as if they were a kind of dissent, like we were somehow choosing to interpret a black sky as a blue sky, like we called a cat a dog and said up was down and, sure, we can chew bubble gum with our butts. Questions like these were not answered with, “Well, that’s an interesting idea, let’s explore it,” but simply with a rubber stamp that boldly, grumpily declared:

  WRONG.

  We were told that authors had concrete intentions, and stories and poems contained hard-and-fast answers about all things.

  Full stop, game over, moving on.

  Except.

  Except.

  Let’s hear what Shirley Jackson actually had to say about the story.

  She said, in an interview in a July issue of the San Francisco Chronicle (emphasis mine): “Explaining just what I had hoped the story to say is very difficult. I suppose, I hoped, by setting a particularly brutal ancient rite in the present and in my own village, to shock the story’s readers with a graphic dramatization of the pointless violence and general inhumanity in their own lives.”

  To paraphrase, she did not know exactly what the story was trying to say, and she knows it has something to do with ritual, violence, and inhumanity. Which is to say, man versus society still works, but perhaps so does man versus man. Or man versus government, or man versus tradition, or man versus his own worst terrible instincts—all of which, I suppose, you could slot in one of those five conflict themes, but to do so would be an act without nuance. It’s like looking at the sky at sunset and instead of describing strata of fluffy pinks and smeary lavenders, just saying bluntly, “IT’S PURPLE. IT’S ALL PURPLE. WHEN THE SKY GOD MADE THE SKY, THE SKY GOD INTENDED ONE COLOR TO BE SEEN, AND THAT COLOR IS PURPLE. DO NOT DENY THIS TRUTH, OR WE WILL SURROUND YOU AND THROW STONES AT YOUR HEAD UNTIL YOU DIE, HERETIC.”

  Looking for hard and fast answers when reading stories—or when writing them!—is a very good way to diminish what’s powerful about stories. They are multifarious, multifaceted things. A story is not a thing given over to concrete rules. As I am wont to say again and again: This shit ain’t math. A story is not the culmination of a string of numbers. Yes, there are mathlike metaphors to be had when writing a story—how the components of the tale find balance, how we discuss parallel or perpendicular elements, how different plot points add up to certain consequential outcomes. But just the same, you can’t take a story and rip it apart and identify its data, its major organs, its perfectly created mathematical components. Stories are far surlier, far more slippery, than that. And it’s evident right there in Jackson’s own words.

  She did not know exactly what she was aiming to say.

  Jackson had ideas, yes. She had a hope as to what she was conveying. Certainly she came to the story with some sense of what would get packed in there, yes, but that doesn’t equate to there being a single answer.

  What’s this mean for you, and for this book?

  It means that when you write a story, your story is a product of you. You have all this stuff inside your head—ideas, opinions, questions, fears—swirling around in a vital brain maelstrom, and your story is often where you disgorge this mental detritus. It means that your story has all this emotional and intellectual material baked into it, whether you mean it to or not. It means that just as it is your job as an author to make the audience feel and think, there also exists a pretty good chance that your story is something that makes you feel and think, too—after all, it’s a product of your thoughts and feelings. If your story is architecture, then these thoughts and feelings are what hide behind the drywall. They lurk between the studs, they crawl through the vents, they hiss and whisper from behind electrical outlets.

  Once again, let us define our terms.

  THE (RE)DEFINITION OF THEME

  Every story is an argument.

  A story has a point of view. It has something to say. What it says may be deep, or it may be shallow—and it may be deep to me, but shallow to you, or vice versa. The argument may be intentional on the part of the storyteller, or it may be unrealized. It may even be some mix of the two, as with Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.”

  This argument might be simple or it might be complex, though it can often be stated best as a single short sentence. The longer the sentence, the more complex the argument … and the more complex the argument, the more the story has to do to prove it, and the harder it will be for the audience to connect to it. But if it’s too simple, the story might appear simpleminded. Some balance should be sought.

  It’s not enough to just say a topic and claim that it’s the theme. I read once that the theme of The Hunger Games is “inequality,” but that’s not a theme. That’s a half-formed idea, an incomplete argument. What is The Hunger Games saying about inequality? What is its assertion? What is its point of view on that matter? (More on this in a second.)

  Note, too, that the story really does have to prove its own argument. In a very real sense, the story’s theme works just like the thesis of an academic paper. Even if the theme begins its life in your mind as a question (which is totally fine), by the end of the tale, that question should be answered and the argument made, the narrative having proven the thematic assertion.

  And, yes, the proof is made up. The argument is made up. The entire narrative is made up, because that’s often how stories go. (Stories of a nonfiction nature aren’t made up, not really, though in the field of “creative nonfiction” you will find a great many inventive liberties. And nonfiction in any shape can still present facts in a way that draws from a manufactured theme, because (again), this shit ain’t math.)

  The truth of the theme is somewhere between the author’s intent and the audience’s reception—you may very well intend one thing, and the audience may very well intuit an entirely different meaning. And tha
t’s okay. That’s life in the big city. You cannot control what the audience will do with the story once it has been told to them. That’s on them.

  What’s on you is controlling the story.

  And that means controlling—or at least considering!—the theme.

  THEMATIC EXAMPLES AND THREE EXERCISES

  Right now, I want you to perform three creative exercises for me. No, no, no, take off the yoga pants and put the sex chair back under the tarp. That’s not what I mean. These are purely intellectual exercises for you, the storyteller, to help you frame the power of a fully armed and operational narrative theme.

  Exercise 1: Find the Theme in a Story

  Pick a movie, a book, a comic, whatever. Any story that you find interesting or intriguing. I want you to take this story, hold it up, shake it around, and see what ideas fall out. What is the story saying? I don’t just mean in terms of plot. Can you discern a message? And is there evidence to support the message?

  Above, I mentioned The Hunger Games trilogy and how “inequality” is not a complete thematic statement. So, what is? Let’s try a few:

  “Inequality can only be made right through revolution.”

  Or: “Rampant inequality turns a world into a dystopia.”

  Or: “The wealthy use inequality as a tool to keep the poor down.”

  Those are three themes right there, based on the notion of inequality alone. None of those are right or wrong—all that matters is that I could reasonably try to prove them with some evidence inside the story. Again: This ain’t math. We don’t need definite answers; we just need supportable ideas. These three themes are the tip of the iceberg, too. We could conjure themes about power, about voyeurism and reality TV, about love, and on and on. (We’ll talk a bit more soon about whether or not a story can support multiple themes, and how it can do that.)