Damn Fine Story: Mastering the Tools of a Powerful Narrative

by Chuck Wendig

  More to the point, let’s say the answers to those questions are, respectively:

  man’s inhumanity to man

  because I want to explore the dark side of morality

  because it’s politically relevant to current affairs

  Then you’re starting to see the shape of things. You can be sure that the theme has something to do with how humans treat other humans, maybe how they cloak their evil actions in righteous doctrine, and how this idea is relevant to something actually going on in the news presently—or timeless because it’s something that transcends the here and the now.

  What if I have the wrong theme?

  That’s okay. Like I said: Theme is not math. You may begin a story thinking that it’s making one argument, and then, by its end, you see it’s made another. As long as it hangs together, it doesn’t matter. When we tell a tale, especially for the first time before we revise and redraft, we’re wandering through a dark room with only flashes of lightning through the windows to guide our way. We can guess at theme, or plot, or how the story will go. But we can be wrong. Honestly, I’m often wrong—no matter how much I outline, whatever I expect to occur, the story nearly always takes weird side journeys. That’s okay. It’s like planning a road trip. Sure, you plot your course ahead of time. You say, “I’m going to take this highway to that highway,” and you print out your map or you let your GPS do the talking.

  But sometimes you hit a traffic jam. Or an accident.

  Or you come up on an exit and you think, It looks pretty in that direction. I want to drive by that barn. Or you see a sign for THE WORLD’S BIGGEST HAY-BALE DINOSAUR, and you’re like, Hell yeah, I need to see that! So you turn on your blinker, and you take the exit.

  You didn’t plan for it.

  And that’s okay, because you get to see a giant hay-bale dinosaur.

  SYMBOL AND MOTIF

  Let’s talk about the literary symbol and motif.8

  There exists a fairly strict reading that differentiates symbol from motif in this way:

  A symbol is an image or other sensory component (like, say, a sound or a phrase) within a story that by proxy represents and reflects some component of that story in a metaphorical way. If you look at the mockingjay inside the world of The Hunger Games, it’s essentially a bird that exists by a mistake: The capitol genetically designed a “muttation” bird, the jabberjay, who would eavesdrop for them. But the rebels figured this out and fed the birds false information, so the capitol decided hell with it, and released all the jabberjays into the wild—and there they bred with mockingbirds and created the mockingjay, a bird that did not memorize conversations, but did memorize sounds and songs. The mockingjay appears consistently in the books and movies, and through the story the bird ends up tied to Katniss, the tribute—the bird is the result of a mistake by the capitol, and so her taking on that symbol both literally and figuratively represents the crimes and errors of the capitol returning to haunt them. (Or, put differently: The chickens have come home to roost.) The mockingjay thus serves as both a literary symbol and a symbol used in the plot of the story: meaning, it’s both text and subtext. (Hell, it’s the title of the third book. Which one could argue is a little on-the-nose, but that can be okay, especially given that the story is written for young adults, not for a snooty, overly literary audience.)

  A motif is like a symbol—again, an image or other sensory component—except it doesn’t represent just anything; rather, it represents the theme of the story in a metaphorical way. It bolsters the theme and delivers on it in an oblique way. Again, in The Hunger Games series, you might argue that the image of fire serves the story as a motif. If we suggest that one of the themes of The Hunger Games is that “Violence can only be ended by violence”—or, to put a different spin on that, “Violence begets violence”—then we are suggesting that violence spreads. It creates itself and feeds upon itself. Just like—hmm, oh, I dunno—fire. Fire—which, like the mockingjay, shows up in one of the titles of the books/films—therefore serves as a consistent metaphor leaning into one of the themes of the story. Katniss even manifests this symbol literally, just as she does the mockingjay. And you could argue that the evolution of that motif is one where she thinks she controls it and herself, but in the end she really doesn’t control it—the violence she looses upon Panem may be essential, but it is not controllable, and it costs her and her family dearly.

  (As a fun side note, if you want a mirror of the “fiery mockingjay,” look no further than the “firebird” symbol touted by the Rebel Alliance and, later, the Resistance that fights the depredations of the First Order in Star Wars. Then look to the group founded by Albus Dumbledore inside Harry Potter to fight Voldemort, the Order of the Phoenix: Again, you find a bird that, you may note, is very much on fire. Suddenly, we realize that we’re talking about the mythological phoenix: a bird that burns up but can revive itself from a pile of ash, used in these stories as a symbol for rebellion and resistance. Which only serves to prove that symbols and motifs give us a very deep, and very interesting, rabbit hole to fall into. Each usage across pop culture is different from the last, while still borrowing from the original mythic source. And this, by the way, is again why originality is overrated in storytelling. No one element needs to be original. You, the storyteller, are the singular element brought to the narrative, particularly in the arrangement you choose for the elements at hand.)

  The difference between motifs and symbols is important if you’re trying to pass a test, but for our purposes the hard separation of the two terms isn’t precisely necessary if you understand the two ideas. Instead, simply consider the opportunity to find ways to invoke the themes in your book in metaphorical ways.

  Which means it’s time we take a little side trip to talk about—

  Yep, you guessed it.

  Profanity.

  Wait, what?

  BAD WORDS, GOOD METAPHORS

  Okay, we’re not really talking about profanity—but we are going to use profanity as a gateway to talk about a larger, squirmier part of your story, which is to say, we’re going to use it to bootstrap a conversation about metaphor.

  Profanity, at its core, is often metaphorical in its nature.

  When I say, “Dave is a shithead,” I do not mean that Dave literally has a quivering pile of feces mounding upon his shoulders. His skull is not poop, nor is it filled with or even covered in poop. I just mean that, metaphorically, the guy’s got turds for brains.9

  Words work for us in this way all the time. We let one word or phrase act as a proxy for an idea. That’s the awesome part about the human brain—we are smart enough to speak in abstractions. Metaphor is a kind of shared, comfortable lie, right? When I say, “This sucks,” I don’t mean it is literally vacuuming or slurping something. If I say that, I mean that I don’t like it, it’s bad, or whatever. It has a distinct negative connotation and doesn’t need to be examined any further because we collectively grok the abstraction.

  In a literary sense, a metaphor works to compare two unlike things. If I were to say, “His body is soft, like a slice of wet white bread,” you would roughly understand what I was getting at. You could probably even remove the lead-in adjective, soft, and most readers of that sentence would arrive at a loose consensus of what that means, even if the particulars cannot be agreed upon. (Is he actually wet? Does it mean flabby?) Just the same, the human body and a slice of bread would never actually be confused by anyone who had not first been kicked by a mule. And yet, despite that disparity, the metaphor works, I’d argue, because it finds common ground in abstraction. The metaphor would fail if a) it tried to compare two like things (“that zucchini is like a cucumber”), or b) it tried to compare two unlike things that had no such common ground (“my day was so bad it was like an oak tree”). Too similar or too disparate, and the metaphor will fail.

  In other words, metaphors work because we can draw the line between the two unlike things. If that line is too short, it’s obvious and underwhelming
. Too long, and the line breaks—which means we, the audience, cannot follow it.

  Thing is, metaphor doesn’t just work at the sentence level; it works as a larger abstraction, too. Theme and story share a relationship based on the conventions born of larger metaphorical abstraction. When every element of a story lines up to prove and represent a larger idea, we call that an allegory. Allegories tend to be religious or moral in nature because a religious text might use storytelling to convey not merely an idea but a hard-coded moral lesson. (Meaning, essentially, an allegory is a fancy lecture. I don’t think lectures make for very good storytelling, but your mileage may vary.)

  But to a lesser degree, assuming we don’t want our stories to become belligerent soapbox preach sessions, we can lightly and loosely invoke theme through symbols and motifs. We show the audience signposts: an image, a sound, a phrase, an action. These are whispers through the cracks—this is us giving hints of what hides behind the walls of the narrative architecture. These abstractions work at a subliminal level because stories are part of a larger artistic frequency: There’s the song you hear, and then there’s the subversive, subliminal harmony buried underneath. You can’t hear it outright. You can’t properly identify it. And that is exactly as it should be.

  Metaphor is a powerful communicator of both small comparisons and big ideas. We can use motif and symbol to bridge the words and actions happening on the page (which take the form of characters building the plot) to our ideas and arguments and identities. And, in that way, they don’t just bridge elements of the story to the ideas behind the story—

  They bridge the audience to the storyteller.

  They connect my story with your story.

  That’s why theme and metaphor are such powerful abstractions. And why this goes back to what I talked about in the interlude on page 154: A story doesn’t merely entertain. A great story informs and challenges. It makes us think, and it makes us feel.

  And part of how it does that is by connecting the teller to the told through the magical wonderful weirdness of theme. It cracks open my chest and shows you my heart. Maybe only for a moment. Maybe only through the smeared lens of metaphor and motif. But it’s there.

  THE INTERPLAY BETWEEN THEME AND MOOD

  Mood is not theme. Theme is not mood.

  Theme is that message whispered through the heating vents. It’s the seed of the idea that grew into the tree that became the story.

  Mood is how the story feels—or, rather, how it makes the audience feel. Mood can shift scene by scene, and, in fact, it should: We want to establish a rhythm with mood just as we do in the rest of the narrative. A single gray, grief-stricken expanse of narrative is dull and listless. It’s like a song without chord changes. At the same time, neither can mood whip wildly about: We can’t go from BLEAK DESPAIR to GIDDY BLISS to GROTESQUE OPPRESSION to CARELESS LUST from scene to scene, or we’ll experience a kind of narrative whiplash.

  And here is where mood and theme can interplay, should you choose to let them: Theme can be a guide for mood. What I mean is that if you identify a potential theme, that theme can come baked in with moods that are appropriate to it. A theme about inequality should likely at least ping an oppressive or bleak mood from time to time, because inequality is rarely going to be a happy topic. A theme about the unconquerable nature of love—well, it would be strange if that theme did not include some positive and romantic expressions of mood, right? Theme can provide a through-line for how you invoke mood and gently shift the tone from one scene to another.

  1 Like, say, “willy-nilly.”

  2 THE NARRATIVE ANUS is my next writing book. Pre-order now!

  3 Like my buttocks, described on page 100.

  4 Or whatever social media platform is ascendant when you read this: Circleface, Friendzone, Ticklr, etc.

  5 In simple, dumb monkey terms, The Grand Unified Theory (GUT) suggests that all the physical forces (gravity, electromagnetism, etc.) are all part of one unified force. In this context, I’m saying that the story as a whole is not separate from theme, but rather, unified with it.

  6 That sounds dirty, and I apologize.

  7 Okay, just for clarity’s sake, your theme probably isn’t a moose.

  8 If I were ever to make electronic music, I’d form a DJ duo called SYMBOL & MOTIF, and I would be both the titular Symbol and Motif. One would be the real me, the other would be CGI me, and we’d wear fishbowls and TVs on our heads as we DJ’ed the end of the world. You can buy my album next year.

  9 Fucking Dave.

  Interlude

  THE LAST RULE

  Here it is, the corker, the game ball, the season ender. It’s the last rule of the book, and it’s a rule that’s less about how to construct stories and more about why we tell stories in the first damn place.

  Stories matter.

  That’s it. That’s the rule. It’s law, it’s holy writ. It’s undeniable.

  Stories make the world go around.

  Stories can get a politician elected—or bury him after he’s in office. Stories sell us products, they convince us of lies or share with us vital truths. Narrative is all around us. The entire Internet is made up of narrative after narrative—some of it nonfiction, some of it fiction (and, ahem, some of it is fiction parading around as nonfiction the same way a wolf might shimmy his ass into a set of sheep’s clothing).

  We tell stories about our families and our loved ones, and we share tales of what happened at work and at school. When we have a bad day, we turn to movies, books, games, plays, and comics. And some of those movies, books, games, plays, and comics will outlive us, and may even outlast our civilization when it’s gone and replaced with the next set of people (or sentient cyborg dinosaurs). Some stories come out in their time but speak to us timelessly—The Handmaid’s Tale or Casablanca or the canon of Shakespeare. Some stories are decidedly products of their time, and we use them to understand the period from whence they came.

  Stories teach us.

  They persuade us.

  They dissuade us.

  Stories are the backbone of mythology, religion, history, sociology, literature. Culture as a whole is composed of countless threads of narrative.

  This thing we do, it has meaning. But it doesn’t always feel that way. When you sit down, and you’re about to put a pen to paper to write that next book or short story or script, or whatever it will end up being, you’re going to experience that twinge called “impostor syndrome.” We all feel it. I get it even still, even after writing over a dozen books and some comics and some film and TV scripts. I get that feeling of being an impostor. I feel like I don’t belong, as if I’m secretly a stowaway on a boat that belongs to other, greater people.

  And that feeling and fear of being an impostor is just the gateway: I start to worry, what’s the point? Who’s reading? Who’s listening? And somewhere in the back of my brain, I’ll hear the echo of that oft-repeated nonsense phrase—“There are no original stories, stories, stories”—and I’ll clench up even further. My fingers will pause. My mouth goes dry. I’ll feel nervous and anxious and woefully unsure of myself and the mission I’ve given myself. It happens every damn time.

  And every damn time, it’s bullshit.

  Storytelling is not special. I don’t mean that as an insult. I mean that storytelling is not some precious, unique thing. The role of storyteller is not a guarded, privileged soapbox. You don’t get an official podium with a sanctioned seal of approval. It’s not just for them. It’s for all of us.

  Storytelling is a shared tradition. We all get to pass around the talking stick and the magic witch’s eye. It’s not just for the priests or the chosen few. Telling stories is a powerful common denominator. And listening to stories is as vital and as common as breathing. We are bound together by our stories. We share traits and tales through those narratives—and we also help to spread empathy and compassion and critical thinking through them. Stories are the ripples that carry water from my shore to yours, and yours back to
mine. They are a form of echolocation, cultural and emotional and sociological. Narrative forms our shared tapestry. You at one end, me at another, and all the threads in between connecting us.

  Don’t be afraid. You can’t be an imposter because storytelling isn’t for the few. It’s for the many. Stories are for everyone.

  Now, here’s the last bit of note.

  I say that every time I go to sit down and write a story, I feel that fear. I feel blocked, hesitant, guarded. That’s true now, and I figure it’ll be true every day after today until I am kicking up daisies.

  But here’s what’s also true—

  The moment I begin to tell the story, that all goes away.

  It just melts. That’s not to say the story I’m telling always comes easy—the first draft can sometimes feel like I’m punching my way through a wall of mud—but the fear? The fear goes. And I start to feel it. I start to get it. I connect with something larger than myself, as if there’s an unseen river beneath us, a river of song and story into which I can dip my nasty little toes and wiggle them around. It’s like any act of stepping into water. At first you think, oh shit, it’s going to be cold, so cold, I don’t want to do this, but then you ease in, and the shock passes quickly. And the water is warm. And it’s welcoming. And now you’re a part of it.

  Push past the fear, is what I’m saying to you. Recognize that stories matter and it is your right and your common human heritage to take part.

  Do the work. Tell the tale. To hell with doubt.

  Stories matter. They are ours. They are yours.

  Now go tell a damn fine story, willya?

  Epilogue

  AH, HELL, ONE LAST STORY

  Growing up, we had all kinds of animals. When I was a wee tot, we had the standard array: chickens, cattle, pigs, a couple goats. My family was a farming family, and my grandfather—who I never met—owned and operated a huge farm in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and my father took that farm on when my grandfather passed, but not in a full-time capacity. By the time I was maybe five years old, most of the animals were sold off, and we were left with a rotating carousel of farm dogs and cats.1