What makes a story? Easy. Once upon a time: A bunch of stuff happens. The end. Anyone can tell that story. “Hey, I was driving down the road and saw this guy spin out on the ice and crash into the ditch along Route 5. It was crazy.” But what makes a story good? I used to think it was strong character motivation. Don't people say, "Character is King"? If you knew what a character wanted and why they wanted it, it would make the things that happen more interesting and entertaining. “That wasn’t just any guy. That was my roommate, Jeff! He’s always late for work and his boss told him if he’s late one more time, he’s fired.” Suddenly the story has character depth. We don’t just know what happened, we know the character at the center of it (a little) and we know what he wants. He wants to save his job so bad that he gets into an accident racing to work. We understand it, but it’s not exactly compelling. It’s still just basically informational.
So what makes a story compelling? If that character doesn’t just have one motive, but two, and the two motives are at war with each other in the story. That should do it, right? “Jeff and I were up all night playing Mario-Kart and drinking Captain’n-Cokes. His favorite. This morning I heard him wake up in a panic and rush out the door. Classic Jeff.” Now we see that Jeff’s motivation to get to work was overwhelmed by his motivation to participate in his favorite hobbies. He wanted one thing, but he wanted something else more. Isn’t that supposed to make it compelling? Sometimes it still isn’t. But why isn’t it? Like many writers, I’ve tried very hard to figure out what would make it more compelling. Like an amateur, I turn to all the things I should be doing anyway, but none of which can solve this problem on their own. Setting the scene: “We had everyone over to Jeff’s basement for Billie’s twenty-second birthday. Sarah, Brad, Amber and Tina all came over. The place was decorated with these random magazine clippings of celebrities and Tina wrote these ridiculous captions.” Details and ambiance: “Jeff put on his Rush albums and cranked the record player with those vintage speakers his dad gave him. Everyone was singing. Amber made those little brownies with the walnuts and caramel. She brought ‘em down to cool and the whole basement smelled like fresh baking.” Backstory: “Jeff’s been trying to hook up with Billie for like a year. Remember how he tried to take her to that Tarantino movie and he invited everyone but told us all to cancel at the last minute so he could take her alone?” Even more layers of motivation for even more characters: “Amber thought if he hosted a big party for Billie’s birthday, she’d have to come over. She said Billie thinks he’s kinda boring so the plan was for him to just cut loose and have fun. Man, that Amber loves to play matchmaker. Keep her away from me.” All of these things add to the story, but it’s still just a bunch of stuff that happens. There is no limit to how deeply you can develop the setting, the characters, the details, and everyone’s motives but still end up with a story that feels like it fizzles. Feels like it’s pretty good in a polite kind of way. Feels like you really got something here, but I just can’t put my finger on what it’s missing. If you have a good imagination and your brain likes to fill in the gaps, you might even think this is good enough. The necessary components are all there, aren’t they? That means it must just be too subtle for most readers. The themes are too sublime to draw attention to themselves in any grossly overt way. This isn’t genre fiction, this is art, it should reward the reader who wrestles with it. Maybe. If you are a famous author acclaimed by famous New York reviewers, then maybe that is possible. But even then, I’d be willing to bet if your work has garnered success with either reviewers or mass audiences, no matter what they point to as the reason, it is because you have one thing that works at its core like a black hole at the center of a galaxy. All the rest might be sparkly and beautiful, but it’s just window dressing to this one thing: That thing is Dramatic Choice. And a story doesn’t work without it. And all those other things that readers love to love are really just tools to set up, develop, enhance and enrich the dramatic choice that makes the story thematically compelling and emotionally relatable. And this is what it looks like: “We were all having a good time playing Mario-Kart but it was getting kinda late. Billie yawned a few times and I saw Jeff getting worried like she was bored or something. He poured a Captain’n-Coke and yelled out right next to her, ‘Loser has to drink!’ It just so happened to be my turn and it just so happened to be my best map, Yoshi Island. I pointed out the time and asked him, ‘Jeff, you sure want to do this? You gotta work tomorrow.’ His eyes cleared up for just a second and I swear there was a flash of sobriety there. But Billie made a big scream and got all excited. I guess she loves drinking games. So Jeff said he didn’t care what map it was, he’d play me on Yoshi Island until he won. Billie gave him an enthusiastic slap on the back and said something dorky like, ‘Go get him, Tiger!’ And then what could I do? It was on. We must have played Yoshi Island a hundred times. Even after everyone left. Even after Billie left, Jeff was drunk and wouldn’t give up. When he went to the bathroom for the fifth time, I just collapsed and passed out on the Lay-Z-Boy. By the time I woke up, he was already scrambling out the door. I took one look at the snow and went back to sleep.” We see now what makes this story compelling is Jeff’s decision at a pivotal moment. His decision to party, play Mario-Kart, try to impress Billie and get drunk along the way is only as powerful as his simultaneous decision to ignore his boss’s threats about being on time. We feel the tension leading up to it, wondering what he will decide. We realize everything we learned about his job, about Billie and this party, all of it turned out to be exactly the kind of information that helps inform why the decision is so pivotal for Jeff. That choice would not be nearly so satisfying if it didn’t have all those things to prop it up and lay the groundwork. But the choice does not serve the details. The choice does not serve the character motives. The choice does not serve the backstory. Everything serves the choice, and everything that doesn’t serve the choice is frankly hollow, no matter how fun or flashy it may be. Everything works together, whether the reader is conscious of it or not, to make that choice seem satisfying to the reader. They will either breathe a sigh of relief at the intensity. Cry at the tragedy. Laugh at the humor. Roll their eyes at the inevitability. Or ponder at the philosophy or that key choice. It's the moment the lovers kiss, the hero makes a sacrifice, the boy becomes a man, or the coward faces his fear. Everything in your story is set dressing for that choice. Everything in your story is context for that choice. Everything in your story is foreshadowing for that choice. And if you have nothing else but that dramatic choice, then you will still have a dramatic story. A short one. A simple one, maybe. But nonetheless a real story. People are drawn not just to stories but stories about how a person chose something over something else. Why a person chose to do one thing when they could have or should have chosen another. Why did they say yes? Why didn’t they say no? When you get to that decision, whether romantic, comedic, or tragic, to watch that decision play out after every last seemingly random detail and plot development and digression turns out to have all been secretly conspiring together toward this singular decisive climax, there is nothing more emotionally satisfying and memorable for the reader. From the first sentence to the last, everything either builds up or spins out of a singular dramatic choice. And everything else is fodder for the cutting room floor. Now wait a minute… Did I say singular? For the overarching big-picture plot of a story, yes, there is almost always only a single key climactic dramatic choice that signals the culmination of Act III and satisfies the premise of Acts I and II, invariably resulting in the denouement. But sometimes a story is made of many stories. Sometimes it contains within it the pieces of all kinds of other stories which play against each other and contribute in various direct and indirect ways, to the bigger broader story. In that case, I suppose each story also has a choice of its own. Perhaps many choices. But that, as they say is a whole ‘nother story for a whole ‘nother blog post... See you again in the Future! -C
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