Damn Fine Story: Mastering the Tools of a Powerful Narrative by Chuck Wendig

Author:Chuck Wendig [Wendig, Chuck]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: F+W Media
Published: 2017-10-17T04:00:00+00:00

THE MYSTERIOUS MISTS OF MYSTERY: OR, THE POWER OF QUESTION-DRIVEN PLOTTING

To repeat: Questions are the food that feeds the audience. Or, to be more precise: Answers feed the audience, and questions keep them hungry. And boy, howdy, do we want them hungry! We want them hungry enough that they keep coming back for another nibble—but we don’t want them so mad with hunger that they put the book down or turn the show off. Storytelling is an act of delivering satisfaction in the most meager doses possible. It’s a tightrope act—you don’t want them overfed, you don’t want them underfed. Always hungry, never starving.

Now, plotting a story—whether you outline it on paper or inside your own skull cave—is the act of moving the story forward, step by step and scene by scene. It is, loosely, the act of determining the sequence of events as it is revealed to the audience. Not just what happens when, but the arrangement of those events and how the revelations stack up. An outline becomes this is revealed, then that, then this other thing, now the end.

The problem is that, when we approach it this way, we run the risk of a disconnected, external plot taking over the narrative. Plot ends up being this giant, Godzilla-shaped, kaiju thing, grumpily staggering through the cityscape of your characters, stepping on everything and knocking shit down and carving its own cataclysmic swath through the careful architecture and urban planning you’ve created. We don’t want that. We don’t want event-driven plotting. We want character-driven plotting, where the agency of an individual character pushes and pulls against the agency of all the other characters. Then the story that’s told is not so much a clean line as it is a web—tug here, feel it there—a constant balancing and rebalancing.

How do we get there? How can we plot and scheme that out? How do we take a ground-level, organic approach to plotting?

First we take LSD and wander naked into the jungle to find and fight the Jaguar King and then from there—

Wait, whoa, that’s not right at all. I’m so sorry.24

No. What I mean to say is that we begin with questions.

Two kinds of overarching questions drive a story:

The questions that drive the characters.

The questions that drive the audience.

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