Deus Ex Blog

While I am not the best writer in the world (not even in the top million probably) I do read a lot, and that has given me a few insights into how to adequately tell a story and how to utterly fail at writing a story. In my experience the best stories all have the following characteristics.

1) They Have Interesting Characters!

All stories are about characters, be they paragons of virtue, anti-heroes, or anthropomorphic desk furniture. To be interesting, characters need to have both positive traits and flaws. In a tragedy, the flaws overpower the good traits, in comedy the positive traits win out. To keep our interest, characters need to grow. This could be positive growth or negative growth, but if your characters stop growing in some manner, your story has ended. You will need to start a new story with characters that have some growing to do.

(If you are planning on doing an epic storyline or one that is serialized over several years, take your time with growth and don’t, whatever you do, get rid of your character’s actually endearing flaws.)

1a) The Characters Stay in Character!

To be believable, characters need to be true to themselves. This particular bit of Disney BS not withstanding, characters need to stay consistent, both within themselves and with their goals. If a character does something against type or counter to their own interests, there needs to be a damn good reason. They need to be pushed to the brink before they break like that. Acting out of character should never, ever be done flippantly. Any acting out of character should be punished with a dramatic consequence, one that fits the crime. (The innocent, naive character killing someone for instance should result in vomiting, and visible revulsion over what they’ve done, etc.)

1b) The Characters Have Goals!

You don’t have to come out and tell us what the goal is, but every character you write needs to have a clear goal, unless the lack of a goal is a character’s flaw. Sometimes the goal is clear (Frodo needs to destroy the ring) and sometimes it could be more mute (someone just wants to be happy but doesn’t know what will really make them happy.) If the characters are just stumbling around having things happen to them, it ceases to be interesting. Working towards something is important. It’s a much more satisfying story if characters overcome all sorts of difficulties to reach their goal (comedy), or come very close to their goal only to lose it due to their fatal flaw (tragedy.) Characters can complete goals, change goals, and gain new ones, but they must not be without a goal for long.

1c) The Characters Run Into Unique Challenges!

Whether it’s a horrendous villain or just the forces of nature, characters need to be challenged. The universe needs to pit itself against these character’s strengths and chip away at their weaknesses. The challenge should be equal to the character in question. For this reason, do not let your characters get too powerful, especially not suddenly. If your character gets too powerful, you will need something equally powerful to make a challenge. (Dragonball Z for instance, after a while you run out of “Universe’s strongest baddie” to throw at Goku and it gets ridiculous that someone of equal stature was hiding out somewhere, over and over again. Lord of the Rings does a much better job of this by keeping its characters weak the entire time in comparison to their surroundings. By the end, the hobbits totally kick ass, but no one really notices until they get back home to the Shire.)

2) They Keep Things Moving!

Tension, or pacing, allows the reader to maintain interest in the characters and be worried about them and their well-being. If you lose tension, you lose the story and the reader’s interest and it is utterly impossible to get them back again without a major event (and even that has a huge chance to backfire.) By starting with characters that are interesting, relatable and above all likable, you can keep tension going by having bad things happen to them, or threaten them and their goals.

2a) They Keep the Tension High!

If there’s nothing particular going on, and plot furtherance is failing to happen for long enough, the readers will get bored and wander off. If a character is traveling to a distant city, they need to be attacked by bandits or something. Otherwise, skip that part and pick up back where the action is. We, the readers, are not really interested in the boring details behind things. (Darth Vader is a great villain until you watch the prequel trilogy and find out he’s a whiny bitch. We would have been better off not knowing that.) We don’t really need to know the details, either it’s helping the character reach his goal or it’s hindering. Anything not in those two categories should be on the cutting-room floor. (With the possible exception of things that give the character a goal or a new goal.) This is after all a story about [character] working towards [goal]. If something random happens that eventually leads to the goal being furthered, that is fine but watch the content to bullshit ratio. (If you have an entire season of filler and at the end throw in an “Oh, there’s the goal!” you will just piss off your readers. I’m looking at you season 4 of Inu Yasha.)

2b) Their Character Growth is Tied to the Plot Advancement

As your characters grow, their goals will also grow. Keep in mind that you cannot go backwards here without starting over. If your character has a huge goal met early on, the rest of the story will either need a much bigger goal or it will feel anti-climactic.

Say you have a love story wherein, at the start, your slacker character wants only to be happy (weak goal.) He sees a girl, and thinks that being with her will make him happy (new, more distinct goal.) He has to stop being lazy and pursue this girl (positive growth.) After several mishaps and false-starts, she agrees to go out with him (goal met.) He finds out she has some flaws of her own that make it difficult for him to stay with her (challenge.) He sticks it out and realizes that, while he may not be as happy with her as he had imagined, he’s way better off with her than he was before (more positive growth.) This is about the most simple story imaginable, but it works because challenges grow in proportion to character growth in an upward motion. By the time our protagonist has to meet his love interest’s zany parents he will have grown enough to meet the challenge instead of just saying it isn’t worth it and giving up as he would have at the beginning of the story.

If on the other hand, say your character, apprentice mage Banalkin Earthjumper, finds a mysterious artifact in the first chapter that grants him super strength, immortality, and indestructibility. Banalkin hasn’t grown at all, he just got lucky and is now overpowered. Luck should never, ever be the deciding factor of anything. (Unless you’re doing farce.) Characters need to meet challenges, not luck their way out of them or be rescued at the last moment by the Deus Ex Machina of the day. You’re allowed one coincidence per story and the best place for it is at the very beginning to set your character off on the path to goal. If you’re past the mid-point of your story, coincidence should not appear in your work. (If you’re doing epic serialization, coincidence should never affect the plot. Even if you don’t believe in God yourself, in a story EVERYTHING happens for a reason. That reason is character growth leading them closer to their goal.)

2c) They End!

The #1 issue serialized epics have is that they fail to end, even after they have ceased to be interesting. This does not mean that the series needs to end, but the individual story needs to. A story is a character in pursuit of a goal. There’s only so much yanking the football away at the last second an audience can take before they wise up and walk out. A character eventually needs to reach his goal. It can take them a while and depending on the skill of the writer, it could take a very long time. At the point the goal is reached, end the story. You can switch to a different character’s story for a while until the original character has a worthy new goal to pick up and run with.

The natural ups and downs of story arcs means that characters need time to settle before you can start out on a new adventure. If you string too many stories together, one after the other, it gets tiresome. Have a starting point, a stopping point, and then a period of time before the next starting point. It can be as simple as “Two weeks later” or as much as “Ten years later…” Let’s face it, interesting stories are about interesting events and how often do interesting events happen? Not terribly often, most of the time daily drudgery happens and it stretches credulity that these characters would have interesting things happen to them on a daily or weekly basis (unless they are a believable cause of interesting things.) Skip past that stuff, but make sure the audience knows it happened so they can reset their internal tension-counters.

2d) A brief note on sex and marriage

Sexual tension is about the strongest tension there is. Don’t give it up lightly, not because you’re prudish but because once a couple starts having sex, that’s pretty much it for the story’s sexual tension. (Depending on the type of story you’re telling, and what other tensions are involved, it’s possible to navigate these issues very successfully and tell wonderful stories post-sex, but for the epic level, building to a climax type stories, I’d recommend saving it for the end of the story.)

Likewise there is a reason marriage is usually the end-point of stories. It’s not that interesting things can’t happen after marriage, but marriage eases a lot of tensions (in a good way for the people involved, not so much for anyone watching.) Also, be wary of weddings. Most weddings in real life last about 20 minutes and then there is a reception that the people attending can interact with. There is nothing more boring than watching the lead-up to a wedding, and we’re all sick of the last-minute crisis endangers wedding bit. It’s been done to death. If you’re characters are getting married prior to the end of the story, do yourself and your audience a favor and gloss over it. If it’s more than a page, two minutes of film, or a week’s worth of web-comic, it’s too long. Post wedding is a good time to pull a “Ten years later” and pick up with the perils of parenting or some other event that has tension to it. You can fill in any interesting bits that happened in the interim via flashback.

There are notable exceptions to all these rules of course, but they’re done by writers far better than I, in ways that ameliorate the problems caused by breaking them.