Damn Fine Story: Mastering the Tools of a Powerful Narrative

  Damn Fine

  STORY

  CHUCK WENDIG

  WritersDigest.com

  Cincinnati, Ohio

  DEDICATION

  To Margaret Atwood, for being kind enough to diminish her own literary legacy in recommending my foul-mouthed blog and unsavory writing advice to those who ask.

  And to my father, who is the blood and beating heart of not only a lot of the stories in this book, but also of why I tell stories in the first damn place.

  TABLE of CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  CAVEATS

  INTERLUDE The First Rule

  CHAPTER ONE Story Is, Story As

  INTERLUDE The Second Rule

  CHAPTER TWO Soylent Story: It's Made out of People

  INTERLUDE The Third Rule

  CHAPTER THREE Strange Arrangements: Or, How Your Narrative Garden Grows

  INTERLUDE The Fourth Rule

  CHAPTER FOUR Fightin', Fornicatin', and Flappin' Them Gums: On Character Interactions

  INTERLUDE The Fifth Rule

  CHAPTER FIVE What Hides Behind the Walls: Understanding a Story's Theme

  INTERLUDE The Last Rule

  EPILOGUE Ah, Hell, One Last Story

  APPENDIX 50 Storytelling Tips

  INTRODUCTION

  My father never read a book. At least, I never saw him read one. He had books on his shelves, mostly books about cowboys and a lot of books about guns (price guides, catalogs, gunsmithing and reloading manuals). But that was it. I never saw him sit down and read a book the way most of you do—and the way I certainly do every day.

  He never read a book, but he always told stories.

  Every day, a story to tell. Some were new stories, like the one he told after he had played a prank on a co-worker: The guys at the plant always bought lottery tickets, right? Dreams of a bigger future and all that. One of the guys came to my dad and asked him to read off the winning lottery numbers to compare to his ticket. As he read those numbers off and they matched, one by one, the eyes of his co-worker (who we’ll call Dave) grew bigger and bigger with every number, until the time came when he realized he’d won. He’d won it all. The big prize, the epic payout. And already he started conspiring about who he’d not give money to, what he’d buy, what it would be like to be a man of great wealth. He’d tell them to screw this job to hell, and he’d walk right outta there, goddamnit—

  Of course, my father already knew Dave’s numbers, having snuck a look at the man’s tickets in advance, and was able to list those numbers off one by one—his poker face not giving any tells to the fact he was pranking the poor bastard. So, eventually, Dave realized what was happening and ha ha ha, poor Dave, who was no longer going to screw this job, who wouldn’t get the chance to cut out greedy relatives, who wouldn’t learn what it was to be a man of great wealth after all.

  Sometimes the stories were older stories.

  Like the time he caught fire.

  Or the other time, where he got into a huge riot-sized fight at a Phillies game.

  Or about the time he lost his pinky finger.

  Most of that finger was indeed gone, missing down below the middle knuckle. The stub had two black dots like a pair of little eyes looking up from its center. Way Dad told it was this: He was operating a log-splitter, and one log crashed into another log, with his pinky caught between them. It mashed his pinky to a red paste.

  Now, if I did that, I’d likely spend a lot of time rolling around on the ground and screaming, but my father—stoic as a carpentry nail—idolized John Wayne, so he just saddled himself up into his pickup and drove off to the hospital.

  As the story goes, he went into the hospital and saw the doctor, and the doctor said, “That finger has to go.” No saving it. It wasn’t Play-Doh—you couldn’t sculpt it into something finger-shaped and call it a day. (Maybe nowadays you could, but this was in the 1970s.) My father, notoriously thrifty, wanted to know the cost of said finger-removal service. The doctor told him, and he found that price unacceptable. He was a practiced haggler, but even he knew you couldn’t really haggle with the hospital.

  “Hold on,” he told the doc. Then he walked out of the room, out of the hospital, and to his truck. He pulled out a toolbox from the back of the truck, and from that toolbox he procured a pair of bolt cutters.

  And then he cut his own pinky off.1

  After that, he walked back into the hospital and had them do the rest—bandaging, cauterizing, whatever. He paid a lesser bill, having done the “hard work” for them. Then he went home and got back to work.

  This is merely a sampling of his stories. Every day, he told some kind of story just like we all do. He might tell us what happened on the way home from work; something his own father did; that time he jumped a creek bed in a snowmobile with my mother riding on the back, and they flipped and somehow didn’t get a scratch on them; that time he got lost in the Colorado wilderness while hunting an elk. On and on, story after story.

  And they were riveting.

  He knew the cadence of storytelling. He had a feel for hooking you with the promise of something interesting, and then there was always a little twist, a little turn. He presented the tales just right, just so, like the perfect bowl of porridge in the bear cottage. He didn’t keep you waiting too long, but he didn’t blurt it all out, either. My father had a natural sense of how narratives rise and fall, and how to keep his audience interested.

  Dad knew how to tell a damn fine story.

  · · · · ·

  This is not a book of writing advice.

  It’s not here to help make you a better writer. Rather, it’s here to help you become a better storyteller.

  Nothing wrong with writing advice. It is necessary to know where the comma goes, and how sentence construction works to create pace and rhythm, and how to know the rules in order to break them and to break the rules in order to know why we needed them in the first damn place. Writing is a vital, elegant mechanism—but it’s not the reason we do what we do, or at least not most of us. Writing isn’t just for the pretty words, or for the well-constructed sentences, or for the way the poetry of it looks in our mind’s eye and sounds in our mind’s ear.2 Writing is a means to an end.

  Writing is a delivery system.

  And what it delivers is, in part, stories. Writing can deliver truth and lies, it can deliver ideas, it can transmit dreams and nightmares, but, for our purposes, for the creation of fiction, it conveys all these things through story. Writing is a craft-driven procedure with rules, though certainly it has a lot of flexibility built in.

  Storytelling is a whole different animal and demands different butchery. It’s art as much as craft. It’s intuition more than law. Writing is a road we build, but storytelling is a river—it’s bendy and strange and hard to predict. It’s natural, too, part of our psychic and social landscape. It’s why we sometimes feel like our stories and the characters in those stories are not precisely in our control, like we are no more than an antenna receiving narrative signals from some funky tale-spinning trickster god out there in the galaxy. We speak of inspiration and muses like they’re exterior forces and we’re just their puppets. The truth is far more crass and crafty, I find: If you wait for inspiration to show up, you’ll never get the work done. Sometimes you just have to start telling the story. The act of writing, of telling the tale, is also the act of laying traps. And it is in these traps that we capture our muses. In other words, we capture them, they don’t capture us.

  I’ve had the good fortune in my career to have written across a variety of media. I’ve written a bunch of books,
some comics, a handful of film and TV scripts (including a short film that premiered at Sundance and a digital narrative called Collapsus). Each of these formats presents story in its own persnickety way. Film has its half-bullshit, half-not-bullshit three-act structure. TV has multiple acts based on the number of commercial breaks punctuating the tale, and ending those acts is a practice of fish-hooking the viewer so they stay through, and return after, the commercial break. A novel is an unruly, brutish beast—big as a brick and often quite stubborn in its independence. The comic book format is what would happen if a TV show and a novel had an ink-stained, four-color baby: It offers the visual and episodic dimension of a television show, but the internal, character-driven dimension of a novel. I’ve even written games, which is often about empowering players to act as proxy protagonists, telling their own stories using the LEGO bricks chosen for the experience.

  Each format is different. One is not easily made into the other. You can’t just cram a film into a comic book (trust me, I’ve tried, and it’s harder than passing a cantaloupe through your urethra). A novel is often too sprawling for a film, and a short story is probably too short.

  And yet, each format has its similarities, too. The more you work across the spectrum of story modes, the more you see these similarities emerge, like languages that all come from a single “ur-source.”3 Because stories are stories. Stories have bones that they share, even if over time they evolve new flappy limbs and orifices and flesh nubbins. Stories have a sense of shared architecture—okay, sure, a mansion is not a houseboat, and a houseboat is not a rancher, and a rancher is not a Cape Cod, but each structure serves similar needs. You still get your bedrooms and your kitchens. You still have water and electricity, pipes and conduits. You still have corners, windows, doors. Just like story, you may have different shapes, different expressions, but you still get your corners and windows and doors.

  Our goal here is to find those common corners and those shared windows and doors. The hope is to learn how to not just tell a story, but how to tell a damn fine one.

  Put differently, and to reiterate what I said at the fore:

  My father never read books. He certainly never wrote one.

  But he could tell a damn fine story.

  And you can, too.

  1 (He’d often torment children with the pinky finger. He’d hold up one of his still-complete fingers and say “pull my finger,” except instead of ripping a beefy fart, he’d quickly switch to the pinky finger and scream, making the children think they had, in fact, pulled off half of his finger.)

  2 Is that a thing? The mind’s ear? It is now, so shut up.

  3 An ur-source is based on the Germanic prefix ur, meaning original, or first. So, this refers to an ultimate, originating source.

  CAVEATS

  Before we begin, some things I ask you to understand.

  First point:

  Though this is not precisely a book of writing advice, it is a book about the art and the craft of storytelling.

  It isn’t about having answers. Because I don’t have the answers. This isn’t science. This isn’t math. You can’t plug a bunch of narrative components into an equation and spit out a perfect story. The truth is, most of what I’m telling you here is wildly imperfect. It’s guesswork. It’s lies layered with horseshit layered with I-don’t-know-what-I’m-talking-about. You don’t have the answers, either.

  Now, writing is beholden to very specific rules, and though these rules are very flexible, they are also teachable. The comma goes here. The sentence ends there.

  Storytelling is far more … wiggly.

  The goal of this book is not to provide you with answers but, rather, to force you to consider the questions. I want you to ask about your own work and the stories you’ve read/watched/played. I want to challenge you with ideas, old and new. Some of this book will help you. Other parts will be worthless to you. Discard what you find distasteful, and hold the rest to your chest like a beloved child. Do whatever works. But just know that this is not a hard and fast process. None of this is about answers carved in stone.1

  Second point:

  This book makes use of many well-known stories as references; for the most part, I use movies, and occasionally comics and books. The reason I’m using Very Popular Pop Media as my touchstone is because, well, we need a touchstone. I can’t go spouting off about My Favorite Book because maybe you haven’t read it. And even if you have, those ten other people over there have not. You are far likelier to have seen Die Hard or The Empire Strikes Back than to have read some old, out-of-print horror novel, for instance, and so Very Popular Pop Media tends to be more dominant in terms of the references I offer.

  … Also, that means I spoil them more than a little.

  So, enter with wary eyes! I won’t be spoiling anything new—it’s not like I’ll be ruining last week’s episode of That Show You Love or Star Wars: Episode XVI2 or whatever.

  Stay frosty. Ever vigilant. For thar be spoilers in these here waters.

  Third and final point:

  I use bad language.

  On my blog—cough, cough, terribleminds.com—it’s worse. But even so, this is a book that contains adult language. I mean, it’s not the Kama Sutra or anything, but it occasionally gets a wee little bit naughty.

  You are forewarned. The strong spice of vulgarity is present—some have a taste for it; others do not.

  Let us begin.

  1 Real talk time? A lot of writing, storytelling, and even publishing advice is bullshit—but never forget, bullshit fertilizes. Ideas have value to those who can use them. So even if I just make you challenge or reconsider your processes without adopting the specific pieces of advice, hey, I’d call that a win.

  2 Snoke is Rey’s mother, and Rey is Snoke’s father. And Chewbacca is really just three Ewoks stacked on top of each other.

  Interlude

  THE FIRST RULE

  The first rule of Story Club is that we don’t talk about Story Club.

  That doesn’t sound right.

  *checks notes*

  Ah! That’s Fight Club. Sorry, sorry. My bad.

  The first rule of Story Club is—

  Wait wait wait. First, let’s talk about that word, rule. Writing has rules, and storytelling has … nnnyeah, not-quite-rules. It has suggestions. It has theories. It has principles and precepts that ideally govern the flow of narrative, even as narrative bends like a snake away from such defined ideas. Stories have very few hard-and-fast rules of note, though. One suspects there must exist a beginning, a middle, and an end, and certainly key components are expected to be in place: character, setting, and so forth.

  Beyond that, the laws of storytelling are not so much chiseled in stone as they are drawn with a toothpick in a quivering slab of Jell-O. And yet, for the context of this book, we still need a baseline. We need some aspects of Story-with-a-capital-S that are at least commonly understood, if not indefatigably irrefutable.

  And so, throughout this book, you will find these interstitial interludes,1 and these interstices will attempt to establish that baseline with some hard-and-fast rules.2 Here, then, is the first rule:

  Storytelling is an act of interrupting the status quo.

  What I mean is this: A story’s very existence is predicated on its divergence, from some or all of the storyworld’s existing conditions and circumstances (“storyworld” being fancy writer talk for the overall setting and cast of characters, and the narrative rules that govern those people and that space).

  When we tell a story, it’s because something has changed. If we can imagine narrative as a line, then the story begins when something bends, twists, or sharply breaks that line. The life of Bruce Wayne is a straight line: A rich kid has a rich family and everything’s fine. And then the line is sliced in twain as a robber kills both of his parents—and it’s Batman who emerges from that grim fissure in Bruce Wayne’s timeline. Katniss in The Hunger Games series lives in a dystopian nightmare—but even still, one that is g
iven over to the status quo of that dystopian nightmare—and then one day it all changes when her sister is called to an annual televised event called The Hunger Games. Katniss responds to that turn of the status quo with her own twist and replaces her sister, thus deepening the divide between what was formerly “normal” and what is now irreversibly transformed.

  Die Hard immediately gives us a number of signals that demonstrate a shattered status quo. New York cop in sunny California? There’s one. On a plane flight when he hates flying? Another. Bringing a gun on a flight, earning him strange looks? The hits keep on coming. None of this is normal. All of these diverge from our expectation. But the big ones are yet to come—first, that it’s Christmas (holidays are themselves a kind of break in the status quo); second, that he is in the middle of a divorce (a divorce is a very literal break in the narrative line of till-death-do-us-part marriage); third, that oh yeah, he’s about to be trapped in a skyscraper attacked by a gang of terrorists-who-are-really-thieves.

  In Star Wars: A New Hope, it’s another bundle of status quo interruptions. A rude princess interrupts the lovely starship ride of two droids and sends them on a new mission. Throw in a sand-crusted farm boy who gets swept up in that mission and, for Luke, the hits to the status quo are literally part of his quest. He wants his life to change, and oh, change it does! He meets Old Wizard Ben. His Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru become Jawa barbecue. Then he meets a smuggler and his walking carpet co-pilot, and it’s time to leave home, and so on. Star Wars as a saga shows us how a story isn’t just about one status quo change, but about several. Often, just as a narrative grows comfortable and starts to settle into a straight line, it disrupts itself again. It’s like a plane flight you think is going smoothly, but every time you grow comfortable in your seat, here comes the turbulence yet again to keep you awake. The status quo keeps changing in the Star Wars story: Luke discovering who his father is, then who his sister is; Obi-Wan’s death, then Yoda’s; the destruction of not one but two Death Stars. It’s this latter point that shows us that the interruption or obliteration of the status quo is not necessarily for the protagonist alone: Darth Vader loses the precious Death Star plans and discovers he has a son and a daughter. And with these things, the Empire sees its paradigm change. In that saga, the whole of the galaxy is subject to the kind of narrative turbulence I’m talking about—