There’s one simple metric to apply to all of your storytelling questions that will solve the bulk of your story-writing problems:
Do you have a character, who cares about other characters, facing a goal or a challenge that they will do anything to achieve?
If you have that, everything else is gonna work out.
I’m working on a project with a guy I met through Gary Vaynerchuk. I had the privilege of being on Tea with Gary Vee, and this particular artist reached out to me after the show with some ideas. We talked and hit it off, and now we’re developing a storytelling video game app—an animated “choose your own adventure” style text-based game. We’re basing the story off my novel Sick, which is already a known property; this is something I won awards for, so I know it’s a solid story.
But I can’t just cut and paste chapters into this game. It’s being written in such a way that there are multiple choices, not just the one ending that happens in the novel. I’ve worked on a “choose your own adventure” video game before, but in that game, no matter what choices you made, you’d still end up at the same ending. (It was based on a romance novel, and you do not mess with romance novel endings, lemme tell ya!)
This project based on Sick will have multiple possible endings and multiple possible storylines. (And, unlike the romance novel gig, we’re not going to charge people to get the good stuff.) You can play multiple times with different characters.
But as I’m working on this game, I find myself getting nervous. This is a brand new way of telling a story for me. I have to keep track of all the different characters and choices, how the story branches out. I’m starting to panic: what if this is way beyond my caliber? I’ve gotten myself into something I don’t think I’ll be able to do, because right now, in terms of marketing, we’re not doing anything new technologically. We’re not introducing a new app or a new way to play games. We’re banking on his artwork and my story. So I’ve been sitting here trying to figure out, “Oh my God, am I in over my head? What if I don’t know what I’m doing? What if I suck?” All the usual things.
When those questions hit it’s time to back to the basics.
No matter the platform, no matter the format, no matter the genre, every single story is going to come down to the same basic elements in the same basic structure.
Do you have a character who cares about other characters, and does she have a goal or a challenge that she will stop at nothing to obtain?
That’s it. If you have those two things, your story is really off to a great start.
Sometimes, what’s at stake is literally life or death, whether that’s the life and death of one person or an entire planet. But “life and death” still exists when we’re talking about asking a girl to prom, or confronting one’s own metaphorical demons. Those feel like life and death in the context of the setting and the story.
One of the tricks I’ve started using, and I’ll do the same thing with this game, is at the top of every chapter, I write myself a little note. That little note says:
“I’ll die if I don’t…”
That’s it. That’s just a little reminder that every single chapter, my character needs to want something so badly that she will (feel like she’ll) die if she doesn’t get it.
In my novel Zero, all she wants from page one is to go to her favorite art school. That’s the thing that she wants more than anything in the world. Other things happen on her quest to do that. She is aided and abetted by her new boyfriend Mike, and their developing relationship appears to be the story. But if you break down Zero piece by piece, you start to notice that Mike is not an obstacle, and not until like the last eighth of the book does he and their relationship become an obstacle. He’s actually, if you really want to get technical, a sidekick! He doesn’t offer obstacles for her to overcome until towards the very end, when Zero makes a choice that screws up the relationship. Instead, the backbone of the story is Zero’s relentless pursuit of the goal of getting to her favorite school.
She does not have to obtain that goal for the story to work. Our players won’t have to survive to feel like they’ve spent their time well interacting with the game.
One thing I learned from Todd McFarlane during my time working on Spawn was there’s always a “turn” in the scene. Every sequence or scene, something has to move forward. All of storytelling is about momentum, all the storytelling is about moving forward. It’s our job as writers and storytellers to excise anything that is not moving the story forward. Once you have that main goal, that “I’ll die if I don’t…” goal, it just becomes a question of moving that ball down the field.
That’s the thing I need to remind myself. Is it clear this character cares about something or someone, and are they determined to pursue a goal no matter what? If so, great; now do I show the character doing exactly that? If so, great.
Of course, there are many other techniques to talk about when it comes to developing your story, but if you’re stuck, if you’re not sure, if you’re worried, if you’re nervous…that simple question can answer a lot.
If you can’t answer that question, then there’s probably something else you need to work on. Without those things, the other tips and tricks and techniques and ideas about writing and storytelling don’t matter.