More Story-a-Day

Tiff wrote about our Story-a-Day challenge that we’ve been running through September. I find this great fun and useful for making the creative engine produce on command, which is always a handy muscle to work out.

Her article summarizes the process really well, and what makes it useful. I wanted to get into the nuts and bolts of understanding your story; because one thing brevity forces you to do is to get to the heart of the matter as fast as you can.

The idea behind a short pitch is to convey ‘why would you want to read/see this’ in a single paragraph. Imagine you’ve just read this amazing book or watched a great film, and you want to convince somebody else to see it so they can share your enjoyment. In real life, you tell them just enough to hook them, without spoiling the ending.

It’s the same with a brief pitch. What can you tell somebody about a story to get them to read it? (And to make you excited about writing it?)

Comment from Tiff: How do I get better at wording things like that though? You and Phil are so good at cutting right to the meat of things and I feel like I struggle a lot.

Reply: We did too at first.

You have to look for the conflict.

Who is the protagonist?

What do they want?

What stops them from getting it?

What are the stakes?

What do they risk to succeed?

Those five questions can fix most scenes and most stories.

Who: A story has to be about somebody - whether they are a robot or little green monster or the bullied kid at school, who the story happens to is usually the first key point. If possible, make this character sympathetic in one or two words. Is that hard? A little bit yeah, but it’s worth doing. I wrote this pitch a week or so ago:

Trollships - The trollships of Wistan have come in the night and attacked the town of Northwall in Aruthien. Ranger-in-training Def is caught alone and outside the walls! In peril of being taken or killed, can young Def survive the raid, or even inflict a defeat upon his foes?

Def is young, alone, and in training; suggesting to the audience that he’s not ready for this. We’ve all been thrown into the deep end of something in our lives, and been scared we couldn’t cut it. This helps the audience sympathize with our protagonist, and that little kernel of sympathy helps make them care about the rest of the story. We don’t actually care about stories, we care about the people in them.

What do they want: Def wants to survive and maybe do more than just that; so he has a clear primal drive (don’t get eaten) and an aspiration (maybe be a hero). A reader or audience can identify with both of those.

What stops them: I mean, hungry trolls in this case. This is the core conflict of any story; if your hero is a rabbit who wants a carrot, and in Act I he gets a carrot … I mean, we’re done, let’s all go home. Unless something stops the rabbit from getting a carrot, there is no story. The more he wants the carrot - the more he needs the carrot - the more we root for him.

What are the stakes: So, we have a character and what they want, and a conflict that stops them getting it. Stories without good stakes will feel flat and dull; If Marge wants her driver’s license and the only thing stopping her is the slow DMV worker and the consequence is she’ll have to wait a whole hour in line … that’s not super dramatic. In Trollships, the stakes are personal capture or death, and some implied stakes about Def’s home town; they’re obviously under threat. We can’t introduce his charming parents and the girl he has a crush on and his loyal dog in the single paragraph pitch, but we’re implying them a little bit, and they’d be fleshed out in a longer outline. To get back to our rabbit example: A rabbit who wants a carrot because he’s hungry we identify with, a rabbit who wants the last carrot in the world to feed his kids we can’t help but root for. Those are the stakes.

Risk: This is the last element in the mix, and one that’s occasionally missing in stories. The protagonist has to risk something for the stakes to have meaning. Their lives, their happiness, financial ruin, social rejection, they have to risk the loss of something that clearly matters to them. If the loss doesn’t hurt, devastate, or destroy them, it’s not really a risk. The bigger and more impactful the risk, the more the story affects us.

(Note: This is a problem with powerful characters who can’t easily be hurt and have little to lose. If your protagonist is perfect, invincible, and can’t be challenged by the antagonist for whatever reason, then the conflict holds no risk for them and therefore no drama for the reader. They won’t love your story because in the end the risk doesn’t matter, and they risk something in their lives every day to get what they want. You have to be vulnerable to defeat in order to deliver the taste of real victory)

So, young Def is risking his one and only life to capture or death in my little pitch above. I’d better make sure that the trolls are established early on as a credible threat, so that the reader feels his risk keenly and fears for his safety, or my story won’t resonate.

So that’s part of the fun of Story-a-Day - not just making yourself create something regularly, but making yourself create that thing in such a way that it stirs a reaction in yourself and your writing team. And speaking of reactions:

The other great value from doing Story-a-Day is reactions! Pitching lots of stories gets you lots of reactions, and it’s fascinating how different people react to different stories, or how those reactions can inform you about what an audience might fall in love with. But that’s another article!