What is a Story?

Writers tell stories. And it’s not just those who write fiction. No matter whether you’re writing an article, a short story, or book, you are, in fact, telling a story. But you’d be surprised just how many writers, both novice and professional, really don’t know what a story is.

The classic rule is that a story should have a beginning, middle, and an end. Everything you write pretty much follows that format. But do these three things make whatever you’re writing a story?

Centuries ago, Aristotle noted in his book Poetics that while a story does have a beginning, a middle and an end, the beginning isn’t simply the first event in a series of three, but rather the emotionally engaging originating event. The middle is the natural and causally related consequence, and the end is the inevitable conclusive event. In other words, stories have an origination, an escalation of conflict, and a resolution.

Your story needs a vulnerable character, a setting that’s interwoven with the narrative, meaningful choices that determine the outcome of the story, and, most importantly, reader empathy. Basically, a story is a transformation—either the transformation of a character or sometimes of a situation. But above all, you must have some sort of conflict.

At its heart, a story is about a person or persons dealing with tension. Without obstacles and without a crisis event that initiates the action, you have no story. The secret to writing a story that draws readers in and keeps them there isn’t to make more things happen to a character but to create more tension as your story unfolds.

The beginning of a story must grab your readers’ attention, orient them to the setting, mood and tone of the story, and introduce them to your main character, whom they will grow to care about. If readers don’t care about your main character, they won’t care about your story.

So how do you introduce your main character to your readers? Begin by having your character perform some sort of action as your first scene opens. Remember, your story is part of a larger whole—a life that has been ongoing way before the story that your telling has even begun. So you must jump into the storyline as it passes you by. You want your readers to grab your main character and hold on tight. Your readers will be propelled through the story until they get to the point where they will let go—the point at which the story ends. But even though the story ends, life goes on.

The crisis that tips your character’s world upside down must be one that your protagonist cannot immediately solve. It’s an unavoidable, irrevocable challenge that sets the movement of the story into motion.

You can introduce this crisis into your story in one of two ways. Either you can begin your story by letting your character have what he or she desires most and then ripping it away, or by denying what he or she desires most, then taunting them with it. So, your character will either lose something vital and spend the rest of the story trying to regain it or see something desirable and spend the rest of the story trying to obtain it.

Two types of characters inhabit every story—a rigid one and a flexible one. The rigid one remains stubbornly unchanged while the flexible one will change as the story progresses. Your main character should always be the flexible one. The crisis in the story will forever your main character who will take whatever steps to try and solve the struggle.

Unfortunately, your protagonist will fail because he or she will always be a different person at the end of the story. If this doesn’t happen, your readers won’t be satisfied. By the time of your story’s climax, your main character will have made a discovery that changes his or her life forever.

Your character will make this discovery by being clever enough to piece together clues or will show extraordinary perseverance or tenacity to overcome the crisis.

Bringing Nonfiction Characters to Life

Writing good nonfiction characters requires discipline and honesty. You can’t just make them do what you want them to do. You have to use the facts to structure your character. You have to report life, not imitate it. To do this well, you have to be observant. For readers, characters consist of four things—what they look like, where they are, what they say, and what they do.

Essentially, creating a realistic portrait of a nonfiction character is all about costume, setting, dialogue, and movement or action. It’s also about “business,” as actors like to call it. Business is the little things a character does while speaking or between dialogue, like putting on a coat, drumming a finger, sipping a cup of coffee, turning on a light, or texting with a cell phone. Each detail adds to the reality of the character you’re trying to portray, and at the same time provides hints about their inner being. Of course, every person has an inner life that is vibrant and active and changeable, but as a nonfiction writer, you can only guess at that.

When portraying a real person, you must use an actor’s tools. Can you, by showing a character doing this or that, make your readers see him or her as you did? It’s a movie or video—light on the screen, shadows on a wall, your marks on the page. Out of all of this a human being emerges.

You have to make the reader watch your character’s eyes as he laughs and jokes. You might even write out some of what the character is saying. You might show him tapping his foot impatiently. Whatever you choose to show influences how the reader perceives that character.

The most important thing in portraying a nonfiction character is honesty and then transparency. You try to show what you saw but with the lens open on the complete experience of the person, with all his subtleties and nuances.

The problem and fun of it is that while being honest, the meaning of your portrait must also be transparent to the reader. So you have to sharpen and shape your observation, much as a painter does. It’s up to you to make choices about detail and angle from all the information that another person in his full humanity offer to you. You strive for clarity and brilliance, position and attitude.

Even a painter of realism is always making decisions about framing and point of view, about light and color, about reflection and detail. He or she chooses which moment to capture on the canvas. It’s much like point and shoot photography. In writing about real people, you want your subject to live on the page, and you want to capture him or her for the reader. To do this well, you have to get inside your character’s mind.

This is the way of method acting. An actor studies the exact person he or she is playing or someone similar. The actor wants a deep and detailed experience of the exterior of their character, as well as how the character thinks, in order to present the character realistically on stage or screen. The actor must feel the character. He or she must steal their character’s soul—if just for a short time. In some way you, the writer, must possess the people you’re writing about, and they must possess you back.

But what happens when you’re writing about another time period?. How do you get into your character’s mind if you can’t meet him or her in person? The answer is research. You must learn all you can about a person through your research. What you don’t know, you must fill in by studying someone similar. To know exactly how a ship’s captain might react just before a storm wrecks his ship, you must study the actions and reactions of other ship’s captains in similar situations. Chances are the actions and reactions will be somewhat the same. Remember, it’s what you choose to show the reader that will bring your character alive. 

When you’ve observed closely and written well about a person, you can feel them looking out at you from the portrait you’ve drawn while at the same time you and your readers are looking back in.

Storytelling is All About Tension

Tension resides at the heart of every story. Alongside it stands unmet desire. Every story is about a protagonist who wants something but cannot get it. As soon as he or she gets it, the story ends. And each time you resolve a problem, you escalate your plot.

Many beginning writers start out their story with a hook that grabs the reader. But then the writer must explain the hook before continuing on with the story. That’s the opposite of escalation—and the end of the forward movement of the story.

Tension drives a story forward. When you resolve tension, you lose the momentum of your story. Many books on writing short stories differentiate between “character-driven” and “plot-driven” stories. In fact, neither character nor plot drives a story forward—only unmet desire does.

You might include page after page of interesting information about your character, but that won’t move the story along, either. It just causes it to stall. Until readers know what your protagonist wants, they won’t know what your story is about and won’t be able to worry or care about whether or not the character’s desires are eventually met.

Plot is a series of related events that the protagonist experiences as he or she moves through a crisis or into a life-changing situation. You might include chase scene after chase scene, but readers won’t care that one car is following another down the street, until they know what the stakes are. If you don’t spell out what the result will be, they simply won’t care. A story isn’t driven forward by events but by tension. Therefore, all stories are “tension-driven” stories.

In order to deepen the tension in your story, you’ll need to create two struggles that play off each other. The protagonist’s external struggle is a problem that you need to resolve. His or her internal struggle is a question that you need to answer. The interplay of these two struggles complement each other until, at the climax, the resolution of one gives the protagonist the skills, insights or wherewithal to resolve the other.

The genre in which you write will force you to use certain conventions that will dictate the precedence of the internal or external struggle in your story. To write successful, marketable stories, you’ll need to include both an internal struggle that helps readers empathize with the protagonist, and an external struggle that helps drive the movement of the story toward its exciting climax.

Your story needs to progress toward more and more conflict, with more intimate struggles and deeper tension to hold a reader’s interest.

The plot must always thicken. Because of that, repetition is the enemy of escalation. Every explosion, sex scene, or conversion means less and less to the reader, simply because repetition serves to work against the escalation of tension in your story.

Instead, continually make things worse for your protagonist. In doing so, you’ll make him or her better for the reader. Start out in the middle of an action and build the tension in your story until its logical conclusion.

Some Truths About Book Publishing

Any writer who has attempted to write a book knows how much work goes into it. You work long and hard, then one day you’re holding it in your hands. And even though it came from your deepest core, it’s really got a life all its own.
   
One of the biggest misconceptions you can have when writing a book is that if it’s accepted by a publisher, then it must be good—it must be perfect. Nothing could be farther from the truth. While you conceive the idea, then flesh it out, and finally give it form, a book isn’t complete until it runs through the gauntlet of copy and content editors.

When a publisher accepts a book, it’s just the first step. To market a book, it must be molded so that it fits into the marketplace. Most writers become myopic when writing their books. They don’t see beyond its content while publishers have a much broader view.

Realize that your editor is a professional at making at helping authors put their books into the best possible shape. So you must learn to be open and nondefensive.

Most changes editors request are minor. You think about it and get to it, You’ve been so close to your book that you perhaps didn’t realize that a bit of dialogue sounded flat and unrealistic or that there was a small hole in the plot. If you’re writing a non-fiction book, you may have inadvertently switched the facts or left one out that made the subsequent text not make sense. You shouldn’t feel bad since these things happen to the best of writers. A book is a large project, so it’s only natural that a few things will slip by.

But what happens when your editor asks you to make a major change? Eliminating a major character, putting in a new one, drastically revamping the ending with the resultant alterations to the rest of your story to accommodate it—these are big. If your editor asks for a major change and after thinking it over you agree, you’ve got some work ahead of you. No matter how you feel about it, it’ll make you a better writer.

Just the way a book is a series of chapters, any major change is simply a bunch of minor ones. Approach it that way. Make a list of what you have to do, then do it. If you feel stymied or have serious reservations about the suggested changes, talk it over with your editor. The more open you are with your editor, the better..

But remember that in the end, it’s your book. Give your editor a concrete reason for refusing to make a specific changes. Offer alternatives. Stand your ground but also listen to what your editor has to say. He or she knows the marketplace.

Besides the editor assigned to work with you on your book by the publisher, you’ll also have to deal with copy editors. The great thing about copy editing is seeing your book through the eyes of someone fresh to it. Your copy editor will challenge any grammar and mechanics you’ve missed and suggest small improvements that never would have occurred to you. Copy editors also catch all those embarrassing mistakes.Since you’ve been working on this big project for so long, you’re bound to make a few.

Today, all book editing is done electronically. You send your manuscript into the publisher, and the copy editor sends it back to you digitally marked. All publishers use Microsoft Word to edit, so no matter what word processing program you use to write the book, you must save the text as a Word document before sending it to the publisher. Word features a complete editing subroutine that enables the copy editor to not only mark mistakes and other items but recommend ways to fix them.

Nearly all first-time authors get bogged down thinking that they control their book. For some reason, many think that they’ll have a role in choosing the cover of their book. As stated above, the publisher’s job is to get a book ready for the marketplace and he or she knows what type of cover will work best. Your publisher trusts this job to experts in graphic design. This doesn’t mean every cover will be perfect for every book, but it does mean you should relax and concentrate on what’s inside.

Another mistake beginning authors make is putting the chicken before the proverbial egg. They worry more about whether their book will be reviewed by the New York Times than they do about its content.

In fact, it’s rare for a first-timer to be reviewed in The New York Times—or any other major publication for that matter—so don’t get your hopes up. The only way a top reviewer will even consider your book is if it concerns a controversial topic. A few good low-profile reviews will help your book in the long run. But one really bad top review could kill it.

Bringing Real Characters to Life

You’d think that if you’re writing about real people in a nonfiction piece that it would be easier than making up characters in a fictional short story or novel. Actually, quite the opposite is true. While you have facts about the person to deal with, there are limitations.

Many of the same techniques for writing characters in fiction apply to nonfiction.  Through detail, through gesture, through talk, through close understanding of someone’s life before and after the scope of your story, you make your people vivid in your reader’s mind.

Characters are primary in creative nonfiction, an all-encompassing term covering the personal essays and literary journalism. The chief difference between creative nonfiction and regular nonfiction is that the writer composes the former in scenes with characters just like in fiction. But characters in nonfiction present special problems. While fiction writers base their characters on real people, nonfiction writers usually tell their readers about their characters. The trick is to use the fictional technique of showing, not telling.

When writing nonfiction, much of the work of characterization is done for you. You base your characters on facts, characterization is complete, the family history is in place, the physical description is a given. But that doesn’t make anything easier. The job is merely different. Doing justice to a real person can be difficult because you may have pre-existing biases to that person or their ideas.

Nonfiction readers get to know characters through their actions. But from who’s point of view? It’s all in the moment, all told from a particular point of view. We see the scene—a dark, stormy night off the coast of North Carolina—in the book Shipwrecks and Lost Treasures: Outer Banks, by Bob Brooke. The reader is in the wheelhouse with the captain, Commander George Ryan, and the officer on duty, Lieutenant W.S. French, at 1:00 A.M. as they try to steer the Huron, a converted gunship, through the swirling waters.

        “Hard over,” French shouted to the helmsman. “Leadsman take soundings.” But his orders came too late. The ship swung around toward the beach, heeling over on her port side.
        “What’s out location?, Mr. French?” asked Ryan.
        “I don’t know sir,” French replied.
        “Give the orders for all hands on deck.”
        “Aye, sir.”
        As the mist parted, Commander Ryan finally saw the coastline. “My, God, How did we get here?” he cried.

With just a few words of dialog and some short description, the writer was able to not only establish a time and place, but the military order covering the panic in the voices of the crewmen. From here, the point of view changes as the scene changes to a father and daughter on the shore, desperately trying to find a way to save the sailors.

Once you establish the scene, readers are in a particular time and don’t leave it. What changes is the point of view. Action keeps the scene moving forward.

Often nonfiction writers relate their characters personality characteristics through an as-told-to narrative. This often happens in memoirs where writers use family stories to make their characters come to life. In these, the writer stands back and lets readers draw their own conclusions and make their own judgements.

A character rarely appears fully formed. Readers get to know him or her in bits and pieces scene by scene. You’ll need to will your characters to life by drawing on your unconscious, memory, and imagination until your characters assume a clear form and, with hope, begin to act of their own accord.

This process is inherent to the success of any novel, but it’s also important in nonfiction writing. The key is first to understand what your characters require from you in order to come to life, and then to determine how you can draw on your best available resources to give them what they need.

But what happens if you don’t have all the information you need to flesh out a character in nonfiction? Unlike in fiction, you can’t just make things up. However, you can use your imagination in finding information from other sources.

For instance, let’s say you want your characters to speak but you don’t have access to the exact words of what they said. You can research the same sort of character in similar situations who most likely said something similar. This is exactly what happened in the above example. From captains’ logs of similar shipwreck scenarios, it was possible for the writer to create an exciting, nail-biting scene. He had to do this because Commander Ryan died when his lifeboat overturned and the all was lost, including his log, when the ship sank.

The same goes for how a character dresses. You may find what you need in old photographs from which you describe the type of clothes your characters wore. Similar information may appear in old letters written by a friend or relative of the character about him or her. Remember, you need to find facts about the person to fill out the characterization. Begin with what you know about the person and then do specialized research to fill in any voids in your characterization. You may not need much, just the essence.

Next Week: Characteristics of Compelling Nonfiction Characters

Setting the Tone

Most writers get so involved with their writing that they aren’t aware of the tone they impart to it. In fact, it isn’t until a third party, someone like an editor, reads what you’ve written that you’re made aware of the tone or lack of it in your writing. Tone can create interest or just the opposite.

So what is tone anyway? Some say it’s the style of the piece. Others say it’s mood. And still others say it’s the author’s voice. Of the three, those who say voice are the closest. But it’s not the author’s voice but his or her attitude toward his subject—something that’s often hidden deep within the piece. Words used to describe tone might be authoritative, intimate, amusing, or aggravated.

Perhaps it might be easier for you to visualize tone. Photographers give mood to their work using light, either natural or artificial. It’s the way they choose to light their subject. The mood they create using light translates into tone. For heightened drama, they light their subject from the side. To increase horror, they light from below. For romance, they use soft candlelight. In films, directors convey the tone of a scene through its background music. Showing a person being pursued by a vicious dog wouldn’t be half as frightening without the ominous music that accompanies it.

But writers don’t have light or music. Theirs is a world of words. So creating the right tone, for the most part, involves using the right words, arranged in a particular way, for the effect you want. When a person speaks, it’s the volume of his or her speech that conveys the tone. But writing is silent. And that’s the challenge.

So if you use the wrong tone in a piece, it can ruin it for your readers. You’ll turn them off before they get half way through.

Unfortunately, it’s nearly impossible to hear the tone in a piece of writing while you’re working on it. It’s only after you’ve been away from it for a while that you’ll notice the tone. And it may surprise you. One way to make yourself more aware of the tone of a piece of writing is to read it aloud. Or even better, read it into a digital audio recorder, then listen to it as if you’re listening to a book on tape. You’ll hear the tone of the piece, whether good or bad.

The primary rule when working with tone is to keep it consistent from beginning to end. Establish your tone in the first sentence. Stay on track and don’t change tones within a piece. Look for places in your piece where the tone fades or shifts and focus your revision there.

Be wary of off-topic tangents. Don’t let your writing ramble. That will destroy the tone more than anything. Stick to your subject.

Depending on what you’re writing, you need to be aware of your voice, but don’t let it set the wrong tone. If the type of writing you do involves your opinion, don’t pussy-foot around. Express them. Take a stand. The worse thing is for you to try to avoid conflict with your readers. Don’t be polite just because you don’t want to offend your readers.

You can improve the tone of a piece by adding specific details. These draw the reader in and make them feel as if they’re part of the story or article. In fiction, this can help establish a character’s mood. In non-fiction, it adds depth and credibility.

However, working with tone can present problems. When bad things happen to people, some react by writing a book about the experience. Usually, it’s a bad book about all the horrible things that happened to the author. It presents little hope to the reader. This is common with people who have had a bad medical experience, feel strongly about controversial issues, or are angry about other people’s behavior.

To fix the tone, you have to fix the way you think about a given subject. You have to back off, calm down, see other points of view, maybe even take some responsibility for whatever happened. When writing about delicate subjects, you mustn’t let a negative tone take over the piece.