On Rivendell and the Most Important Question

Photo by Jean Kleisz

courtesy of unsplash.com

In the Hobbit (1937), J.R.R. Tolkien writes,

Now it is a strange thing, but things that are good to have and days that are good to spend are soon told about, and not much to listen to; while things that are uncomfortable, palpitating, and even gruesome, may make a good tale, and take a deal of telling anyway. (Chapter 3, A Short Rest; copyright J.R.R. Tolkien and Estate, etc.)

I was something like 12 or 14 when I first read that passage, and probably 22 or 24 before I realized the full impact it's had on my understanding of stories and how they are told.

In the context of the story, the narrator is commenting on Bilbo's stay in the Last Homely House west of the mountains, Elrond Half-Elven's hidden paradise-refuge-museum-mansion valley of Rivendell.  For those unfamiliar with the overall Tolkien legendarium, it's basically the home of some extremely wealthy, politically powerful (but neutral), and well-educated friends of one of the protagonists, the wizard Gandalf.

The thirteen dwarves and Bilbo (the titular hobbit) have, in the pace of the story, just made it through a rough encounter with three monstrous trolls, and enjoy a few week's rest and recuperation at the hospitality of the elves.  (The episode is a fair example of the basic unit of Tolkien storytelling: enter unknown, things go slightly weird, then bad, then worse than expected, then magical help comes, the danger is thwarted or escaped, and we're whisked away to a beautiful place of comfort and rest for a while.)

So now that they're safe and resting comfortably for the time being, the pacing of the story jumps ahead, and although several weeks pass in story-time, we stay just long enough for a concise and enjoyable description-montage of why the good place is good, before we move forward to when the party leaves Rivendell to move on with their struggling journey.

What Tolkien is basically getting at in the above quote is that audiences don't really want to hear about it when things are going well for the characters.

It's an odd thing, because 

1. stories without sympathetic characters don't generally do well, and

2. when we sympathize with characters, we say to ourselves that we want things to go well for them, but

3, in the end, what we really want is for there to be more story, and we won't pay attention to more story if things are going well.

The simple fact that Tolkien illustrates so well here is that conflict, struggle, and tension are the reason we listen to stories in the first place.  Sure we want there to be a happy ending, in fact the vast vast majority of stories told these days feature happy endings as a deal-breaking requirement (can you name a motion picture tragedy that grossed more than $100 million in the last ten years, with the arguable exception of Nolan's The Dark Knight? Or any popularly received tragedy whatsoever?).  But in many ways, a story doesn't really start until something goes wrong, and the characters are forced to deal with the problem in some way.

Which leads us to the lesson of this post: if you want an audience for your story, the most important question you can get them to ask is

What happens next?

Another way to put this idea comes from Emma Coats, who works in animation and used to be at Pixar, who keeps up an excellent tumblr account calledStoryShots, which is about illustrating, filmmaking, and storytelling (and which I previously mentioned here), and her famous 22 lessons about storytelling, this time coming in right at the top of the list:

#1: You admire a character for trying more than for their successes..

(for the full post, click here)

Stories that feature characters at their ease in the lap of luxury are interesting as escapes from reality if they're told right, and can be captivating if the characters have had a tough time and are (whether they know it or not) preparing themselves to undergo further challenges later on.

What matters isn't giving the characters what they want, what matters is giving the audience what they want.  Tension and payoff, struggle and triumph.

As Dumas writes in The Count of Monte Cristo (as copied and pasted from wikisource, presumably an anonymous English translation from 1846):

There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state with another, nothing more. He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness. We must have felt what it is to die, Morrel, that we may appreciate the enjoyments of living. (Chapter 117, The Fifth of October)

What the audience wants, in order to get interested in the story, is to feel like what they want (happiness for characters we aid them in rooting for, punishment for characters we coach them to despise) is still on its way, still developing, but on its way if they stay with the story longer.  They want to know what will happen next.

If this is not the most important question in storytelling, and I suppose it isn't really (a case could be made for instance for "why did it happen?" at least), then it's at least the first question you have to learn to make the audience ask in order to get started.

At the very least, it's a question many other writers have found a great deal of success by asking and answering.