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| Photo by Michael Hirsch courtesy of unsplash.com |
What remains to be seen is what the best ways of getting trouble into a story, of how to tie it to characters, how to ground it in the reality of the storytelling. In short, how to start it.
So far as I know, there are only a few key rules for how trouble has to exist in a story.
First and foremost, if the trouble doesn’t effect the characters, there is no reason to talk about it.
Consider this carefully: what is trouble, if it doesn’t directly effect either we ourselves or someone we’re interested in? The party experiencing it is what makes it relevant to us.
So once again we have the same question: what is trouble? How do we put our characters into trouble so that they have to work their way back out again?
The most obvious solution is to put their lives in danger. In fact, the simplest thing to do is to put the whole world and everyone in it in danger, and then make the characters figure out a way to solve it. That’s sort of the simplest possible trouble a character can be in: either they personally and/or the world totally will be destroyed if they can’t fix this problem quickly.
But what about that makes the story interesting?
The easiest answer is that most people don’t want the world to end, in fact we’ve mostly got plans that are based on the world continuing its big spin for some time to come.
And so we arrive at a simple axiom for understanding how to get characters in trouble:
All trouble is an obstruction to some character’s preexisting goal, whether they know they had that goal or not.
Example. You don’t have a stated goal not to lose a leg in a jaguar attack today. But if you’re attacked by a jaguar, and if you’re pinned to the ground and being bitten on the leg, really hard, it will probably occur to you clarity and force that you really had this goal of keeping your leg all along.
So, the goal that gets obstructed is where the rubber touches the road.
And the reason that character had that goal in the first place is what makes the story relevant to us in the first place.
So it’s simple: Storyteller, know thy characters.
If you want a good story that has an interesting problem being worked on for realistic reasons in a way that will get you a sympathetic audience, you need three things.
1. A character’s goal
2. An obstruction to that goal
3. A reason they will fight to accomplish it anyway.
And that’s it, that’s how to start a story.
What does your character do for a living? What do they want to do? Are they married or single? Do they want to be married or single? Do they have kids? Do they want kids? What are their interests? What are their fears? What do they think of their neighbors and why? Somewhere in all this you’ll find what makes them tick, and usually the possibilities for causing them trouble won’t be far behind.
Next, the rule about how to bring the trouble itself into your narrative, that is the course of the story.
At an earlier point in these wanderings, I noted that typically trouble in stories is like trouble in life, in that we generally notice the effects of the trouble (a patch of wet carpet, missing fishing boats, a band of soldiers turning up to lock us away, and so forth) before we become aware of or figure out the cause of the trouble itself (a leaky roof, a giant mutant lizard, our fiance’s jealous lover has conspired to frame us for conspiracy to commit treason to the crown, and so forth).
I’d like to amplify this remark here by adding that whenever possible, to engage the interest of the audience, a storyteller should try to get these effects of the trouble into the story as early as possible, perhaps into the first paragraph if not in the first sentence. Usually a good story will, but doesn’t need to, have some dark hint as to what’s to come this early.
If something else that’s interesting enough to snag the reader’s attention suggests itself instead of the problem the characters will have to face by all means use that instead, but if you’re struggling with how to get the story started, ask yourself what the trouble is and come up with the first time the character noticed some part of it.
Of course, indirect references can always be stacked on top of each other; the trouble may be that a dragon will attack the castle, but the first thing our hero notices is the bootprints outside of his house of the thief who will compel him to go out of his usual course, where he will hear of the trouble and start on the road to adventure and so forth. This subject is a little lame since there are no surprising details, and because the two things don’t really have anything to do with each other. But hopefully the point makes sense, that characters, places, words, strange objects, whatever you find to stand as a symbol for what’s to come, putting that at the front, so long as it’s surprising or in some way interesting to the audience, is a great way to start things off, too.
And of course all this will have a profound impact on and draw a great deal of information from the setting as well as the character.
Which is why the framing of trouble, character, and setting is sort of a three-body problem in and of itself, but that will hopefully become clearer (or not) when we get to those two parts of starting stories next.
Of course, all this “start with the main trouble at once” is moot if you want to have a prologue, as many good stories do, because prologues usually best work as ways to introduce the characters, their setting, how they usually cope with trouble (at least at the start of the story before they’ve been through anything), and what the general feel for the story will be. But that’s also for a later article.
Finally some quick notes on how trouble will play out as your story goes on.
I’ve already said twice that trouble starts vague and gets more clear as the story goes on. I don’t insist on it, but usually people take time to fully understand things, and I find that far more often than not the process of sorting out what the real trouble is and how to fix it is a large part of the character’s journey. The other part is how they solve it.
A lot of good stories I’ve read have had red herrings of one sort or another; the character either thinks they’ve figured out what the problem is, when they really haven’t, or they think they’ve got the solution in their grasp, and they don’t. Many stories emphasize in one way or another the first of these points in describing the course of events, and nearly all, in one way or another, emphasize the second.
Keep in mind that so long as you want your story to go on, the problem has to remain unsolved, in order for there to be an emotional reason for the audience to keep listening/reading/watching. I have nothing against epilogues, such as they are, but I think wherever they have nothing to do with tying up some side-effect or aftershock of the main struggle, the audience views them as irrelevant information, and I tend to agree. No matter how much we like characters and settings, once the problem is solved, there’s no real reason to keep reading.
So choose your trouble carefully, go with your gut. What would mean a great deal to you? What would you fight for? What wouldn’t you think is worth it? Above all know your characters, and their reasons for doing the things that they do. It’s the best way I can think of to craft a thoughtful, meaningful, and satisfying narrative that people will enjoy and remember.
That or just put a time bomb at the earth’s core, either way.
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