Out With It
Five Questions to Get That Story Off Your Chest
Good morning and welcome to May. If you’re a student, you’re in between spring break and summer break right now. If you’re an office dweller, like me, you’re staring down the end of the tunnel to the light—the tunnel is that long, holidayless stretch from Presidents Day in February (if you’re lucky, or New Year’s Day, if you’re not) to Memorial Day. Memorial Day at the end of May breaks the seal and then before you know it you’ve got Independence Day, Labor Day, Veterans’ Day—it’s all downhill from here.
May 3 is the 123rd day of the year, or 33 percent of the way through—one third of the year down. I am tracking slightly ahead of my goal to make 52 short story submissions in 2022, with 18 down (34 percent). That’s a lot of “no”s to hear in 123 days. Just kidding! They have not all been nos. Some of them are TBDs.
Anyway, on this 123rd day of the year I give you the first of three short and sweet Shelf Lifes, or at least that is my plan, because I am traveling later this week so I have to get ahead and write an extra article this week. I’m going to try to still write the same number of words but just spread them over more articles. I am working to become briefer. We are all of us on a learning journey.
Today I have an article for the folks who have a story to tell and who just are not sure how to get started. Maybe you are someone who hasn’t written a story before but has wanted to. Maybe you’re a person who has written plenty of stories but you have one that’s stumping you. Or maybe you’re a regular writer of stories who just has a bit of trouble getting started (that last one represents me).
Have you ever played Twenty Questions? In that game, someone thinks of a subject and everyone else asks pointed questions to deduce what that subject is. We’re going to play a variant on Twenty Questions today, but it’s only five questions, and the subject is the ideal version of your finished story. Ready? Set? Go.
1. Who Is Your Audience?
If you know your audience well—for instance, if you often or always write for the same audience—you might be tempted to skip this one. However, I encourage you to read on because I’m going to suggest some alternate phraseology to this question and you might not have considered every angle, for instance: If you are writing a novel, what shelf will this go on in the bookstore? What books will be next to it on the endcap? If you are writing a short story, what publication do you envision this in? Who else is on the table of contents with you?
I’ve written about audience before and the importance of understanding who yours is. People who read? People who like stories? My story is universal, it’s for everyone! While I hope everyone reads your story, “everyone” is too broad to define your audience. “Adults” and “young adults” are also a little too broad to answer this question properly. Young adults read lots of stuff (including stuff for adultier adults).
Formulate your answer to include things like demographic, genre, subgenre, form, and even similar authors. For instance:
Adult readers of mainstream horror novels, people who like Stephen King and Dean Koontz.
Young adult readers who enjoy adventurous fantasy series with romantic elements, like Laini Taylor’s Strange the Dreamer and Leigh Bardugo’s Six of Crows.
Adults who read short science fiction on a regular basis—people who subscribe to Asimov’s, Apex, and Analog.
Having your audience in mind up front gives all kinds of insight into the ways you might craft your story, beginning with what its boundaries might be. If you’re hoping to land on the shelf between Taylor and Bardugo, then you probably want to aim for the same word count sweet spot they both hit—both books come in right around 140,000 words—and limit things like swearing, violence, and graphic sex that don’t often find their way into YA fantasy.
2. Who Is Telling That Audience the Story?
Once you know who your audience is, and you can picture them in your mind, next ask yourself: Who is telling my story to that audience? Yes, you are, obviously. But within the four walls of the story, who is narrating?
This is a multidimensional question. First, it’s a question about point of view (check out my Shelf Life article on narrative point of view). First person? Third limited? Third omniscient? The rare and weird second person? If you’re going with a third-person narrator, how close will this narrator be to the action of the story? Bird’s-eye view? Right behind the main character’s shoulder? Inside her very skull, privy to her thoughts? Is the story being told from the hero’s point of view? Or from the villain’s? (Remember, protagonist and hero are not synonyms.)
The narrator and point-of-view character (or characters) set the whole tone of your project. A story narrated by a teenage private school student is going to sound very different than one narrated by a police detective. In The Secret Place by Tana French, chapters alternate point of view between those told by Detective Moran and those told by Holly Mackey and her three close friends, with the point of view hopping between the perspective of the different girls. This is a master class in point of view, if you haven’t read it.
Consider: All reliable narrators are the same, but every unreliable narrator is unreliable in their own way.
3. Why Them?
Alright, you’ve figured out who your narrator is; and if the narrator isn’t a specific character (if it’s an omniscient narrator, for instance), I hope you have figured out who your main character is—the person that omniscient narrator will be paying closest attention to. (Sometimes there are multiple, equally important main characters.)
Next question: Why this character? Why this particular one? Why should the audience care about this character, above any other person in the setting who might tell us their version of events?
In The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, why Offred? Why not any of the other hundreds or thousands of handmaids trapped in Gilead? Why is this handmaid the one whose story we’re getting? What makes her the best candidate to illustrate the situation in Gilead for the reader? What sets her apart from any other handmaid?
She’s assigned to one of the Gilead movement’s most prominent political leaders.
Several of the women she knew before the revolution have gone on to fill other roles in Gilead society than handmaid (jezebels, unwomen).
The particulars of her situation that led to her being forcibly enslaved as a handmaid are particularly chilling (her husband was previously divorced before they married; in Gilead, where divorce is illegal, all divorces have been retroactively nullified and Offred was therefore convicted of adultery).
There has to be a beating heart behind your choice of narrator. They have to have an emotional investment in the narrative beyond acting out the plot. “This is the person who went from point A to point B” is not good enough. Frodo isn’t the hero of The Lord of the Rings because he walked from point A (the Shire) to point B (Mount Doom) to throw a ring away. Why Frodo? Why Scout Finch? Why the Buendía Family?
4. What Happens That Changes the Course of Their Life?
Now you know who your narrator is, and why they’re the one to tell the story. Next up: They’re going about their normal, ordinary, everyday life and then, suddenly, something changes. Maybe everything changes. If nothing changes for this character, if nothing is out of the ordinary and life continues as usual for them, then you don’t have a story. There is no story there. At best, you have a vignette.
Something has to happen that interrupts this character’s everyday life: This is the inciting incident that causes the story to begin (even if it isn’t spelled out at the beginning of the story). As I discussed in The Plot’s the Thing, John Gardner famously said that stories start one of two ways:
A person goes on a journey; or
A stranger comes to town.
These are the things that most often tend to disrupt our everyday lives. Either someone comes from elsewhere to interrupt our life, or our life is interrupted by our own journey elsewhere. Every time I write about Gardner’s two possible starts that cover any story, I think “nah that can’t be universally true” and then I pick some books I know at random and spot check.
The Handmaid’s Tale? Offred goes on a journey (she is assigned to a new commander, her third and final, after two unsuccessful prior postings).
To Kill a Mockingbird? Dill (a stranger) comes to town to stay with his aunt for the summer and Scout befriends him.
The Secret Place? A stranger (Holly Mackey) comes to “town” (Detective Moran’s police precinct).
One Hundred Years of Solitude? José Arcadio Buendía, and his wife Úrsula, leave their home in Riohacha to found a new town, Macondo.
The Fellowship of the Ring? I do not need to tell you about this journey.
5. Who Will They Become on the Journey?
Last question: You know, from answering question 2, who is telling this story—that is, who they are at the outset of the story. But have you figured out who they will be by the end? How they will have grown, developed, and changed? Just as you need a disruption in everyday life to cause a story worth telling to begin, you also need character transformation.
The protagonist must grow and change as a result of the experiences they have during the course of the plot. If your character is the same person, the same kind of person, at the end of the story as they were at the start—then your story has a plot but no character arc. Every character’s outer journey must be reflected in their inner journey. There’s no way around it. If your story doesn’t see your character coming to an understanding or realization that changes them in a profound way, then the story needs another look.
That’s it: Five easy peasy questions to get any story off your chest and onto the right foot. Still intimidated by the blank page in front of you? I have more where this came from available in last year’s Defeat the Blank-Page Blues.
If you have questions that you'd like to see answered in Shelf Life, ideas for topics that you'd like to explore, or feedback on the newsletter, please feel free to contact me. I would love to hear from you.
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