Twenty Questions (Part I)
To Tell a Story
Shall we play a game? No not a war game. Not a peace game either. The very best kind: A parlor game.
If you’ve never played twenty questions, you should. It’s great because you don’t need anything other than your imagination and a healthy sense of curiosity—and at least a couple friends—to play. The rules are simple:
One player chooses something—a person, place, or thing—but does not say what it is.
The other players take turns asking questions in order to narrow down and then guess the first player’s selected something.
The first player must answer the questions truthfully.
The game ends after twenty questions have been asked or the something is correctly guessed.
The player who guesses the something correctly wins.
If no player guesses correctly within twenty questions, the first player wins.
As you can see, it’s kind of like Twister except not at all.
Lately I was working on some plotting during my writing group and I realized that when I plot, I play, essentially, a game of twenty questions with the concept. I start with a vague concept and I need to make a plot out of it. There’s a series of questions I ask and, if I can answer them all satisfactorily then I have the basis of a solid plot. If I cannot, then I probably don’t—or I need to workshop it a lot more to get to something usable.
And then I thought—meh, probably everybody does this so let me look around the internet and see what everybody else’s list of questions for plotting a story is, but I didn’t find much that looked like my list. I found a lot of questions for readers to ponder while reading but fewer for writers to ponder while writing. Maybe because there’s no need for it. But I always enjoy sharing a technique.
I confess I’m trying to get a bit ahead on Shelf Life as I have some time away in July, so you’re not actually getting twenty questions today. This article is going to be broken into several parts over the next week or so. Were I just giving you a list of questions, we could fit it all in—but I’ve never been that succinct in my entire life. In order to get a little bit ahead, I’m going to break these twenty questions into a series with a few of them at a time. I may write a few other topics interstitially but, rest assured, all twenty questions will be revealed soon.
1. Who Is Telling This Story?
This is a multipart question; well, a lot of them will be. Prepare yourself.
“Who is telling this story?” asks both “Who is the narrator?” and “From whose perspective is this story told?” Sometimes it’s the same person and sometimes it’s not. For instance, The Fellowship of the Ring is told by a third-person omniscient narrator. Most of the story is told by that narrator from Frodo’s point of view, although some portions of the story follow the points of view of other characters. A counterexample is Moby Dick, which is told by a first-person narrator in the character of Ishmael, who recounts the events of the story from his own perspective, after the fact.
The narrator may be a character in the story, or the responsibility may shift among multiple characters inside the story, or the narrator may be a presence from outside the story. Whoever the narrator is, it’s critical to know whose (which characters’) perspectives the narrator has access to, and how much access to those perspectives they have. Is the narrator reporting on what they observe? Or is this narrator privy to thoughts and feelings—the inner workings of the characters?
Finally, ask yourself: Is this narrator reliable? And, if not, how will you—the author—clue your readers into the fact that they are not?
2. Who Is the Protagonist?
The protagonist is the main character of the story, whose decisions and actions drive the plot forward and who acts in opposition to the antagonist. The protagonist need not be:
The hero of the story—consider Humbert Humbert, protagonist and villain of Lolita.
Only one person—consider Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo, which juggles an ensemble of six protagonists.
A person at all—a protagonist can be an animal, as in Charlotte’s Web.
The person telling the story—Ishmael tells the story of Moby Dick, but the protagonist is Captain Ahab.
There are lots of stories that could be told differently, with a different character as the protagonist. Some classic illustrations of this phenomenon in literature are Beowulf (the original Old English poem), and Grendel by John Gardner, which retells the events of Beowulf from the monster’s point of view, with Grendel as the protagonist and Beowulf as the antagonist. Another good example is Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë and Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys. Likewise, imagine how the novel The Great Gatsby might be different were its protagonist Jay Gatsby and not Nick Carraway, or how Lolita would be different were Lolita the protagonist.
You may know right from the get-go who your protagonist will be, but go through a little thought exercise and consider how the story would differ if other characters stood in as the protagonist. This doesn’t mean you have to deviate from the original plan, but can help ensure you’ve chosen the best character for this purpose. Sometimes shifting this responsibility just a little bit, as in the examples above, can make a world of difference.
3. What Is the Protagonist’s Tragic Flaw?
Every protagonist has to have one. Sorry, “too handsome for this world” or “perfect in every way except she trips over her own feet” are not tragic flaws.
Every interesting character has to have a flaw or a weakness somewhere. It’s like Superman and kryptonite: Without kryptonite in the story, he’s too powerful and there’s no dramatic tension there. You know he’s stronger than everybody else, so you know he’ll always win. You might also say Superman’s weakness is his unflinching idealism. So he kind of has two.
Anyway, in spite of the tongue-in-cheek remark about being perfect in every way except for tripping over her own feet, clumsiness is not Bella Swan’s (from Twilight) character flaw. Her character flaw is that she has absolutely no sense of self-preservation and that constantly puts not only herself, but everyone around her, in danger. If Bella did not have this character flaw there would be literally no story. The saga would go like this:
Jacob: “Hey”
Bella: “You’re obviously pretending to be my friend because you have a crush on me, get lost.”
Edward: “Hey”
Bella: “Immediately no. You’re 100 years older than me and you want to drink my blood, this is predatory on every level.”
~ fin ~
Every good protagonist has one. Victor Frankenstein has his hubris. Captain Ahab has his obsession. Poirot is vain. Bond is a womanizer. Humbert Humbert is a literal pedophile (and a proto–internet reply guy who has been waiting for you to say it so he can mansplain the important difference between a pedophile and a hebephile).
If your protagonist is perfect in every way, they’re not going to be very interesting or inspire dramatic tension. They should have a flaw of some kind, and whatever that flaw is should tie into the overarching story in a meaningful way. Can this character turn their flaw into a strength by the end, or will they triumph in spite of it? Does their flaw reflect the larger themes of the story? Only you can instill hamartia.
4. What Is the Protagonist’s Status Quo?
Every plot starts when the protagonist’s status quo is disrupted by an inciting incident. That’s just how it is, listen, I don’t make the rules. Usually when I say that I did make up the rule but this one I really didn’t invent. This is like gravity, it’s a natural law.
In order for a status quo—the existing state of affairs—to be disrupted, we have to first know what that existing state of affairs is. What is Longbourn like before Mr Bingley and Mr Darcy arrive? How were things in the Shire before Gandalf showed up asking for a closer look at Bilbo’s old ring? What was life all about on a Tatooine moisture farm before the malfunctioning droid you bought from the Jawas vomited a holographic SOS into your lap?
You don’t need to spend a lot of time establishing the protagonist’s status quo because, frankly, it’s boring. Even if the protagonist is a touring rock musician or like a ghost librarian in a haunted library—I mean, no matter how interesting their status quo is to us (a normal alive person who is definitely not!!! a ghost librarian), it’s boring to them because it’s just their normal life.
And anyway—I’m sorry, excuse me, I need to write down “ghost librarian falls for sexy exorcist” (an autobiography?); I’ll be right back.
As I was saying, as little as a few establishing paragraphs will do, but it’s got to be there. You, the author, and we, the readers, need to know what life was for the protagonist in the before times.
Before what? If I explained all that, it would be Thursday.
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