Twenty Questions (Part V)
Four Final Questions to See It Done
We are in the home stretch now, friends. You are in the home stretch of finding out the last four questions; I’m sure the suspense is killing you. I’m in the home stretch of getting ready to be out of town for a bit; the suspense is killing me. Traveling in the summer is fraught with peril. By peril I mean thunderstorms. Wish me luck.
17. What Is the Antagonist’s Zenith?
When we left off on Tuesday, the protagonist was at their nadir, or the lowest point in their fortunes. They had experienced their disaster obstacle, and that led them to a crisis of faith. And I mentioned that if the protagonist is at their nadir then the antagonist must, conversely, be at their zenith—the apex of their fortunes.
Ask yourself: What does that mean for the antagonist? What does it mean for their fortunes to be at their highest (vis a vis the story)? They haven’t won, because the story isn’t over yet. But from all perspectives, it now looks as though they will win. Everything is in their favor. What does that look like, for this antagonist?
Back in Part III, question 10 asked: “What does [the antagonist] want?” That is, what is their goal? Whatever their goal is, when the protagonist comes to the point of being least likely to achieve theirs, the antagonist should be most likely to achieve their goal—because they are in direct opposition to the protagonist. Whatever it is the antagonist has been working toward all this time, it should now be within their grasp.
18. What Twists the Knife?
From their nadir, their lowest point, the protagonist gathers themself up to make one last push for victory, for reaching their goal. But what’s to stop them from retreating back to the last place of safety, gathering some more allies to replace the ones they’ve sadly lost along the way, or take any newfound knowledge of the antagonist back to the drawing board to come up with a better plan? Something has to happen at this point to introduce a sense of urgency, to rush the story forward to its resolution.
I’ll share one of my favorite examples of this from among all the stories I’ve consumed in my life. In Final Fantasy VII, protagonist Cloud Strife reaches his nadir when antagonist Sephiroth reveals to him that his memories were damaged by exposure to the chemical mako and he’s believed the whole time he was living his friend Zack’s life, not his own. Then Sephiroth tosses him into river of mako and leaves him for dead. Sephiroth is closer than ever to effecting his master plan, which involves summoning a meteor to damage the planet. The meteor is, plotwise, supposed to lend that sense of urgency—Cloud must recover and gather his forces to defeat Sephiroth immediately! Because a meteor is bearing down on the planet and this is the only way to stop it! Gameplay-wise, however, the meteor just hangs out in the sky while the player completes all the little sidequests they never got around to before. It was well-executed storytelling for other types of media, but not for a game in which they player is allowed to dally as long as they want to.
Anyway, there has to be some reason why the protagonist and their allies must hasten the resolution of the story and can’t heck off to the Gold Saucer and race chocobos for sixty hours before confronting the antagonist. The confrontation has to be forced when the odds are worst—no time for regrouping and starting again.
As you’re plotting your obstacles, disasters, crises, nadirs, and zeniths, be planning some kind of ticking clock or other imperative to hold your protagonist’s feet to the fire and force that final confrontation. Readers aren’t stupid and you can’t rush your protagonist to the end without a good reason, or it’s going to ring false for your reader. You never want your reader to pause, reading your story, and go “Why on earth would they do that? Why wouldn’t they have done literally anything else instead?”
There needs to be a Sword of Damocles and it needs to be believable. So—what is it?
19. What Surprise Do You Have Up Your Sleeve?
This could be a surprise for the protagonist, a surprise for the antagonist, a surprise for the supporting cast—or a surprise for all the characters—as long as it’s a surprise for the reader. A good resolution might go as the reader expects but a great one won’t.
Readers like to be surprised with things they didn’t expect, and I strongly recommend every story resolution should have at least one. This could be something like the protagonist prevailing in an unexpected way, the return of an ally we weren’t expecting to see again, a shocking reveal or action on behalf of the antagonist, or even something that nobody is responsible for but affects the characters and the final showdown nonetheless.
Whatever it is—and this goes back to what I was saying earlier—while it should surprise the reader, it shouldn’t completely blindside the reader. Readers like surprises but they don’t typically appreciate dei ex machina—that is, they don’t like it when a completely new or omnipotent power is thrown into the story at the last minute to resolve the conflict between protagonist and antagonist. They don’t want Zeus to stroll on stage and mop up for everybody.
So when you are planning this final surprise, make sure you have foreshadowed it properly throughout the story. Fortunately, since you are the author, you have the luxury of adding the surprise into the climax of the story and then going back through the manuscript to add the foreshadowing as needed. The best twists in a story are the ones the reader doesn’t quite expect but, once revealed, can see remember seeing the groundwork laid all along.
What wrench can you throw into the final confrontation between protagonist and antagonist to take things to an even greater level of drama, surprising your characters but also your reader?
20. How Did Everyone Develop and Change During the Story?
Finally: Where are they all now? Just kidding, I do not need a Harry Potter–style epilogue explaining how everyone is doing twenty years later; especially not if it involves everyone marrying their high school sweetheart and the main character growing up to become a cop.
Instead, as the final question, the author should ask themself how each main and supporting character developed and changed throughout the story. I won’t say grew because some of these characters may have done something more like a regression, in the case of an antagonist—someone who was mildly bad to start with might have moved toward real malice or evil as the story went on.
This is a question to take stock of the quality of your characters. Naturally, your protagonist will have developed—and, hopefully, grown—throughout the story. The protagonist simply cannot be the same person they were at the start of the story. If this person came into the story with no flaws and had no growing to do and, at the end of the story, can conclude, “Yep I was already perfect for purpose and the events of this story confirmed it,” then you have a bad character. Period, that’s a bad character. I won’t usually make a black/white statement like that but this one I’m confident about.
An antagonist has more leeway to stay stable and stationary, without development. Sauron from The Lord of the Rings is like this. He already morphed into his final, maximally evil form long before the events of the trilogy and so he does not do any development. He’s just a big weird eye. He glares. He glares and he sics Nazgûl on you. It’s what he does at the beginning of book one and it’s what he’s doing at the end of book three. I will note that other antagonists, such as Grima Wormtongue and Saruman, do change throughout the course of the story. They’re a good example of regression, actually.
Your supporting characters—the ones with names who participate in the plot, that is, not every background character—should also grow and develop. Each of them should come to the story with their own goals that align or intersect somewhere with the protagonist’s or antagonist’s goals. If they succeed in fulfilling their own goals along the way, then ostensibly they will have grown and developed and have completed a full character arc. If they did not, if they are still exactly the same people as they were when the story began, then they are likely flat characters.
This isn’t necessarily a problem—large casts of characters probably have a mix of round (more prominent) and flat (less prominent or important) characters. But if you thought somebody was important and you discover they’re a flat character; or if many of your supporting characters show signs of being flat, then you might need to rethink their arcs—or even whether you need them at all.
A story takes a character on both an external and an internal journey. A character who has been on an internal journey is changed between the starting point and the finish. Whatever their tragic flaw was, it’s been resolved or overcome. Whoever they needed to be to triumph, they’ve become that person. Hopefully everyone in the story has become the person they were meant to be, including the antagonist, who was meant to be the loser.
There you have it. An entire story with everything you need in just twenty questions. If you bookmark it, plot is always just a parlor game away.
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