Four Elements of The Perfect Story

Complete Characters

People (myself included), often make the mistake of saying that you need “relatable” characters. Being able to see yourself in a character is VITAL to enjoying a good story… that said, you don’t have to be a serial killer to appreciate Hannibal Lecter – you just have to be able to understand him.

Hannibal’s brilliant mind (in Red Dragon especially, but also in the film Silence of the Lambs), leads him to make horrible conclusions on society as a whole, and to do horrible things… but given his past and the way his mind works, we can understand how he functions. The scary thing about him comes when we see parts of our own mindset wrapped up inside him.

He is well-crafted. He is complete.

Structure

In screenplays, there exists a perfectly defined pre-determined structure. The average screenplay is about 110 pages (this has changed over time, but is basically universally agreed upon). It contains a beginning of about 27 pages, a middle of about 56 pages and an end of about 27 pages.

Well, in novels, it isn’t that simple. That said, books without structure are obvious to almost everyone. Characters often find themselves stumbling across things - purely by chance - that resolve difficult plotlines. They go pages and pages without doing anything ultimately relevant to the book.

Note: On the subject of relevance, let’s say the main character breaks her car and then fixes it… well, if it had never broken, we would be left exactly we are. Or, let’s say they get lost in the woods and find their way out… if they hadn’t gotten lost, again, we would be left where we are.

The structure is the SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT THING when it comes to your readers completing your story or book. It is the guiding light. When we put down our book and think, “I wonder if Jimmy will be able to tell Sally how he feels”, that is the structure keeping us involved. Something should always be left unresolved until the final pages. At any given moment, we should be able to put down the book, and be in the middle of something that needs to be resolved.

Surprise!

The structure is the guiding leash that pulls us along. That said, if Frodo must destroy the ring of power, and everything goes as planned, we have an incredibly boring story. He sneaks in without trouble, plops the ring in the fire, and everyone is saved. Hurray!

…

Except the path is too direct. When things are too easy, it’s hard for us to get invested in the wonderful characters that exist, or in the beautiful theme that is laid out before us. We need to have our emotions toyed with. We need the possibility of failure. We need Surprise.

Don’t imagine that surprise is the opposite of structure. It is NOT. Surprise allows you to shift your story (See Story at the bottom of the Theme section). This means, new things happen. New opportunities present themselves. Still, the overall structure remains.

Imagine that you’ve created a maze for your readers. The maze leads to a wonderful, riveting conclusion that you’ve had planned for quite some time. Your structure is the maze as a whole. When you introduce surprise, you are simply shifting a wall in the maze; your character can no longer go the way that your reader imagined... but that’s okay because, when you shift a wall, another way opens. Regardless of how many walls you shift, eventually, the path will lead to the center.

Theme

Hansel and Gretel shouldn’t have gone into a stranger’s house. That is why they’re eaten.  That’s the theme of the story. That’s why it exists. That’s what the story, at its core, is about.

This doesn’t mean that the perfect story must always have a MORAL (though there is nothing inherently wrong with a moral). It does, however, need a message. It is quite likely that ALL of your favorite books have a message. Good books that seemingly have no message, typically have an atypical message; eg. “There’s no meaning to the universe. Everything is random and pointless.”

Don’t confuse STORY and THEME.

Your story is what happens: Hansel and Gretel leave a trail of breadcrumbs. The birds eat the breadcrumbs and they get lost. They see a house of candy. A woman invites them inside. She turns out to be a witch. They get eaten.

The Theme is WHY the story exists.

You should always have a general theme in your mind when writing a book – even on page one.

To Never Give Up

Writing is brutal. As someone who has edited hundreds of novels, I can’t count how many times I’ve worked with clients who believe that their first novel will immediately have tremendous success. People know how hard it is now to become a paid writer (See my rant on National Novel Writing Month), and yet, everyone invariably thinks that they will be the exception. There are a wide variety of reasons that they believe this.

They think they are better writers than most people, but to take into account that agents and publishing companies are often too busy to even look at their work.

They think they already have the connections they need, fail to realize that people in positions of power get FAR too many requests of a similar nature to give theirs the proper attention.

They think they are rich enough to begin their careers on money alone, but fail to take into account the wide variety of distribution problems they will run into.

Whatever the situation, writers very very rarely receive instant success… I certainly didn’t.

This blog post is designed to show you how much stuff you might have to go through before your career takes off - but it is also designed to show you that, if you never ever give up, despite an incredible amount of rejection, you might finally get the writing career you long for.

The following are very real things that happened to me before my writing career took off--

I Got An Agent... Sort Of

About five years ago, I got a top 10 literary agent to say that he wanted to work with me. He said he was very impressed with my writing style, and wanted to sign me. Unfortunately, we never reached the signing. He was too busy to take another client, though he wanted to. He sent my name to several of his colleagues. They were either too busy or weren’t as passionate about me as he was. Eventually, it faded into nothing.

Phantom Producer

A producer on American Pie and The Butterfly Effect read and loved my scripts. Despite trying to stay in contact, it faded away in much the same manner as the agent.

Kevin Costner

Through a good friend of mine, I managed to get Kevin Costner, a Santa Barbara resident like myself, to read and consider doing one of my scripts. Soon after, he was cast to play Chris Berman, the lead in Draft Day. He got incredibly busy. I never heard anything about my script again.

I Edited A Screenplay For A Hollywood Film

Through a combination of luck and connections, I produced the second draft of a script for a New York Times Best Selling series. The director left at the last second, and after a while, it was costing the production company too much money to keep the project going. The movie was never made, and I never received a credit.

The moral here is not a sad or depressing one. It is simply this: stuff happens. If you plan on giving up over failed opportunities, then don’t try to be a writer in the first place! Writing is not an easy career. It is not something you can do instead of “real” or “hard” work. It is something that requires an incredible amount of dedication on your part – but if you never give up, it WILL eventually happen for you.

After initial failure, Jack Canfield, the author of Chicken Soup for the Soul, bought enough copies of his own book for it qualify as a “best seller”. He had quite literally an entire house full of his own books. In the following months, he managed to unload every last one.

JK Rowling was an unemployed single mother living off of welfare. The Sorcerer's Stone was written in 1991. It wasn’t published until 1997, and then, only after an incredible amount of rejection and failed promises, much like the ones listed above. Strangely enough, it was only published after the eight-year-old daughter of a Bloomsbury editor demanded to read the rest of the series.

Ayn Rand received some of the most famous words of rejection ever recorded from the Bobbs-Merrill Publishing Company. The house called her novel, The Fountainhead, “unsaleable and unpublishable.” It was published by Random House, the largest publisher in America. To date, 8 million copies have been sold.

First Sentence, First Line

If you’ve been a writer for long, you probably already know that good agents are EXTREMELY busy. If they aren’t instantly captured, many will never read past the opening line. That means, if you aren’t an established author (and sometimes even if you are) you need something powerful to get their attention.

Even more, if your reader needs to go to the bathroom, but has just read your first sentence, you want them to fight against their bladders to read the second. A sentence like, “John’s boss had caused him misery once again” might sound like a decent start. (After all, the sentence introduces our main character, AND shows us how unhappy he is with his job all at once!) Sadly, it’s not, and all the good it does is irrelevant.

Simply put, the above sentence doesn’t work because it answers more questions than it causes the reader to ask... Think of the questions your reader might have before begin read your book--

“Who is this book about?”

Answer: John.

“What is this book about?”

Answer: John and his unhappy life.

“What is the initial conflict going to be about?”
Answer: John’s work life.

Booorrinng.

Don’t misunderstand. Having a grounded story is important - but NOT in the first sentence. Your first sentence needs, instead, to force the reader to ask MORE questions, not less. It must both intrigue and surprise.

Consider the following sentence: “It happened again today.”

Read that again a few more times.

Don’t you want to know what happened? Why it happened? Who made it happen?

This was the first sentence of one of my short stories, and I’ll probably use it again in another project - it’s just that powerful!

Here’s another great example, the opening line of the Nick Cave song, We Came Along This Road--

“I left by the back door with my wife's lover's smoking gun.”

This one does ground the reader. We know what happened to a certain degree, but we’re still left asking so many more questions! Why did Nick shoot him? Assuming the obvious, that it was because he'd just discovered the illicit affair, we're left wondering how did it get started? How did he find out? Did Nick plan this out, or did it happen in the heat of the moment?

We are thrown smack in the middle of the story. We’re already there, holding the gun on the street thinking, “My god… what have I done?” How could we possibly go to the bathroom or switch to the next story? We have to keep reading… and that is what a good first sentence is designed to do. In some ways, it is more important than the whole first chapter. Be sure to take your time and get it right!

Writing Prompt

Send in your opening sentence for analysis and for a chance to have your book featured on this blog post.

UPDATE: Here is the fantastic first sentence of Margie Borchers' unpublished work The Betrayal Chain: "I awake to another day of eerie stillness, uneasy as oblique streams of morning light creep millimeter by millimeter along the bedroom wall."