The Five Iron Laws Of Storytelling

Someone recently asked me about my “rules” for writing. This struck me as an odd thing to ask (why would someone want my advice?), but then I realized that when FROSTBORN: THE MASTER THIEF comes out in the first week of May, I will have self-published 30 novels. 7 DEMONSOULED books, 10 THE GHOSTS books, 5 FROSTBORN books, 4 TOWER OF ENDLESS WORLDS books, 3 THE THIRD SOUL books (I count THE THIRD SOUL OMNIBUS ONE as a single book), and 1 stand-alone mystery/thriller novel. So perhaps it’s not so strange that people sometimes ask for advice.

That said, there aren’t really any rules. Basically, write whatever you can get away with, and whatever works.

However, when people talk about “writing” they usually mean storytelling, which is the entire point of writing a novel.  And storytelling definitely has some strong laws – iron laws, even – that a writer ignores to his peril. When people get ticked off about the ending of a story (like the SOPRANOS, or Stephen King’s DARK TOWER series), or if they simply don’t like a novel or a TV show, it is usually because the writer ignored one or more of these iron laws.

These, then, are what I believe to be the Five Iron Laws Of Storytelling. When discussing them, I will cite five examples that I think to be excellent examples of the craft of storytelling: the movie THE KING’S SPEECH, the movie WRECK-IT RALPH, the movie GRAVITY, the novel PRIDE & PREJUDICE, and the TV series BREAKING BAD. (I should note I did not like BREAKING BAD because it was a textbook example of the trendy and shallow nihilism that infests contemporary American culture, but it was nonetheless an excellently crafted story.) I will also site four things I believe to be examples of bad storytelling – the final two volumes of Stephen King’s THE DARK TOWER series, the DRAGON AGE 2 computer game,  the ending of the MASS EFFECT 3 computer game,  and the ending of the SOPRANOS television series. So note that there will be !!!SPOILERS!!! for all eight of these shows, films, games, and books.

Now, on to the Five Laws:

1.) THE PROTAGONIST MUST HAVE A PROBLEM THAT RESULTS IN A CONFLICT.

Because if there is no problem, there is no story. Conflict and problems are the engines that drive story. A happy life with minimal conflicts and problems might be the ideal for real life, but it makes for an exceedingly dull story. The main character of a story needs to have a problem that results in some kind of conflict. Note that the story doesn’t necessarily have to have an actual villain – it just needs a problem.  THE KING’S SPEECH doesn’t have a villain (though the future Edward VIII is kind of a jerk), but instead revolves around George VI’s efforts to deal with his speech impediment. GRAVITY, likewise, has no villain, but centers around Dr. Stone’s efforts to survive in the harsh environment of space.

So the protagonist must have a problem. The story is about how he deals with the problem.

2.) THE PROTAGONIST’S PROBLEM AND CONFLICT MUST BE CONSEQUENTIAL AND HAVE REAL STAKES.

The problem has to be serious, because if it is not, if there are no real stakes, the reader will get bored and cease to care about the character. The worst of all worlds is an unlikeable character with a trivial problem. Walter White in BREAKING BAD is a thoroughly unlikeable character, but becomes sympathetic to the audience because of the nature of his problem – he is dying of cancer, and so he turns to meth production to ensure his family’s security after his death.

Walter’s problem, of course, has very real stakes – his own mortality and his family’s future. But the stakes need not be life and death, but nonetheless they need to be emotionally serious. In THE KING’S SPEECH, at no point in the movie is George VI in any kind of physical danger. He is wealthy and respected, his wife and children love him, and he does not have the self-destructive impulses of his brother. Nevertheless, his problem is real, and it is emotionally painful, and it poses a risk to both himself and his sense of duty to the monarchy and his country.

Likewise, Elizabeth Bennett in PRIDE & PREJUDICE is in no physical danger throughout the book. Nonetheless, the stakes of her problem – her feelings for Mr. Darcy – are consequential. If she does not secure a good marriage, when her father dies there is the very real possibility she will be impoverished. Or if she marries an unsuitable man like Mr. Wickham, her life will be miserable. So while a young woman dealing with her feelings seems like a trivial problem, it will nonetheless have potentially dire consequences if she chooses wrongly.

Physical danger is of course an easy way to introduce high stakes to a story – in GRAVITY, Dr. Stone faces the constant risk of death in a variety of agonizing ways. Later in WRECK-IT RALPH, Ralph faces the prospect of nonexistence if he dies outside of his game. In BREAKING BAD, other than inevitable death from cancer, Walter White faces increasingly high odds of getting shot in the head by his business partners and customers (clearly crystal meth is not a business for the conservative-minded investor).

Regardless of the nature of the problem and conflict, it must be consequential and carry high risks and dangers for the protagonist.

That said, the problem must be something the protagonist can conceivably deal with and handle. Too vague of a problem, or too powerful of a problem, and the story goes off the rails. DRAGON AGE 2 is a good example of this difficulty. The central conflict in the game was the strife between the mages and the templars, who were supposed to police the mages. The templars claim the mages are demon-worshiping abominations, while the mages claim the templars are arbitrary and brutal. As it turns out, both sides are right, regardless of which faction the protagonist chooses to aid, making the conflict of DRAGON AGE 2 to be…human nature? Social injustice? Regardless, it’s not a problem that can be resolved within the game, (and in the ending the templars and the mages go into open war no matter what decisions the player makes) so the story falls flat.

3.) THE PROTAGONIST MUST TAKE ACTION AND STRUGGLE TO RESOLVE HIS CONFLICT AND PROBLEM.

A common failure in storytelling is a protagonist who has a serious problem…but does nothing about it.  We’ve all read stories with a passive protagonist, or even worse, a protagonists who does nothing but whine about his difficulties, or thinks that by feeling bad about his problems, they will somehow magically get better. Worst of all is when a protagonist does nothing but whine or complain for two hours or 300 pages and somehow does solve all her problems – this is a common problem in romance novels.

The converse of this problem is the Boring Invincible Hero; this is common in science fiction or fantasy series where towards the end of the series the hero is so powerful he can defeat all problems using his magic or a blast from his particle cannon. Struggle is necessary for a story – if the protagonist does not struggle, the story is boring.

No, the protagonist has to take action, actual, active action to resolve his problem, but he must struggle while doing so. In BREAKING BAD, Walter White sets out to solve his family’s impending financial ruin by brewing up some crystal meth for sale. In WRECK-IT RALPH, Ralph wants respect from the other denizens of his game, so he jumps to another game to win a medal and therefore prestige. In GRAVITY, Dr. Stone struggles to stay alive the entire time in face of the indifferent hostility of outer space to human life.

If these characters did nothing to surmount their problems, we would have boring stories.

4.) THE PROTAGONIST MUST FACE CHALLENGES AND SETBACKS, AND HIS EFFORTS TO RESOLVE HIS PROBLEM MAY EVEN BACKFIRE.

This is a good antidote to the Boring Invincible Hero problem described above. Think of this as the Unexpected Complications Ensue rule. You see this all the time in real life, in matters both serious and trivial. Like, you need to mail your rent check, but you’re out of stamps. So you drive to the post office, but there’s an accident at an intersection and you have to take a different route. As you take a different route, your car breaks down. All these new problems need to be dealt with, and you still have to mail the check! We’ve all had days like that, and fictional protagonists should be no different in the pursuit of their goals.

Additionally, it’s also possible for a protagonist to actively make things worse through his actions. Like in WRECK-IT RALPH, Ralph sets off to get his Medal of Heroism, but in doing so accidentally puts his own game out of order, and inadvertently unleashes the virus-like Cy-Bugs on the Sugar Rush game. Walter White in BREAKING BAD is a textbook example of this – in the course of attempting to solve his problems, he make a number of extremely bad decisions that estrange him from his family and send his business partners gunning for his head. In THE KING’S SPEECH, George VI gives up in despair, believing he will never overcome his speech impediment. In PRIDE & PREJUDICE, Elizabeth torpedoes her relationship with Mr. Darcy because of her misunderstanding of his motives.

And if you’ve seen GRAVITY, you know Dr. Stone’s situation frequently goes from bad to worse!

5.) THE ENDING MUST PROVIDE SATISFACTORY EMOTIONAL RESOLUTION TO THE PROBLEMS RAISED IN THE STORY!

Of all five laws, this one is undeniably the most important. Screw this one up, and readers will be ticked, and talk about it on the Internet for years. Whatever crisis comes up in the story, whatever conflict or difficulties, it must be resolved in an emotionally satisfying manner by the end of the story. It can be a happy ending, or a sad ending, or a mixture of the two, but it must be emotionally satisfying. 

Let’s look at some bad examples first.

Stephen King’s THE DARK TOWER series is a a good example of this – after 22 years and seven books, the protagonist Roland learns that he has repeated his quest to the Dark Tower over and over again for thousands of years, forgetting every time. Which makes everything that happened in the previous seven books meaningless, since the events had happened before and will happen again. Therefore there is no emotional resolution to the story or of Roland’s quest for the Tower.

MASS EFFECT 3 is another example of how not to end a story.  In the case of MASS EFFECT 3, the ending is simply too abbreviated – Commander Shephard sacrifices himself/herself, a weird light shoots out of the Citadel, the Normandy crash-lands on an alien planet – and that’s all. Considering the hundreds of hours of gameplay involved, and the intricate network of emotional relationships between Shephard’s companions, and the dozens of subplots over the three games, the ending was too short to provide adequate emotional resolution. It felt like a cop-out, as if the writers had simply said “OK, we’re done now, stop here” and had given up before attempting the necessary denouement. (The ending of DRAGON AGE ORIGINS, by contrast, was an excellent example of a well-done ending.)

The ending of THE SOPRANOS is an even more extreme version of this. Infamously, the series simply ends with a cut to black in the middle of Tony Soprano and his family eating dinner, and many viewers thought their televisions had failed. This is the ultimate example of a story failing to provide emotional resolution – the final episode does not even attempt to do so.

I suspect these problems arise when a writer tries to be “realistic”, which is what happens when a writer mistakes verisimilitude (a story feeling realistic) for “realistic”.  A story requires suspension of disbelief, and attempting phony “realism” causes the story to break down.

But, on to some good examples of endings.

The ending of BREAKING BAD was well-executed, since it resolved the story’s emotional conflicts. Walter White does not escape punishment for his many crimes, since he is shot to death at the end. Additionally, he dies in the act of resolving some of the conflicts he helped create – his meth empire has been taken over by neo-Nazis, and his former partner has been forced to prepare meth for them. Walter tries to provide for his family, free his partner, and defeat his rivals, and dies at the end, killed not by his cancer but by finally facing the consequences of his many bad decisions.  Note that this is by no means a happy ending, but it is a satisfying ending, which is more important.

THE KING’S SPEECH ends well, with George VI addressing the nation over the radio without melting down due to his speech impairment, simultaneously resolving the conflicts over his stammer and his fear of accepting his duties as king. This is an ambivalently happy ending – George VI has overcome his conflicts, but the viewers know that the United Kingdom is about to go through World War II, and George himself will die of lung cancer and heart disease in 1952. Nevertheless, the conflicts within the story have been resolved.

WRECK-IT RALPH has a more straightforwardly happy ending. Every single conflict raised within the story is resolved – Ralph accepts his role as villain in the game, realizing that he is a vital part of the team, he gains the respect of his neighbors, and the villainous King Candy and the Cy-Bugs are defeated. Additionally, even the side conflicts are resolved – Fix-It Felix marries Sergeant Calhoun, King Candy’s malevolent influence over the racing game has ended, and the homeless video game characters are able to set up inside Ralph’s game.

To sum up, stories have a sort of irresistible logic to them, much like a properly balanced equation. A writer should set out to create a story that follows this logic, which will result in a far more enjoyable experience for the reader.

-JM