The Exaggeration of Story

Once upon a time there used to be small bookshops on every street corner, run by helpful, wizened booksellers full of advice and oak shelves piled high with leatherbound tomes.

We have to fight to make sure Mr Barnes and Mr Noble and all those other those sweet, cardigan-wrapped, bespectacled and wild-haired book pedlars don’t end up penniless and destitute, right?

Hardly. The kind of rhetoric you hear in defence of the poor booksellers being steamrollered by Amazon is pretty much the same as the rhetoric back in the 90s when those same booksellers (Borders, Waterstones, Barnes & Noble) were crushing their smaller counterparts with huge book superstores.

But the down on his luck little guy makes for a much more compelling argument.

Which is a lesson all storytellers can learn from. If you want to make a point strongly, if you want characters to be memorable and for the stakes to feel high, there is one simple way to do it: exaggerate.

In some cases a genre is tailor-made for bombastic storylines involving the end of the world or battles against satanic forces, so little exaggeration is needed. Things are already turned up to eleven. Other types of stories aren’t quite so extreme and pushing too hard can make them feel melodramatic and generally fake.

But when you find yourselves with a narrative with a beginning, middle and end, that makes logical sense and where characters have believable motivations, and yet it isn’t clicking—something’s missing— that’s when the power of exaggeration can come in very useful.

You don’t have to scrap everything and come up with something better (although that’s always an option), you just have to look at what you’ve got and exaggerate it. There are always going to be parts you can bend and twist and stretch.

What it usually comes down to is this: a character who makes a decision to do something and then does it, facing whatever obstacles that may come his way, can make for a perfectly good story. But it can also be a mundane and pedestrian one.

But a story where a character is forced to act now, without preparation, or where he decides he doesn’t want to do something but has to do it anyway is pretty much always compelling.

And why would he have to act before he’s ready or do something he doesn’t want to? Because circumstances insist on it. And if your circumstances aren’t insistent, then making them is a matter of bending and stretching and twisting. Your character might not literally have a gun to their head, but there are many ways to make it fell like they have.

Johnny loves Mimi but she’s going out with Mike. He decides to tell her how he feels, but when is the right time?

Is there a story there? Sure, probably. But what if Mike confides in Johnny that he’s going to propose tonight at midnight? What’s Johnny going to do now?

In both cases Johnny could end up doing the same thing, but by exaggerating the scenario, the story feels a lot more driven.

If a detective is trying to catch a killer there’s a reason why often the detective will have extra incentive to close the case. Knowing the victim, a personal history with the killer, their last case before retirement and so on and so forth. Since it’s his job to catch killers you’d think that would be enough, but there are lots of people in the same situation doing the same job. 

In order to make a story worth telling it needs to be personal to this particular character you’ve chosen to write about, and that means making their circumstances that much more compelling than the norm.

How far you push things will depend on personal taste and judgement, and the kind of audience you’re writing for, but every story has some part, some motivation or deadline that can be pushed just enough to provide the character with momentum, and the reader with a reason to root for them.

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And if you're a sci-fi fan don't forget to check out Alex J. Cavanaugh's new book, available at all the usual places.

 Amazon | Barnes & Noble

Purchase Links: Amazon | Barnes & Noble

Purchase Links: Amazon | Barnes & Noble

Purchase Links: Amazon | Barnes & Noble