Story seems to be the hardest word

Lately I’ve been critiquing a lot of writing where the story is full of movement and people go from A to B in search of whatever, but it reads very dull and lifeless. All genres, no matter what demographic it’s aimed at, need story. But even if all the basic requirements are fulfilled, it can still read flat.

A guy is hungry. He has no money. He borrows some from a friend. He goes to the store. He buys some food and eats it. Now the friend wants a favour in return for the loan...

Things happen, someone wants something, there’s an obstacle, a solution is produced and there’s even a suggestion it’s headed somewhere. So why doesn’t it grip you? What we have so far is just a bunch of stuff happening. It isn’t interesting in and of itself, and if you want the reader to be engaged it needs something more.

So, what differentiates story from a bunch of stuff that happened?

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U is for Unexpected Delivery

Within a story the plot will go in various directions and surprises and revelations will occur. But in between all that people will move around and interact, and that’s where writers can come undone. Informing readers of ordinary activities in ordinary ways is going to slide through their heads without really registering. Even if a story is true, if the events are described accurately and with authentic touches, that won’t necessarily make it interesting.

Giving a character goal, even a simple one like making a coffee, and then showing them achieving that goal, is dull. But some writers think if they show the process in great detail it implants meaning and resonance to the mundane. And sometimes it does (but not automatically — you have to know what you’re doing and what effect it will have on the reader). If I think I know what’s going on, and it turns out it’s exactly what I thought, whether it was a big plot twist or some tiny incidental moment, it will deaden my curiosity. Even if there’s plenty of exciting things to come, I will detach from the story, skim or skip bits or give up altogether, because my desire to know what happens next isn’t being stimulated. And dammit, it’s the writer's job to stimulate me.

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T is for Toil and Trouble

Looking for trouble? You better be, because story is all about conflict and tension. Trouble needs to be in the rear view mirror or on the horizon or next to you in the passenger seat, or all three. If it's happening right now then you should have the reader gripped. Of course, you don't always want to be in the middle of it. But even when you're in between moments of high drama there should still be a sense of it around.

If trouble is approaching then it needs to be foreshadowed. A man sunbathing on the beach feeling relaxed and happy is not very interesting. Even if it is intended as the lull before the storm and a few paragraphs later an aeroplane falls out of the sky into the ocean in front of him, that section of him catching rays needs to have something about it that suggests the approaching catastrophe. 

You can do that in many ways (and I will go into that little later) but if you don't, if you decide you want the contrast of a relaxed easygoing moment before things go haywire, the problem is people will skim it and there's nothing you can do to stop that if you don't add some kind of tension.

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B is for Backstory-a-go-go

Let me tell you a joke. Two men walk into a bar. And the barman says, “Welcome to the Trapatonni Bar and Grill, first opened in 1932 by Giuseppe Trapattoni, a squat Sicilian who left his homeland with only the shirt on his back and a dream that one day…”

How much more of Giuseppe's story would it take for you to realise the background information had nothing to do with the joke? Not long, I'm guessing.

It used to be different.

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A is for Angry Young Men

It’s easy enough to say a character should be active, driving the story forward, have a goal etc. but what if he isn’t that sort of character?

A lot of young male writers that I read and critique in the various writers’ workshops I belong to, write about young male characters who don’t know what they want, who haven’t decided what their goal is, who don't care about anything. These writers want to write a story of discovery. They want to write about how to figure out which are the important things. They want to rage against the ridiculousness of life, in no particular order.

They want to write about these things because life doesn't conveniently offer up a neat, pre-packaged plot to give existence meaning and direction. That’s what they’re interested in, because that’s what they feel about their own lives. Certainly people have written books about such characters, so why not them? If it reads slow or aimless, then it’s literary fiction. It’s character driven. It’s intentionally mundane to reflect life. But how do you stop it being boring for the reader?

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Flat Narratives

The writer is a time traveller. He can see the whole of existence at once. He knows the end as well as the start. When someone says something that doesn’t make sense now, but will have an impact many pages from now, the writer smiles knowingly. All information is available to him. The problem is the rest of us are mere mortals who can only start at the beginning and work our way from one moment to the next, and when someone says something seemingly meaningless, that's all it is.

Leading the reader from A to B is not something where you can just set off and be confident you’re going to be followed. There’s no point relying on stuff that happens later to satisfy the reader if the reader never gets that far. The idea that ‘It will all make sense if you keep reading...’ is not taking into account how readers read. We keep reading because we like what we’ve read so far and want more. We don’t think ‘This isn’t working, I should keep reading and maybe it will...’

Each scene or chapter has to be engaging in its own right. Even if certain information needs to be conveyed, you can do that while other stuff is happening. Jack can tell Dave about an old school teacher who will turn up later in the story. But he can tell him that anecdote while they are in the middle of robbing a bank. Obviously it doesn’t need to be quite that extreme, but it shouldn’t be just them hanging out or driving in a car. It should tells us something about these specific characters.

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Boring Characters

This is something I struggle with, and I’m not speaking about poorly written characters, I’m talking about the kind of story that starts off slow and then builds. I’m going to go over some of the problems I’ve encountered (in my own and other people’s works) and then later I’ll go into some solutions which I’ve thought of (but can never seem to implement in my own stories).

If your story has a normal guy (or gal) and then through the story things happen and they change, that is a legitimate story structure. But if at the start your character has many negative traits, and by that I mean they predominantly DON’T want to do stuff (they’re shy, they’re aimless, they’re afraid of taking a chance) it can make for a very slow, pedestrian start to the book. Obviously you want to provide a contrast, show their transformation, but boring is boring, whatever the reason.

Often writers use one (or all ) of the following excuses: 

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