Ever find yourself slogging through a story that, on the surface, you’re really jazzed about?
You started off with a great concept and compelling characters, but for whatever reason you’re just going through the motions, trudging towards an ending that’s somehow lost its luster.
You’re drifting down the Blue Danube on a story raft that simply won’t float. Its taking water on from all sides and the more you struggle, the more you bail the water out, the faster the raft goes down.
At the end of it all you’re left with wet britches and the burning question:
“Why isn’t this story working?”
There’re a lot of reasons your story might fizzle. Getting a spot on diagnosis, especially when you’re new to the game and haven’t developed the editorial gaze of death to discern the fluff from the chuff (Chuff in this sense being a good thing. I don’t know what chuff really is, but I needed something to rhyme with fluff, so there ya go. Deal with it. Please) can be difficult.
This is where beta readers, editors, friends, and family members come in handy. The problem is, being only halfway through a story and struggling towards the ending is not a good time to dump your word vomit on a friend or enemy.
Self-Diagnosing your story problems is one of the best skills you can develop in your writing. To make it easy, and accelerate your learning curve, I’m going to lay out some of the most common story problems that can rear their ugly little heads.
Wrong Main Character
It’s stupid how often this one crops up.
We’ve all been there. You start with a good lead character, but a greatsidekick. Part way through the story you realize the sidekick is way more compelling than the main character, which is an issue.
Your MC doesn’t have to be the swellest gal around, but preferably she has the most at stake in the story. If not, then you might be crossing your streams.
Ask yourself:
Who is this story really about?
Is it really about the MC or is it actually about her best friend Suzy? Sure you might have started off the story thinking it was about the MC, but sometimes these things grow out of our control.
You start off telling Story A, digress into the scummy boulevards of Story B, and then find yourself in the cardboard city of hobos that is Story C.
It happens.
You can do a couple things at this point: Change to a new MC and start over, or tweak your MC to make her unmistakably the protag.
Neither is an easy fix, but if you make the right correction, you’ll find the story flows better and more naturally. And after all, whether inside the bathroom or out, isn’t better flow what we’re all looking for?
Wrong Point of View (POV)
I struggle with this one. A lot. It’s my nemesis.
Here’s why: I love writing in First Person. It’s my bag. Ostensibly it plays to a lot of my strengths as a writer.
Here’s the problem: First Person doesn’t work so great in a big sprawling story with multiple POV’s. You can maybe, maybe, maybe have two First Person characters alternating chapters, but you have to work damn hard to distinguish your character’s voices otherwise they blend into one another.
Most people, unfortunately, don’t have the chops to pull this off (I might be one of them. Shh, don’t tell anyone).
In a big story featuring a diverse cast, I’ll usually alternate chapters between characters using 3rd Person Limited while returning more often than not to that First Person POV main character.
If you’ve chosen your characters wisely, and structured the story appropriately, you’ll arrive at the end of your story and that Gordion knot of interweaving storylines will have untangled itself.
If not, well, that knot will still be fully intanct, and now it’s covered in sticky honey.
Great.
How to fix this?
There’s not always an obvious solution. It’ll take fiddling with your story bits to figure out what’ll work best. Also, unfortunately, what worked best to fix your last story might not be worth beans on this story.
So there’s always that.
Good luck.
Wrong POV Character
Usually, your main character (within a scene) will also be your POV character. It’s a good rule of thumb to put the reader in the mind of whichever character stands to lose the most.
This is a moot point in stories that stay behind the lens of a single character throughout the story, but you should be conscientious of how this limits the storytelling tools you have at your disposal.
For instance, Watson is our POV character, but Sherlock is the main character. Everything we see and learn about Sherlock is through Watson’s eyes. This works really well for Sir Doily, but might not work for your tale.
Ask yourself:
Is my POV character the main character?
If the answer is no, you better have a darned good reason for it. If you find yourself struggling to come up with even half-assed justifications, then the fix is simple: make your main character your POV character.
Wrong Structure
This is the story problem tripping me up on my current work in progress.
To give you some context: this project is a collection of three novella’s forming an overarching narrative called Augment. The individual novella’s link together loosely, but it’s not until you reach the end of the last novella that the greater story reveals itself.
That last novella, The Watchmaker’s Daughter, is giving me fits, and rightfully so. It’s the one that has to neatly wrap up all the loose ends, connect dots the reader didn’t even know needed to be connected, and offer a satisfying conclusion not only to its story, but to the two preceding stories as well.
In short, it’s pulling more than it’s fair share of weight. Which, if done correctly, will be cool. But, if done incorrectly (which is likely what will happen considering how unwieldy a little bitch it is) it will leave the reader incredibly unsatisfied.
I don’t want to leave ya’ll unsatisfied, so I’ve mulled over why the story isn’t working and have come to the conclusion that the structure itself is inherently broken.
This is a problem. Fortunately it can be fixed.
It sucks to learn the structure of your story is flawed, but it’s better than wallowing in the muck of not knowing.
How do we fix a broken structure?
Go back to the beginning and relay the foundation.
This is one of my least favorite sorts of fixes to make, because it amounts to a lot of work and throwing away many already written words. But hey, we write until the story is right, right?
NOTE TO NEW WRITERS!
Listen up. I’ve outlined some of the common story problems threatening to take you off track, but ignore all of this advice until you’ve actually completed your first draft.
As a new writer it is more important to take the editor cap off and simply write to completion. Everybody hits the 1/3 mark in their story and thinks “This is dreck.”
That’s normal. You have to get comfortable living in that zone and learn to push past. If you stop mid-way through a first draft to go back and fix it, you’re increasing the odds you’ll ever actually finish the damned thing.
So, finish that first draft no matter how horrendous it is, then go back and tweak and revise, but not a moment sooner.
NOTE TO ADVANCED WRITERS!
You should also finish that first draft before going back and implementing these tweaks. Why? For all the same reasons I gave the new writers.
Nobody, regardless of skill, is immune to stalling out. I don’t care if it’s your first short story or thirtieth novel, finish that first draft before putting your editor hat on.
Stop arguing, just do it.
Here’s a picture of a cat to make it all better.
Thanks for reading. I’d love to hear what some of your common storytelling problems are. Get down to the comments and share with the rest of us!
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