Tag Archives: character

The Star of the Show

15 Tuesday May 2012

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This last weekend, I was an at excellent live action roleplaying game. The theme was a pulp adventure, so there were lots of high stakes and drama, but one thing that occurred to me as we ran through the adventure is that there were approximately 25 main characters in this story. They were all unique characters with their own motivations and depth, and watching us all funneled through a storyline was quite the interesting experience.

LARPs are an art form all their own and nothing I say here should be taken as a criticism of it, but it got me to thinking about story media in which there are singular–or at least smaller sets–of stars in the show, and how we define them.

One of my particular weaknesses in building characters is that I like to make plain Janes who have interesting people they support around them. I think this tends to be because I, personally, prefer to be in the role of a supporting cast and crew (which I’ll talk more about next week). That’s all fine and good in life, but when you’re building a star for a particular story, you’re looking at a different spectrum of qualities.

For example, one of my first LARP character ideas for this game was a young woman who had basically been raised on an salvage/mercenary airship, who had an eccentric godfather as the captain and lead of this crew. She was a sometimes adventurer, and otherwise jill-of-all-trades support. I mulled over this idea for a few weeks, but knew it was missing a spark. Ultimately, I realized she was a support member for a cast of more interesting NPCs who would not appear in the game.

Now, in her own story, she could emerge as the star of the show, or perhaps I could take a deeper look at the cast and have someone else emerge as the star of the show and let her remain as support, but none of this would have worked well in a LARP, in which there are 25 stars of the show–each with their own wildly divergent personal storylines. So I’ve kept the idea for a later story.

In an archaeological fantasy novel I was plotting some time ago, the main character was a concubine who had a secret an archaeologist very much needed. I puttered on this story for a while as well, and eventually when talking to a friend, she succinctly said, “So your main character is basically just a plot device?” and I realized I needed to take a deeper look. In that case, I decided she would make better support cast to the archaeologist, who had more at stake in this story.

Even in an ensemble cast, such as the trio from the Harry Potter books, there is a primary character, even if the supporting characters are just half a step away. Harry, in those books, has the most going on, and he has the highest personal stakes among the trio. In the Lord of the Rings, there is a huge cast, but eventually they are broken into smaller groups with their own emerging leaders. I’d say Samwise Gamgee and Aragorn emerge as the stars of the show when all is said and done. (And I suspect others have convincing arguments for other characters in the lead.)

It’s possible to have multiple stars of the show, but I believe one is likely to be slightly brighter than the others, and the star is not always the Point of View character. Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson are classic examples of this: Watson is the point of view because he is someone the readers can identify with, whereas Sherlock is not.

All that said, how do you find the star of your show?

Consider:
1. Which protagonist has the most stakes or personal investment in the story?
2. Could story/end result happen without that protagonist?
3. Are there specific, important things that character does in the story that can’t easily be replaced by or delegated to someone else?

These might not be the only litmus tests to define your star of the show, but they should help you get on your way. Do none of your characters “pass” the test? Or one specific one you want to be your star? Consider the star qualities, and rework that character so he or she can shine.

Putting the “Pro” in Protagonist

27 Tuesday Mar 2012

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Last week, Mike talked about protagonists and antagonists, and pointed out that in many iconic stories, the protagonist is reactive and the antagonist is your proactive character. This week, I wanted to talk about reactive and proactive protagonists, and how they drive a story. Now, many characters are going to be a mixture of both–they might start reactive and then become proactive as the story progresses, or they might start proactive and then begin to react as their actions lead to fallout.

Many of us in our day-to-day lives are reactors. We sit comfortably in whatever we’re doing, whether that’s a desk job or acting as a lone gunman. The events that cause change–a lay-off, breaking up with a significant other, coping with a death in the family–are usually things that happen to us, rather than events we go out to seek. When it comes to storytelling, many characters are in the same situation, only that which they are reacting to often gets kicked up to the next notch or three in severity or drama. For example, instead of a fender-bender, the whole interstate crumbles below them. Instead of helping a friend move, they must move a Ring of Power across the known world. Given our experiences, we often default to make our characters reactive, because protagonist are capable of reacting to circumstances much greater than mere average Joes living average lives who do not get stories told about them.

So what about proactive characters? Proactive characters usually want something. They want something vitally important–whether for greed or love. It could be a person, an item, or an ideal. They want it so badly they’re pushing aside anything that gets in their way. Aren’t these qualities that we usually associate with antagonists? They certainly can be, but they work just fine for our protagonists, too. Your antagonists should have a level of proactiveness, of course, although they might start by reacting to a proactive protagonist. Chances are you have two willful people who want something that causes them to cross. That something could be money or world peace–it doesn’t matter. Your protagonist could be a treasure-hunter, and the antagonist another treasure-hunter competing for the same prize.

Ultimately, your character is likely to be a combination of reactive and proactive, but chances are that one is going to outweigh the other. Reactive characters often make us boggle at how strong they are–how one thing dumps on them after the other, yet they persevere. (Yet, most real-life people put into that situation will often tell you they would have preferred not to have to be so “strong.”) Proactive characters, I believe, are the people who wow us because they are who we secretly want to be–they aren’t afraid of change or to go after the things they really want–no matter what the setbacks are that happen along the way.

The Most Important Character

23 Friday Mar 2012

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Quick, without thinking about it name the most important character of your story. Go!

Your main character, right? It seems pretty obvious. That’s the character your audience wants to see. That’s the character you have to get all of us to like, so we’re willing to enjoy your story. Even if your main character is a hateful prat, you have to make us love him or her, or else we’ll certainly never stay with your story to the end.

Well, yes, maybe. But I would argue differently. In my mind, the most important character in your story isn’t the one whose story it is, but the one who creates the story:

Your antagonist.

Think about all the stories you know and love. How many of them start with the main character doing something proactive? Can you think of any? I can’t. At least not any iconic characters. Luke Skywalker. Harry Potter. Frodo Baggins. Lyra Belacqua. Arthur Holmwood. Katniss Everdeen.

Their stories begin before we are introduced to them, but not because of anything they do. We are introduced to these characters right as they become personally engaged in their own stories. Right as something happens to them to change their world and drive them, usually reluctantly, toward becoming the protagonists of their stories.

Let’s think about the stories we know and the ones we want to tell. Something outside your main character’s control puts him or her on the path to becoming the protagonist of the story, and more often than not that something is put into motion by someone. That, of course, is usually your antagonist. It’s your antagonist who carries your story, whether you want us to hate or love your antagonist, agree or disagree with them.

Besides, we don’t need to hate your antagonist. In fact, I think the best antagonists are those we don’t hate. The ones who we might even agree with in some ways, were they not such extremists.

You can sometimes get away with a boring, stock, cardboard-character protagonist who nobody really likes. Tolkien did. Lucas did. More importantly even than your protagonist, your antagonist must be someone interesting. Possibly someone charismatic and likeable. Yes, you can also get away with uninteresting antagonists, but you really need something else to capture your audience’s attention and keep it engaged.

Let’s be honest, antagonists like Lord Voldemort and Sauron are not that interesting. One is half-dead for nearly half the books he’s in and the other is a disembodied eye in a tower. Both are more like story elements than characters. They push their respective stories into happening, but they are little more than evil-for-evil’s-sake mustache-twirlers like Snidely Whiplash.

So think about the antagonists who you like; the ones who are interesting. The ones who get you cheering even more than the protagonists in their stories. I consider Severus Snape, for example, to be arguably the most interesting character in the Harry Potter books. Other interesting antagonists I can think of include Spike from Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, Magneto from the X-Men stories, or Marisa Coulter of the His Dark Materials trilogy.

These characters do despicable things and oppose their corresponding protagonists at almost every turn, but we are drawn to them because, well, being bad is fun. Antagonists almost always have the most fun in stories, if for no other reason than because they lack inhibitions. Where the protagonists are often boring because they have to hold back and play the “good guys,” there’s something freeing about cheering—somewhat—for those who toss aside social mores in pursuit of their goals.

What am I getting at?

Think about your protagonist and how much effort you’ve put into developing him or her. Now take that amount of effort and put twice as much into your antagonist. Your story—and your audience—will thank you for it.

There’s a lot more I want to say about antagonists, but I’ll come back to them over the coming weeks.


 

Kill Your Characters

09 Friday Mar 2012

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Every Tuesday, the team I work on at my day job goes out to lunch. One of the topics this week included the death and return of Superman and the recent rant by Max Landis. Ann recently has become highly involved with a Harry Potter community and we’ve been re-engaging with the storyline, which, of course, is steeped in death. (And okay, look, I’m going to spoil the Harry Potterseries somewhat, but if you haven’t read them or seen the movies by now… well, you really ought.)

So, of course, I figured I could turn this into a Story Papers article.

Although I have never been able to get into the books, I understand that George R.R. Martin slaughters characters all over the A Song of Ice and Fireseries. He is not alone in that, of course. Joss Whedon isn’t afraid to kill off characters, and, as I mentioned, J.K. Rowling’s magnum opus focuses a great deal on mortality.

Killing off a beloved character is something of a gamble, but only a little one. It can turn your audience against you if you handle it poorly, but the potential upside in audience retention is worth the attempt. Assuming yours is a story where character death is plausible, showing that you are willing to kill off a character can further help to capture your audience.

When the fifth Harry Potter book came out, in which J.K. Rowling announced a beloved character would die, we all threw ourselves into the book to see who it would be. She did well to keep us guessing, with multiple near-misses throughout the book, but ultimately she lived up to her word and killed off Sirius, one of the series’s most popular characters. She did it again in the next book, with Dumbledore. And then, well, all hell broke loose in the finale and lots of people died.

Yes, the last book was a bloodbath, but by then each individual death became less and less shocking. Why? Well, there are several reasons. First, it was a bloodbath. One death is a tragedy. Ten deaths is a statistic. Second, it came at the end of the series. We expect genre fiction to climax with battles and deaths, so delivering those merely lives up to the expectations of the audience. Third, it was no longer a surprise. By then, Sirius had died. Dumbledore had died. Multiple bad guys and just-introduced characters all died. We had become somewhat numb to it.

Now, I’m not saying she “did it wrong” by killing off so many characters, only that their deaths were not individually as impactful.

If you’re writing genre fiction with lots of violence in it, characters should die. You might be tempted to kill off just the bad guys, or maybe only newly introduced characters your audience hasn’t bonded with yet. That is a mistake.

You might also consider just bookending your story with death. Also a mistake. Killing off characters at the end of a story, during the climax, is totally expected. You will surprise no one. And the beginning, too, is a pretty standard place to introduce and eliminate some characters; look at how many protagonists are orphans, after all.

It’s the middle of the story, though, when the audience maybe isn’t expecting it, that a character’s death becomes profound, meaningful, and horrifying.

Donald Maass teaches to constantly up the tension in your stories. Every chapter should put the protagonists in a worse situation, or at least a new stressful one. As our friend Geoff has said before, “Think of the worst thing that can happen to your characters and do it.” (I might be paraphrasing but the idea is sound.)

And basically, what is the worst thing that can happen to any mortal being?

Now, a character’s death should in some way make things worse for the survivors. Killing off an annoying sidekick none of the other protagonists like doesn’t increase the tension in your story (it might make your readers happy, but you don’t always want that… a lot of times you want your readers scared for the protagonists). You want your audience to remain engaged? Let that annoying character live and kill off a favorite character instead.

Your audience might not thank you, but it will almost certainly remain engaged just to see what happens next.



How Emotions and Backstory Affect a Setting

28 Tuesday Feb 2012

Posted by in Advice, Ann, Experiences, Theory

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Many of my early stories could have been told in an empty white room. Describing settings was always so tedious to me–getting away from the action of the scene to stop and explain to the reader about the lampshade and the carpets in a soulless laundry list or overwrought, long-winded paragraphs.

But it doesn’t have to be that way–it just took me a long time to understand how to give soul to my descriptions, so I thought I’d share my discovery.

How we view things–everything–is weighed down by our emotions, moods, and history. How I see my mother’s house is going to be entirely different than my husband or my best friend, because we have different emotional and historical attachments (or values) to the setting.

This has become most evident lately, as I’m preparing for some changes in my life. I’m moving back to my semi-rural hometown from the city. For many years, going back to visit my hometown always brought negative feelings in me–it felt small and worn down and I could only remember too many events that happened there that made me want to leave and never return.

On the other hand, my friends who had visited that town thought it was “cute and quaint” and harbored no negative feelings for it. My husband, who didn’t grow up there, had entirely different feelings about it, and those were based on his own life growing up in a city suburb.

It’s the same when someone enters your house. You think it’s a mess and cluttered, or even spotless and clean. Another person might come in and think it’s cozy, tidy, and lived in, or they might feel it’s too pristine or too sterile. Each person perceives the same place differently, based on their own experiences, preferences, and their emotional state.

Use this for your characters.

Does your character prefer small and lived-in? Does she prefer large, spotless, and empty? What does her background suggest?

Is she in a hurry? She might not be paying attention to the details and everything is an obstacle. Is she trapped? She might be eying the details and the walls feel imprisoning.

Is it her mother’s house? What if her mother has moved since the last time she visited, and so the house is even alien to the protagonist? What mixed emotions would that cause? Would she see items once from her previous home now displaced?

How does our cackling villain see his dark lair? How does the hero? Knowing this can help you, even if you don’t decide to share it.

There are many directions to take–and many dimensions you can unlock about your characters’ personality, emotions, and background–by how they respond to their immediate setting. Give it a try, and see if it helps bring new insights in both how you integrate your description into your narrative, and what it reveals about your character.

Presentation and Perception

10 Friday Feb 2012

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How you present characters to your audience can drastically influence how they are perceived. If that sounds like blatant manipulation, well, it is. Telling stories is about manipulation. From deciding what—and how—you show your audience to determining which emotions you want to stir are conscious decisions made to elicit the desired response(s). The what and how of showing are one of your most basic tools as a storyteller.

What does that mean? Well, consider the mystery story. Most mysteries present the results of the crime and show the investigator(s) working through the clues to find the criminal. Sometimes, the person who perpetrates the crime is shown, but who that person is and the motive behind the crime are left as unknowns. In some mysteries, the storyteller presents all that information up front and the story becomes a manhunt instead of a criminal investigation. What the storyteller doesn’t show shapes what kind of mystery story it is and how the story unfolds.

Let me show you a different example. What follows are descriptions of characters from two stories, one of whom at least you probably know of.

Character One:

This brute is the heavy for a scheming mastermind who is himself more than willing to sacrifice those who love him to see his plans succeed. When we first meet this scofflaw, he is hunting down a frightened family. He finally traps them in the wilderness, where he threatens the father, attacks one of the children, and carries off the other—eventually leading to the child’s death.

Character Two:

This frail and lonely girl falls in love with someone she meets in her younger days and executes a desperate plan to place her closer to the object of her affection. Despite her best efforts and obvious affection, her attempts to woo are forcefully rejected and she returns home. To add injury to insult, the father of her would-be love then pursues the poor girl back to her home and—with the aid of an all-too-willing accomplice—incites the local authorities to have her murdered… in her sleep.

Ponder for a bit those descriptions, and in particular look at my very careful word choices in each. In my descriptions, I have tried to make it clear the man is completely unsympathetic. He is a “brute” and “scofflaw,” and in particular I very explicitly chose the latter word rather than one of its close, but not-quite-same, synonyms (say “ruffian,” “outlaw,” or “scoundrel,” none of which are quite right). The description of the girl, meanwhile, is clearly meant to provoke your pity for her plight. She is a victim—one whose only crime is to love a hateful person who enacted her death. Hers is a pathetic and unfair existence, to be slain by the very people assigned to protect the innocent.

You might have guessed my portrayals of these characters don’t match those of their original source materials. You’d be right. My only deceptions, though, are in word choice and emphasis.

Let’s see, then, how Wikipedia describes the first character (removing giveaways like names, of course). No fair looking this up!

Character One:

[He] has a friendly, softhearted personality and is easily driven to tears, as seen in his very first scene…. He is very loyal to his peers, especially [his master]…. he becomes extremely angry whenever anyone insults [his master] around him (a mistake made by [the father]…). [He] is also very loyal to [the child he carries off], suffered several times… because of this loyalty, and had to go into hiding twice to avoid prison.

A rather different interpretation, don’t you think? But even in that description, it’s clear that how I described the character was factually accurate (I called him a scofflaw and his description notes how he had to hide twice to avoid going to prison). The facts are the same, but the word choices are clearly not.

The second character, rather unfairly I think, does not have her own Wikipedia entry. But here, instead, is a sample (provided by Wikipedia) of the way she expresses her adoration for whom she loves, told from the point of view of her would-be amour.

Character Two:

Sometimes after an hour of apathy, my strange and beautiful companion would take my hand and hold it with a fond pressure, renewed again and again; blushing softly, gazing in my face with languid and burning eyes, and breathing so fast that her dress rose and fell with the tumultuous respiration. It was like the ardour of a lover; it embarrassed me; it was hateful and yet overpowering; and with gloating eyes she drew me to her, and her hot lips travelled along my cheek in kisses; and she would whisper, almost in sobs, “You are mine, you shall be mine, and you and I are one for ever.”

The second character is quite a bit overzealous in her affections here, which I left out of my description. I wanted you to sympathize with her, to think of her as the victim of her story rather than as the driving force of conflict.

So have you guessed who these two characters are yet? Go ahead and click behind the cut to finally see who I’ve been talking about.

Continue reading »

The Three Foci in Games

27 Friday Jan 2012

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Oh hai, I’m moving my posts to Fridays. Ann will occasionally post on Thursdays, so from now on we’ll be posting two to three times a week: Tuesday, sometimes Thursday, and Friday.

Telling Stories in Games Series: Part I

There’s a chance you didn’t know this, but most (but by no means all) of my writing and editing experience comes from tabletop roleplaying games (TRPGs). When Ann and I mapped out what we wanted to do with this blog, I knew that I wanted to do a series of posts about telling stories in games (I’m going to aim for one or two per month). The recent announcement of D&D Next (aka 5e) makes this series seem somewhat more timely than it would have been otherwise.

Overlap exists between telling stories with games and telling stories in other media–after all, a story is a story is a story–but some differences persist. Everything Ann and I cover in Story Papers is applicable to game-based storytelling, but I’m not sure the reverse will always be true. Still, even if you don’t play games with a narrative, you might find something helpful in these posts.

Last week, I talked about the Three Foci of Stories as a sort of baseline for all future theory-based articles I write. It seems reasonable, then, to start off this series of telling stories with games in the same way.

Setting Focus

Last week I advised you to avoid setting-focused narratives, unless you’re Tolkien (and even then…). Well, for game-based stories, you can just throw that right out. Setting-focused narratives have been the default for at least fantasy roleplaying games since the invention of the genre in 1974 and they remain popular today in most genres I’ve experienced.

If you’ve played a fantasy roleplaying game on the tabletop or as an MMO you are already familiar with the concept:

  1. The characters are in a settlement with a problem.
  2. The characters go to a nearby bad place and “clear it.”
  3. The characters uncover some clue that leads them to the next bad place.
  4. The characters travel to the settlement closest to the new bad place.
  5. Repeat 1-4 as much as desired, making the problems and bad places larger and more challenging as you go.

That’s a pretty bare-bones macroscopic example of how such stories run.

A small-scale setting-focused story–say, a single adventure–instead details a single location (or if it’s really elaborate and ambitious, several). In fantasy RPGs this is probably a “dungeon;” in science-fiction RPGs a spaceship, spaceport, or a point of interest on a planet; and in modern-day RPGs it might be an office building, some old ruins, or a military base. Whatever the location is, it and its history are at the center of the story.

The first RPG adventures dispensed with any kind of external plot at all and simply began the adventure at the door to the dungeon. Questions about why and how the characters arrived there were irrelevant; the point of the adventures were to explore a new location and uncover its mysteries. Modern sensibilities require a little more plot than that, but a “dungeon crawl” remains a story about a place and what goes on there.

And remember that being setting-focused doesn’t mean your story is limited to one small part of the setting. A story of exploration is setting-focused (maybe with some character focus on the side), whether that exploration covers a single underground complex or an entire world.

Plot Focus

RPGs today are often more interested in plot, especially if they aren’t of the fantasy genre (and even then, plot-based adventures seem pretty popular). Many plots involve saving someone or something from someone or something else–giving the otherwise non-heroic characters a chance at being something more than mercenaries or self-absorbed jerks. The monomyth provides a basic example of an outline for these kinds of stories in any medium, although in games (at least in tabletop roleplaying games) you have to alter it somewhat to account for multiple primary protagonists.

The scope of what the characters save tends to increase as the overarching story progresses. First it’s just a village, hijacked airplane, or doomed freighter adrift in space. Eventually, it’s the entire country, world, or galaxy! (Not always, of course; sometimes the scope only increases to the next-largest nearby town.)

As I talked about last week, plot-driven stories are everywhere. Examples abound! Some of the more common plots that work well in games:

  • Save this place
  • Free the people
  • Stop the bad guy from regaining power
  • Throw down the bad guys
  • Rescue the princess!*
  • Slay the dragon**
  • Destroy a MacGuffin
  • Recover a MacGuffin
  • Escort the important person
  • Take this there

Many of those plots work in multiple genres, even if they appear on first blush to be specific to just fantasy or science fiction.

Character Focus

In many ways, a purely character-focused game lacks story. Or, rather, it lacks a story told by the gamemaster, narrator, storyteller, or host (whatever your title is). A pure character-focused game is pretty much a free-form roleplaying session, where the players take on their characters’ personas and simply interact. You might have a plot you want to introduce, but if the players are having fun in their free-form roleplaying there’s a good chance they will completely ignore it (don’t let it bother you; sit back, watch, and enjoy!).

That’s a pretty extreme example, though, and only barely constitutes an actual story. It’s most likely to happen as a break from your plot- or setting-based story, when the characters have a chance to just interact and the players are in the mood to really get into their characters. These kinds of “filler episode” sessions can be important to the pacing of your game and the enjoyment of your players.

If you want to try to run a game that is largely character focused, you’re definitely going to need the cooperation and interest of all your players. Some might take to the idea and provide long and detailed backstories as well as goals, desires, wishes, and fears of their characters. Others might just show you a character sheet. You’re better off, in that case, with running a plot-focused or setting-focused game instead and integrate player-created stories as best you can. This idea deserves its own post, really, so I’ll come back to it in the future.

Final Challenge

Here’s a challenge for you: Start with a story seed of your liking. Now, produce a one-page outline for it focusing on setting, a one-page outline for the same story focusing on plot, and finally a one-page outline focusing on characters. If you try it, let me see what you came up with!

*Actually, for all that it is considered a cliche in fantasy, I’m not aware of any professionally produced RPG scenarios that blatantly use the “rescue the princess” trope.
**Also an under-utilized trope.

The Three Foci

19 Thursday Jan 2012

Posted by in Mike, Theory

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So let’s talk about actually telling a story. I think Ann and I have been writing so far under the assumption that everyone who reads this blog is a practiced, experienced storyteller. That might be the case, but we’d also like to be accessible to newcomers as well. And those of you who are seasoned storytellers might still find something interesting. :)

As a quick definition, pretty much every story needs these three elements: character, plot, setting. I’ll talk about all of these in greater detail (especially characters) in later posts. For now, though, let’s talk about stories that focus on each of these elements.

Character Focus

Character-focused stories generally take an ensemble cast with a variety of personalities and put them all together into a situation that allows them to interact. The plot is usually relatively simple and exists mostly to give the characters something to talk about. In many, the setting is minimal.

These kinds of stories rely on well-rounded, complicated, believable characters. They should have the same kind of beautiful fallacies, imperfections, contradictions, and hypocrisies that real people do. The real challenge when focusing on such flawed characters is to assemble and present them in such a way that the audience cares about them. Or at least most of them.

Stories about the interactions of people, often done in a way to draw out strong emotions, as well as those that tell the life story of a single person (fictional or real), are hallmarks of character-focused stories. Sitcoms and slice-of-life entertainments (which only occasionally are actually stories) also fall under this broad heading. Examples include stories from such different eras and media as Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility; the manga and anime Azumanga Daioh (and its myriad imitators); many of Shakespeare’s romances; or movies like Good Will Hunting and Steel Magnolias.

Plot Focus

Probably the simplest of the three story foci are plot-focused stories. Genre and speculative fiction rely heavily on this kind of story, as do many of the old epics that form the backbone of human literature. A plot-focused story needs a strong (often familiar) plot, a number of characters to make it happen, and just enough setting to make the audience care about the stakes of the story.

These kinds of stories can be pretty epic (saving the world!), but you can also tell more intimate stories as well (such as a locked-room murder mystery). Your plot can be extremely complicated, with multiple twists and turns and surprises to keep your audience guessing, or it can be extremely straightforward and linear. There are benefits to each, but also some serious drawbacks, so unless you’re a practiced hand at one extreme or the other I recommend moderation. If your story is too complex, you will lose your audience and it will cease to care. If your story is too simple, you will bore your audience and it will cease to care. Once your audience stops caring your story is over.

Fortunately, though, plot-focused stories are pretty easy to do and you have a lot of examples to choose from. Most popular and famous stories focus on plot. Where do I even begin? Well, how about the beginning? Gilgamesh, Beowulf, The Odyssey, The Iliad, the stories of The Bible–pretty much all of humanity’s first several millennia of myths, legends, and literature focus pretty heavily on what happens in the story (myths do so for reasons other than mere entertainment, as Geoff talks about here). More modern examples are no less abundant, and include summer blockbusters out of Hollywood as well as almost every fantasy, science-fiction, horror, mystery, or action/adventure book, game, television program, or movie. They are everywhere, and we love them.

Setting Focus

More travelogues than anything else, setting-focused stories go into great detail about the world in which the story takes place, with the plot and characters there merely to guide the reader. Probably the most famous example of a setting-focused story is Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. I don’t really have a good feel for how popular or common these kinds of stories are anymore, but my guess would be “not very.”

Honestly, if you’re heavily invested in a world of your own creation, I recommend that you tell your stories of it through interactive means. Introduce your world to others via games and actual character- or plot-focused stories, then provide additional background information to those who want it.

Final Challenge

Here’s a challenge for you: Next time you finish a story you enjoy (in any medium) take a moment to think about the story’s focus and how you could rewrite the story (with the same characters, basic plot, and setting) to focus on the elements the storyteller did not.