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What “Show, Don’t Tell” Actually Means

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in Craft

Successful Fiction Writing = Creating + Organizing + Marketing

I blog weekly on one of the above three topics, alternating between them. This week, I’m blogging on Creating. Today I’m blogging about the completely useless advice that every novelist has been given: “Show, Don’t Tell.” What does that mean? What are you supposed to do with it?

The World’s Worst Advice

Lazy editors since the beginning of time have scribbled “Show, Don’t Tell” on novel manuscripts and handed them back to novice writers without any explanation. If you’ve ever been infuriated by this advice, you’re not alone. It’s bad advice. 

The reason it’s bad advice is that it tells you to “Show, Don’t Tell,” when you need to be shown how to “Show, Don’t Tell.” It’s very meta, in the worst possible way. 

I’m thinking that the next book I write in my Advanced Fiction Writing series should probably cover this topic. But I haven’t written that book yet. I did spend a couple of chapters on the subject in my best-selling book Writing Fiction for Dummies (see chapters 10 and 15, if you have the book). In this blog post, I’ll lay out the basics. 

The 7 Tools of a Novelist

Novelists typically use 7 tools to write their stories. Here they are (and I’ll define them, with examples, a bit further down in this article):

  1. Action
  2. Dialogue 
  3. Interior Monologue
  4. Interior Emotion
  5. Sensory Description
  6. Narrative Summary
  7. Exposition

The first 5 of these (Action, Dialogue, Interior Monologue, Interior Emotion, and Sensory Description) are what editors mean by “Showing”. The last 2 (Narrative Summary and Exposition) are what editors mean by “Telling.” 

None of these are “always right” or “always wrong” to use. Each of them has a place, and part of the art of fiction writing is knowing which tools to use for any given paragraph. When an editor scrawls “Show, Don’t Tell” in your manuscript, they mean that the particular section they marked should use the “Showing” tools, rather than the “Telling” tools. 

But you can see the problem. Just saying “Show, Don’t Tell” doesn’t give you any guidance on which of the 5 “Showing” tools to use. Nor does it give you any insight into why Narrative Summary or Exposition was the wrong choice for the offending paragraph. 

This is a large subject, so the best I can do in this article is to give you definitions of each of the tools, along with examples.

What Action Means

Action means that you show your characters doing something. Here is an example:

Hermione swung her heavy sword at the werewolf’s neck. 

The werewolf ducked and lunged straight at her.

Hermione twisted hard to the right and kept spinning clockwise. She brought her sword up to chest level and threw all her weight into the swing. 

The sword bit into the werewolf’s throat. 

The above snippet is pure action. Nouns and verbs. If you do your Action right, you create a video in your reader’s brain.

What Dialogue Means

Dialogue means that you show your characters saying something. Here is an example:

“Are you going to answer my question?” Mr. Darcy said. 

Lizzie scowled at him. “You are the last man on earth I should ever be prevailed upon to marry.”

The above snippet is mostly dialogue. Words within quote marks. The first sentence ends with a dialogue tag that tells us who the speaker is—Mr. Darcy. The second sentence begins with an action tag for Lizzie. When writing dialogue, you can use either kind of tag, or you can leave the tag off completely, if you’re certain the reader will know who’s speaking. If you can’t be sure, it’s best to include a tag. If you do your Dialogue right, you create an audiobook in your reader’s brain.

What Interior Monologue Means

Interior Monologue means that you show one of your characters thinking something. You often put this into a paragraph that also includes Action or Dialogue. There are two flavors of Interior Monologue, direct and indirect. Direct Interior Monologue shows the thought in exactly the words the character thinks them. Indirect Interior Monologue summarizes the thought. Here are examples of each, paired with Action:

Katniss fired an arrow at the Gamesmakers’ table. Have a nice day, bozos.

Katniss fired an arrow at the Gamesmakers’ table. She didn’t care if it hit any of them, as long as they got the message. She was not somebody to ignore.  

The first snippet is direct Interior Monologue; the second is indirect. Direct Interior Monologue is often italicized, but not always. It is never necessary to add a tag, such as “Katniss thought.” Most novelists choose to get inside the head of only a single character (the “viewpoint character”) in any given scene, so the reader will always know who is doing the thinking.

If you do your Interior Monologue right, you create an audio voiceover in your reader’s brain.

What Interior Emotion Means

Interior Emotion means that you show your viewpoint character feeling some emotion. This is not as simple as telling the reader what the emotion is. That is considered “telling.” Instead, you typically do this by showing a physiological reaction that implies an emotion. A little Interior Emotion goes a very long way, so you almost always team it up with Action, Dialogue, and/or Interior Monologue. Here is an example:

“Just give me your wallet and everything’s going to be fine.” The knife point pressed lightly into Reacher’s back. All his body suddenly felt cold. He knew that voice. He’d heard it on six different tapes. This was the RSB killer—Rob, Stab, Burn. Everything was not going to be fine.

This paragraph begins with Dialogue, followed by Sensory Description—the knife point in the back. The  only Interior Emotion is the short sentence in which Reacher’s body goes cold, a feeling that is commonly associated with fear (although fans of Jack Reacher know that he’s rarely scared). Then there’s some indirect Interior Monologue. 

It is not necessary to get fancy with your Interior Emotion. Tell the physical sensation that your viewpoint character feels. If you do it right, your reader feels the same emotion as your character, even though your reader probably doesn’t feel the physical sensation associated with the emotion.

What Sensory Description Means

Sensory Description means that you show what your viewpoint sees, hears, smells, tastes, or touches. This can stand alone, or you can mix it with any of your other tools. Here is an example:

The moon’s surface was blindingly white, pocked by a thousand craters. The black sky touched the horizon absurdly close. Dust rooster-tailed behind the rover that was racing away at six kilometers per hour—faster than a human in an EVA suit could run. Jazz looked at her arm readout. She had 18 minutes of oxygen left, and civilization was three kilometers away. Her comm link continued to crackle useless static. She took a sip from her water supply. It was lukewarm and tasted like dirty gym socks. 

This paragraph is mostly Sensory Description, with a little Action (Jazz looking at her watch) and a little indirect Interior Monologue. You might wonder if the rover racing away is Sensory Description or Action. My view is that it’s a little of both. I tend to reserve the term Action for people who have agency, and I use the term Sensory Description for inanimate objects. The rover might be driven by a person with agency, and it might be an AI with some level of agency. Or it might be just out of control. We don’t really know, so my call is that it could go either way and it’s not worth arguing about. 

Remember that you are not painting a picture, you are telling a story. Sensory Description works best when it serves the story. In the example above, all the details described highlight the predicament Jazz finds herself in. 

If you do your Sensory Description right, your reader sees and hears and smells and tastes and feels exactly what your viewpoint character does. You have put your reader inside your character’s skin, and that’s a win.  

What Narrative Summary Means

Narrative Summary means that you are summarizing a story without using much Action, Dialogue, Interior Monologue, Interior Emotion, or Sensory Description. That can be very efficient at moving through time to get to the interesting stuff. But it should never be used on the actual interesting stuff. 

Here’s an example of Narrative Summary that does the job it’s intended to do:

When I got on the plane at LAX, I was trying desperately to figure out what I’d tell Corleone about where his investment had gone. My flight attendant read my situation from the get-go and kept bringing me courage in a bottle at about three times the recommended weekly allowance. Somewhere over Indiana, I briefly considered becoming a priest. Or a pirate. Or a peony. About the time we settled onto the runway at JFK, I made the decision to tell Corleone the truth. He wouldn’t like it, and maybe he’d have one of his guys work me over, or maybe I’d wind up in the wood-chipper. But I didn’t care anymore. Like my first girlfriend told me, “No brain, no pain.” 

The paragraph moves our character from LA to New York. More importantly, the lad is making what can only be described as a Poor Life Decision. We don’t see any of the logic, which is probably for the best, because no amount of logic will get him to this decision. But copious amounts of the demon drink will do the trick. Note that this is a summary of many unseen events. We don’t see a single bottle. We don’t hear a word of Dialogue, nor Interior Monologue. It’s all just summary. But this paragraphs gets our boy where the author wants him to go in 122 words, which is a lot less than a scene would take. So this is a serviceable bit of Narrative Summary. Even though it’s Telling, not Showing.

Now let’s see where Narrative Summary goes wrong. And this is where an editor is going to hit you with a big red “Show, Don’t Tell” sticker. Let’s show the scene where Corleone sics his thugs onto our hapless protagonist.

When I was done talking, Corleone yelled a bunch of insults at me and told his thugs to beat me up. They took me outside and hit me thirty or forty times. It hurt bad in several places. I begged for mercy. Then one of them shot me.

This 48-word paragraph is way too little. It summarizes a terrifying and violent scene and the reader feels pretty much nothing. The right way to write this requires all the Showing tools you’ve got—Action, Dialogue, Interior Monologue, Interior Emotion, and Sensory Description. To do this well, you’d need anywhere from 500 to 1500 words. I don’t have the word count allowance for that here, but here’s how it might start.

“…so I lost it all on blackjack in Vegas,” I said.

Corleone just stared at me. A vein throbbed in his neck. I thought he was going to have an aneurysm for sure. He leaned back in his chair, and said…

OK, I’m going to stop right there, because what Corleone said can’t be printed in a family newspaper. But feel free to write the rest of the scene yourself. It’s not going to be pretty. It is going to take a bunch of words. Because Showing is inefficient. It burns word-count like crazy.

Narrative Summary is efficient, but it’s usually boring, so it’s your job to make it as unboring as possible while keeping the word-count low. Narrative Summary works best when there’s a bit of story to be told, but it unfolds over a long stretch of time. It works worst when it blurs over the exciting parts of the story that your reader really wants to see, hear, smell, taste, touch.

What Exposition Means

Exposition means that you explain some set of facts that your reader needs to know. Maybe it explains the physics of zero-gravity. Or the history of mockinjays. Or a complicated bit of politics in your storyworld.

There are many places where you need to inject some facts into your reader’s brain. You can do it economically with Exposition, and that’s not bad. 

Book 1 in the Harry Potter series begins with a full page of Exposition, describing the Dursley family. Charles Dickens begins his novel, A Tale of Two Cities, with a famous bit of Exposition—“It was the best of times; it was the worst of times…” These are both examples where Exposition works very well. 

If Exposition goes on too long, or if it doesn’t really serve the story, the reader will get bored, and that’s a major problem. 

You can juice up Exposition by having one character explain it to another in Dialogue. When an editor writes “Show, Don’t Tell” on a bit of Exposition in your novel, they may be urging you to do just that. The problem is that Dialogue used as a smokescreen for Exposition can be just as boring as the original Exposition, while chewing up twice the word-count. So this is not always a great strategy. 

My advice on Exposition is to think three times about how much you really must have. Use the minimum amount of Exposition to get the job done. And then go back to Showing your story. 

There is much more I could say on all of the above. I’ll say more in future blog posts. For now, I leave you with…

Homework:

  • Look at the most recent scene you wrote. Analyze every single sentence in the scene. Is it Action? Dialogue? Interior Monologue? Interior Emotion? Sensory Description? Narrative Summary? Exposition? Some mixture?
  • Are you doing too much Telling? (This is common.)
  • Are you doing too much Showing? (This is less common, but equally lethal.) 
  • Do you like the balance you strike between the 5 different kinds of Showing? 

The Three Pillars of Marketing

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in Marketing

Successful Fiction Writing = Creating + Organizing + Marketing

I blog weekly on one of the above three topics, alternating between them. This week, I’m blogging on Marketing. My topic today is what I call the Three Pillars of Marketing. Everything you will ever do to market your novel falls under one of these three pillars. But let’s deal with the elephant in the room first…

All Novelists Hate Marketing

Yes, all novelists. At least those with a conscience, and all the novelists I know are good people who have a conscience. None of us wants to be a marketing weasel. And all of us have run into marketing weasels. 

For the last few months, a robo-caller has been calling my house many times every week, claiming to be from “The Home Improvement Group.” I’m not interested. I have talked to a couple of the actual humans behind the robo-caller and asked them to put me on their Do Not Call List. But they keep calling. Over and over. And they fake their Caller ID, so it’s not always obvious that it’s them again. 

Let’s define a marketing weasel. A marketing weasel is somebody trying to sell you something under one of the following three conditions:

  • You don’t need it. 
  • You don’t want it. 
  • You can’t afford it.

So how do you avoid being a marketing weasel? It’s really pretty simple. You aim your marketing ONLY at your Target Audience. Let’s review the meaning of that term.  

Your Target Audience

Your Target Audience is the set of all the people in the world who would love your fiction, if only they knew you existed. Let’s be clear that some fraction of your Target Audience actually does know you exist. But not all of them. Most of them never heard of you.

It doesn’t make sense to market your novel to people outside your Target Audience. They’re just not that into the kind of fiction you write. Some of them might like your novel, sorta-kinda. Most of them just won’t see the point. Some will actively hate your novel. 

It makes all kinds of sense to market your novel to people inside your Target Audience. By definition, they want your novel—or they would if they knew it existed. 

And if someone wants your novel, then they also need it, because all humans need Story. Story is how we make sense of the world. Story is what keeps us alive and helps us thrive. Story is the rocket fuel humanity runs on. 

And books are pretty cheap, as compared to most other stuff. If somebody wants your book and needs it, they can almost certainly afford it. 

I strongly recommend that you market your work ONLY to people in your Target Audience. They want it; they need it; they can afford it. If you tell them about it, you’re not being a weasel. You’re doing them a favor.  

But then how do you actually do your marketing? There are three things you need to do, and only three things. But you have to do them in the right order. I call these the Three Pillars of Marketing. Here they are:

  1. Attract your Target Audience—let them know you exist.
  2. Engage your Target Audience—earn their trust by being trustworthy.
  3. Convert your Target Audience—ask for the sale.

The First Pillar—Attracting Your Target Audience

Most people in your Target Audience don’t know you exist. They don’t know you wrote a novel. They don’t know what your novel is about. 

Attracting your Target Audience just means that you somehow make that connection so they know those basic facts about you and your novel. There are thousands of marketing tactics to make that connection. We can talk about those later. I’ve talked about some of them in previous posts on this blog and in the Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine that I used to publish. I’ll continue to teach specific marketing tactics in future blog posts, because tactics come and tactics go. But the principle is forever—do what it takes to Attract your Target Audience and ONLY your Target Audience.

The crucial thing is that any marketing tactics you use to make the connection should be honest. They should make it crystal clear to each person that one of two things is true:

  • They are in your Target Audience. 
  • They are not in your Target Audience.

When choosing marketing tactics to Attract people in your Target Audience, give enough information to repel people who are not in your Target Audience. That’s right, repel them. You want to drive them away. You only want people who are in your Target Audience. If somebody is dying of thirst and you don’t have water, don’t try to sell them pretzels. Point them to somebody who sells water. 

As a side note, one reason for writing a One-Sentence Summary of your novel is that it Attracts people in your Target Audience and repels people who are not in it. Both sides of this coin are important. 

The Second Pillar—Engaging With Your Target Audience

Assume somebody knows you exist and that you wrote a novel that would interest them. It’s way too early to try to sell them your novel. 

That’s like asking somebody you just met to marry you. They may be attracted to you. But they don’t KNOW you. They don’t trust you. Yet.

Engaging with your Target Audience means that you spend time earning their trust. You earn trust by being trust-worthy. This may take a long time or it may happen quickly. If you were selling them a big-ticket item, like a life-insurance policy or a ticket to the moon, you would need to spend quite a lot of time. Big-ticket items require a lot of trust. 

A novel is a smaller-ticket item. The money is probably not the main issue. If your book is priced in the $5 to $25 range, that’s usually not a big deal to a reader. Readers pay that kind of money all the time. 

The main issue is the reader’s time. It may take 5 or 10 hours to read your novel. Your reader can never get back those hours, if you waste them. So you need to show that you can be trusted to give 5 or 10 hours worth of value. 

You have many possible tactics to Engage with people in your Target Audience. I’ve talked about some of them in the past and I’ll talk about many of them in the future. But the principle is the same for all these tactics—you must show that your potential reader can trust you with several hours of their precious time. 

The Third Pillar—Converting Your Target Audience

Assume you’ve Attracted someone in your Target Audience and you’ve Engaged with them enough that they know they can trust you. Now what? 

Ask for the sale! Don’t make it complicated. Give them a way to buy. 

Converting your Target Audience means that you make it easy for them to buy your novel. There are a number of ways to do this. The principle is always the same. Make it obvious how to buy your novel, and make it as simple as possible.

Three Marketing Rules To Live By

Let me summarize with three rules to live by:

  • Don’t try to Convert somebody you haven’t Engaged with. 
  • Don’t try to Engage with somebody you haven’t Attracted. 
  • Don’t try to Attract somebody who’s not in your Target Audience.

Homework:

  • Think about the last novel you bought. How and when were you Attracted? How were you Engaged and how long did it take? How were you Converted? 
  • Have you ever bought a novel, and then it turned out you were not in the Target Audience? What went wrong that led you to buy a novel that wasn’t right for you?

Using AI Effectively

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in Technology

Successful Fiction Writing = Organizing + Creating + Marketing

I blog weekly on one of the above three topics, alternating between them. This week, I’m blogging on Organizing. My topic today is the very controversial question of how novelists might use AI effectively. 

Why Blog About AI?

AI is massively controversial. So why am I blogging about it? Because you, my Loyal Blog Readers, asked me to. I recently asked you all to let me know what topics you’d like me to blog about. Just about half of all the questions you raised had to do with AI. Some of these questions were specific, and some were open-ended. 

I have huge trepidation in tackling this subject. Nothing I say will make everyone happy. But my thinking is that this is important to talk about. AI is part of our future, whether we like it or not. There are a lot of issues, and my space is limited, so I can’t cover everything, and I don’t intend this as the final word. Some caveats first.

Let’s be clear that AI is a huge resource hog. It uses massive amounts of water and electricity, and for some people this is a show-stopper. If that’s you, then I respect your opinion. I agree that this is a gigantic problem that is extremely urgent. But this blog post is not about environmental issues of AI. 

Furthermore, AI may well be a threat to humanity. It’s plausible that AI could take over the world and decide that humans are more trouble than they’re worth. If you refuse to use AI because it’s a potential Skynet, then I respect your opinion. Again, this is extremely urgent. But this blog post is not about the doomsday prospects of AI. 

Some of you have decided that, despite the very real downsides of AI, you still want to use it, because it also has some very real upsides. But you want to use AI effectively and ethically. The rest of this blog post contains a few thoughts on that. (Only a few. Whole books could be written on this, and I’ve got limited word-count.)

First, we need to distinguish two very different ways of using AI.

Two Ways to Use AI

Amazon’s content guidelines distinguish between “AI-generated” content and “AI-assisted” content. 

  • Content is “AI-generated” if an AI created the content, even if you made revisions afterward. 
  • Content is “AI-assisted” if you created the content and then used AI tools to help improve it (editing, error-checking, etc.) 

Amazon requires you to disclose AI-generated content, but not AI-assisted.

For me, personally, AI-generated content is a hard no. I have no interest in reading a novel written by an AI. I have no interest in writing a novel with AI. I think most authors agree with me on this, but a few don’t. If you use AI-generated content, then you have an ethical responsibility to let potential readers know that. 

I don’t have a problem with AI-assisted content. AI can be useful in doing research, in brainstorming ideas, in editing. Let’s talk about that.

Using AI for Research

AI is well-known to “hallucinate” sometimes. “Hallucinate” means that it gives a wrong answer to a question, often very emphatically. 

In my experience, this is more of a problem on topics that are “fuzzy” than on topics that are well-defined. I have seen more hallucinations when I ask questions about history than when I ask about math. 

If you’re going to use AI for research, then treat it the same way you’d treat a human who has read a lot of books but has a fallible memory. Humans will sometimes reconstruct memories based on what they think “ought to have happened.” I do that. You do that. It’s how our brains are wired. AI does that too.

So check everything you possibly can that an AI tells you. Ask for sources. If the reasoning seems fishy, push back on it. Most AIs will apologize when you catch them in an error. But they may then give you another wrong answer. So never blindly trust what an AI tells you. AI is a conversation partner. It’s not God.

Using AI for Brainstorming

Some people think better about their story in dialogue with someone. That’s how my brain is wired. I “think by talking.” So I sometimes need to solve a story problem by talking it out with somebody else, even if they’re not a writer, even if they don’t understand my story. The act of trying to explain things to them helps me understand it better myself. 

AI can be a sounding-board, if you need this kind of help. I have sometimes used an AI to talk out an issue in my story. There are a couple of points to be wary about. 

Some AIs can be very sycophantic. They’ll tell you what a genius you are, what a marvelous story you’re spinning. Ignore this. The AI is designed to keep you chatting. The more flattery it heaps on you, the longer you keep talking. 

Some AIs will offer up suggestions for how to improve your story. Take these with a huge grain of salt. The AI doesn’t fully understand the world we live, much less your fictional storyworld. It may hand you a mediocre idea. Be ready to say no, or to argue with it. But also be ready to see a useful idea when it comes up. Sometimes a bad idea is a stepping-stone to a good idea. 

Some AIs will then offer to write the scene for you. I always reject this offer flat-out. No, I don’t want an AI to write my story. Even if it could write better than me (I doubt it) I don’t want AI to do my writing. The joy of writing is in the writing. 

Using AI for Editing

A lot of writers use AI to read their manuscript and make suggestions for how to improve it. I have not done this myself. However, I have used an AI to critique software I’ve written, and this has always been useful.

Once again, you should be wary of the sycophantic AI. It will tell you that your work is a Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. A little of this is helpful, if you’re like most writers and think your writing is the worst drivel imaginable. If you need a little positive feedback to get you through the day, then this can be a good thing. But when you start believing you’re a Staggering Genius, that’s the time to tell the AI to dial it back. 

In general, the critique an AI will give you has variable quality. Sometimes it will nail a serious problem. Other times, it will confidently tell you something that’s plain wrong. It’s on you to use your critical thinking skills to tell the difference. Treat the critique from an AI the same way you’d treat the critique from a human. Push back and explain why. This will force the AI to try again, and sometimes it gets it right on the second try. Or the tenth. 

Homework:

  • Are you OK with using AI at all? Why or why not? 
  • Are you OK with AI-generated content? Why or why not? 
  • Are you OK with AI-assisted content? Why or why not? 
  • Do you know enough about your storyworld to be able to do research using AI and check its claims? 
  • Do you need a sounding board to help you brainstorm your fiction? 
  • What types of editing might you allow an AI to handle, and are you able to tell good editing from bad? 
  • If you’d like to discuss this with me, feel free to email me. This is a tough subject, and I know some of you have strong opinions. I’m here to listen, and you may well change my mind or teach me something. I’m OK with that. 

Why Your Story Question Matters

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in Craft

Successful Fiction Writing = Organizing + Creating + Marketing

I blog weekly on one of the above three topics, alternating between them. This week, I’m blogging on Creating. My topic today is: the “Story Question” of your novel.

What is a Story Question?

Every novel has a Story Question—a central question that drives your reader to keep reading. A novel that doesn’t have a strong Story Question is a boring novel, and it’s easy to put down “for later.” But later may never come. A novel that has a strong Story Question keeps the reader turning pages, no matter how late the lying clock says it is.

A central part of your task as a novelist is to create a Story Question in your reader’s mind—a Story Question that won’t quit. As we’ll see, there are naive Story Questions, and there are Story Questions that make your novel unforgettable. 

Examples of Story Questions

A few examples should help clarify things. 

In The Lord of the Rings, the wizard Gandalf tells the hobbit Frodo very early in the story that the magic ring Frodo has inherited is toxic. It’s so morally dangerous that nobody can be trusted to keep it. The Ring will corrupt all who own it, and the most powerful will be corrupted fastest. And the evil Lord Sauron is looking for it now, because it will greatly increase his power over Middle Earth. The only solution is to unmake the Ring—to cast it into the Crack of Doom where it was forged, many hundred miles away in the evil Land of Mordor, under the watchful eye of Lord Sauron. The Story Question is “Will Frodo destroy the Ring of Power—or will it destroy him?”

In Ender’s Game, Ender Wiggin is a six-year-old boy living in a future version of Earth obsessed with fear that an alien ant-like race (the “Buggers”) will return for a Second Invasion. The First Invasion failed, thanks to a once-in-a-millennium military genius named Mazer Rackham. The home planet of the Buggers is many light-years away, but the First Invasion was many years ago, and now the time is growing short. When the Second Invasion comes, who will save the planet? A Battle School orbits the earth where genius children are sequestered in an unnatural environment where they are trained in military arts. The greatest honor any family can have is to give up its son (or occasionally its daughter) to be trained in Battle School. The Story Question is “Will the commanders of Battle School be able to train Ender before the Buggers arrive—or will they break him in their mad rush to beat an impossible deadline?” 

In Outlander, Claire Randall is an English nurse vacationing in Scotland in 1946 with her husband Frank. They were separated for most of the War, and now they’re trying desperately to reconnect. When Claire touches a mysterious standing stone at the mystical site Craigh na Dun, she finds herself transported back in time to 1743. She’s immediately kidnapped by some Scottish rogues and taken many miles away from the standing stone. The Story Question is: “Will Claire find her way back to her own time—and will she go back if she can?” 

How to Raise Your Story Question

So how do you raise the Story Question in your novel? Should you just say it straight out?

You can, but if you do, it’s likely to be very simple and on-the-nose. Readers prefer a complex Story Question, one they participate in, one they figure out for themselves. Once a reader fully understands your Story Question, they feel an ownership in your story, and they’ll be deeply invested in your novel. For hundreds of pages. Maybe thousands.

It’s important to note that the real Story Question is not the naive one that the reader initially sees. A naive Story Question is one-dimensional—a will-he-or-won’t-he proposition. A strong Story Question has a hidden gotcha buried in it.

In The Lord of the Rings, the naive Story Question is: “Will Frodo destroy the Ring of Power?” This assumes that destroying the Ring is easy. Just take it to your nearest Crack of Doom and drop it off. But the Ring corrupts all who touch it, and Frodo has touched the Ring. The nearer Frodo gets to the Crack of Doom, the stronger the Ring’s power, and the greater his urge to keep it. The reader soon realizes that Frodo might not have the moral strength to destroy the Ring. And now it’s a real Story Question, with teeth of iron. The Ring might very well destroy Frodo.

In Ender’s Game, the naive Story Question is: “Will Ender be the Chosen One, the next Alexander the Great?” But all the clues from the first chapter onward scream that he will. So this is not a great Story Question. However, even in the first chapter, it’s clear that Ender is being manipulated by the adults—put in danger from other kids, bullies who are much bigger and stronger. Ender is smarter than any of the others, but brains only go so far in a fight. Can he keep winning, even as the bullies get stronger? And if he keeps winning, will he lose his goodness—that thing that keeps us rooting for him? That’s a much stronger Story Question. Will we still like Ender when he becomes the next Alexander? 

In Outlander, we get a hint of the Story Question in the brilliant first two sentences of the epigraph: “People disappear all the time. Ask any policeman.” So the naive Story Question is “Who is going to disappear?” Soon enough, we guess that it’s Claire, the lead character of the story. When she does disappear, going through time at Craigh na Dun, the Story Question evolves to be a bit more interesting: “Will Claire get back to her own century?” But we’re not done evolving. Claire quickly finds herself attracted to Jamie Fraser, a handsome young Scot. She can deal with mere physical attraction. But then she’s forced to marry him, and she soon realizes that he’s her soul mate. So now the Story Question becomes a terrible dilemma. Maybe Claire doesn’t want to go back. She loved her first husband Frank, yes, but he’s not here. And he’s definitely not Jamie. In a situation like that, what would you do? Now there’s a Story Question to keep you reading until your nails are chewed right through.

Homework

  1. If you subscribe to BookBub, you get an email every day with short summaries of half a dozen novels at great prices. Read through today’s list and look for the Story Question. Is it a naive Story Question or a complex one? Or do you have enough information to even make a guess at what the Story Question is?
  2. Pick your 5 favorite novels of all time. For each one, write down the naive Story Question and any more complex Story Questions that emerge as the story evolves. What is the dilemma that the final Story Question raises?
  3. For the current novel you’re writing, what is the naive Story Question—the one you show the reader first? How far into the story are you before you reveal this Story Question? Do you evolve it later into a more complex Story Question? Can you sharpen it to have a more powerful dilemma? 
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