How to write a good story (and how that applies to a slender verse work)

A story, simply put, is “a telling of a bunch of events that happen, and sometimes of the people they happen to”.

A plot, more specifically, is the events themselves, and the sequence they occur in. It’s the main thing that should drive a work, even if the characters’ reactions to it are more of the focus. In Fight Club, a man’s condo blows up, so he moves in with a messianic anarchist and sets up an underground boxing society. It grows out of control, turning into a terrorist organisation, whose plans the man foils. In Scott Pilgrim, a jerk starts dating a young woman with a lot of damage, and is attacked by her seven evil exes. He fights them off, thanks to becoming less of a jerk, and gets the girl.

A character is a person the plot directly or indirectly affects. The plot shapes them as it progresses and they in return shape and have impact on the plot. In Fight Club, the principle characters are the nameless Narrator, his friend(?) Tyler Durden, and Marla Singer, a love interest for Tyler and The Narrator. In Scott Pilgrim, the principle characters are Scott Pilgrim, his girlfriend Ramona, and her head evil ex and primary emotional baggage source Gideon. (There’s more to characters than this, but this section is centred around plot and structure, primarily.)

Plots themselves can come from a lot of places in relation to the characters. In many cases, the plot arises as the result of a larger external set of events in which the characters become involved. In others, the characters themselves instigate the events. In Scott Pilgrim, for instance, the plot arises mostly as Scott becomes involved in the wider conflict of Ramona’s baggage over her exes, which is represented in film as an evil organisation. In Fight Club, the narrator and Tyler, dissatisfied with their lives and their places as men, start the titular fight clubs that go on to shape the plot.

In the context of the slenderverse, either can work. While it seems more obvious to generate plot from the embroiling of the lead characters in involvement with Slendy, it could also work that the events which lead to the involvement in the Slenderverse are started by the characters.

The most important thing about plots is that they should be cumulative – the events within them should happen logically as a consequence of the previous events. When plot beat 3 happens, it happens within the context that plot beat 1 and 2 happened, and all the ways plot beat 1 and 2 shaped the characters and the wider plot should still be in place, being built upon by plot beat 3. The South Park guys do this perfectly; when they’re planning an episode’s plot beats, they never say “This happens and then this happens and then this happens.” They specifically link the events with either “and so” or “but”. As a result, they end up with a narrative which flows and builds clearly upon itself, as a good narrative does.

Consequently, the events of your plot need to be set up. Foreshadowing is the greatest advantage of planning

In summary:
- A plot is made up of a sequence of significant events happening to the characters, and the smaller events that get them there.
- The importance of plot vs the importance of character shifts, but plot is always important.
- The events of a plot (plot beats) should always happen as a clear, logical result of the previous plot beats.
- Decide your plot before you start.

Characters, in a single sentence, are the human faces of the story’s plot. They’re who we follow, who we hate or pity, who we empathise with. They give us perspective and their interaction with events around them is how we experience the story and the setting. Most importantly, they change with the story as they progress through it, and this change is known as a character arc. There are essentially two types of character arc – the route a person goes in relation to the plot:

Someone in a low position grows and overcomes internal and external obstacles to reach a high position and achieve their goals.

Someone in a high position is entangled and is slowly destroyed by external obstacles and ultimately their own flaws to fall from grace to a low position.

In classical parlance these arcs were referred to as “comedy” and “tragedy” (the use of “comedy” then was very different – with today’s sensibilities, the latter is much more common in comedy). In a slenderverse piece, in my own personal opinion, the second is preferable. It’s hard to be scared by a protagonist getting stronger and overcoming obstacles. This said, if you think you have a way to make the first one work, and are willing to use your time and reputation to do so, go ahead. Just remember that a prime example of that would be “FRAP and friends”.

Characters can be divided roughly into two categories: principal characters and background characters. The principal characters are the ones who make most of the decisions in the plot and generally are changed by it the most. Your protagonist and antagonist, as well as any deuteragonists you may have, fit this category. Your background characters are just that: they inhabit the subplots and tangents, or support the principal characters.

Now, if you’re writing a human or human-like character, you need to be able to make them feel like a real, understandable human, and in order to do this, you need to understand them yourself. You need to know what they’ve been through in their life so far and how that’s shaped them. You need to know the way they are, you need to know why they are the way they are, and you need to know how the way they are affects what they’ll do in your story. Like plot, what happened in the past is always a contributing factor in what will happen. A character’s experiences are the prism through which they view the world, and by sticking to a defined character and deducing logically how they would act you create a more believable character. Conversely, if you make them do something ridiculous or which doesn’t fit their pre-established character, the whole thing tears itself apart.

Ignore all of that with The Slender Man. He is nothing close to human, and making him more human would reduce the degree to which he is an effective villain. His incomprehensibility is one of the main reasons he’s scary. Just make sure that he’s always a threat, he’s always unknowable and he’s always in a position of power.

A character’s motivation – what they want to achieve – is one of the main aspects of their personality, and is what drives their journey through the plot. It should be clear what they want, and more importantly, what they want needs to be something the reader can get behind. This helps you write their course through the story, and it helps the reader understand them and invest in the story. That’s not to say that if you do a shitty job giving them a bad motivation, or not using it to drive their motivation, or just give them a terrible character, they’ll like them, but it’s a start. When planning your story, you’ve got to look at their motivation, how it changes them as they get closer to what they want to achieve, and ultimately if they still want what they want when they could potentially have it.

Another thing to keep in mind in any situation is each character’s degree of status and power – their ability to affect the world around him. This informs every bit of interaction they have with very other character. For instance, at all times except at their exact moment of loss, the antagonist must have greater status and power than the protagonist, and the protagonist in turn must seek power necessary to defeat the antagonist. In 99% of situations involving more than one character, there will be an asymmetric balance of power, and this is an important element of any characters’ identity and interactions with others; their place in the pecking order, how they feel about that, how they interact with people of higher/lower status . Always keep these things in mind when writing characters.

Be really really fucking careful about writing characters who are analogues of yourself. Really, the only thing you can use of your own is experience and perspective – anything else can get really alienating to people who aren’t you really fast. Also, when using a character perspective similar to your own, you have to stay self-aware. Knowing your own faults and limitations and getting over them earnestly is the only thing that’s going to sell it. Writing yourself as an ideal, or writing an ideal version of yourself, is a bad move. On top of this, it's really self-serving - it makes it seem as though you care more about writing about you doing awesome things than you do about providing a good story. I'll get into this later, in the writing part, but one of the worst things a story can be is overly self-indulgent.

Most importantly, when defining a character, one thing always stays the same; the reader has to want to spend time with them. Maybe they’re good guys they want to root for. Maybe they’re charismatic or funny. Maybe they’re mysterious and intriguing. Either way, enjoyable and compelling characters are the key to a story. People will enjoy a sub-par plot if the characters involved make for good company – for example, the first Guy Ritchie Sherlock Holmes movie. If people do not care about your characters, that’s the kiss of death for the entire project – we don’t care if they succeed, we don’t care if they fail.

In summary
- Characters should change as the plot affects them.
- Human characters should be intriguing, likeable, or compelling.
- Human characters need to be understandable. We need to see them as people, and the more connection we can make with them, the better.

Setting is where the story happens. Maybe it’s the present day. Maybe it’s a different time or different place completely. But either way, you need to understand it. When writing a story, awareness of the larger world around the plot plays a large part of defining the course of action. It limits or enhances what the characters can do. If a character has access to the police, they are empowered. If a character does not, they are confined. A character who can escape from where they are will act very differently to someone who cannot.

We experience this setting through the viewpoint character, the protagonist. A lot of characters, in a lot of works with potentially unfamiliar settings or circumstances will be everypeople who the audience can relate to and experience the world through. In the A Song Of Ice And Fire books, the viewpoint characters are often people heading off to unfamiliar places or strange new positions in the world; Jon to the wall, Ned to King’s Landing, Daneyris to the Dothrakhi hoard. Luke Skywalker was a farmboy who hadn’t seen much of the galaxy. Frodo had never left Hobbiton. This allows us to discover things as they do, allowing for exposition to be natural and setting to become familiar. Similarly, a character whose experiences are so alien to our own that we cannot understand them does not provide a particularly enthralling perspective.

Similarly, in settings where the circumstances are alien to the protagonist or where they are at a power disadvantage, the antagonist will generally be far more familiar with the situation, and represent far more power. By making grasping the situation and the setting analogous to gaining ground against the enemy, you allow for a very natural course of character growth, which develops as the reader makes their way through the story; as we read, and experience, the character grows stronger through learning the ropes.

In a Slenderverse context, this could be simply getting used to the state of being stalked by the Slender Man or being a runner.

First of all, if anyone tells you that you should write stories with three acts - a “beginning, middle and end” - you should punch them somewhere painful. The stomach and throat are good picks, but I for one and partial to punches in the kidneys. They’ll never see it coming.

There is a reason for this, I’m not *just* advocating random violence – though I am strongly advocating random violence. Looking at stories through the “beginning, middle and end” three act structure is a lot like looking at a story via something you may have heard of – “The Hero’s Journey”. Both of these things are really useful for what they’re meant for – stripped down, post-mortem analysis of stories in retrospect, often for anthropological ends. Both, however, have been hijacked by people looking for an easy way to reverse-engineer a story, and both lead to generic, interchangeable and often deadly-dull tales.

Structure is simply the sequence in which the things in your story happen, and the rise and fall of the story’s drama. It’s perhaps the trickiest thing to teach, because there’s two distinct layers to it, one being way simpler to teach than the other. And hey, you guys aren’t paying me, so let’s deal with the easy stuff first.

Essentially, as your story progresses, everything has got to become MORE. The protagonist is progressing more and more, gaining more and more of the things he needs to succeed, and in response, the antagonist is trying harder and harder to defeat him. The risks are getting more and more dramatic, there is more and more at stake, and the struggle itself is taking more and more of a toll on the characters. Ultimately, when it ends, however it ends, it does so BIG. In a tragedy, the fatal flaws and circumstantial traps finally drive down the protagonist and they’re left at their low point without the possibility of redemption. In an adventure, the hero risks everything to go after the biggest reward. The stakes are highest, our investment in the characters is at its peak, the shocks and surprises outshine everything else in the story. Everything comes to a head, and the story reaches its climax, the moment when everything is up in the air, and it could fall either way. For the first time, the protagonist has the potential to succeed, but at the same time, should he fail, the loss will be greater than it has been for the entire story.

The thing you need to take away from this is that the story requires escalation. It needs to get bigger and bigger. And as it goes along, events need to occur which propel the characters along the plot to the climax. These events divide up the story into “acts” – points of no return where the story or the stakes change in a way from which the characters cannot return

Now, planning structure is generally taught in three parts – the beginning, middle and end. This is silly for a few key reasons. The beginning is easy to write. If you’ve been pitching a story, your pitch is probably the beginning. The end is whatever your beginning requires for resolution. It contains the final position of the point of your work. Whatever it’s about, it’s never more about it than at the end. And the middle?

Well, this is where it falls down. I have a number of books on writing, and the section on “the middle” is always pitiful. It’s a large expanse of time, often the largest in the story, and if you’re instructing someone, you can’t just say “Here, you do stuff. Stuff happens. Make stuff happen. Also, rising action.” Yet too many people do. In the copy of “The DC Comics Guide To Writing Comics” that I have on my desk, the section on the beginning is five pages long. The section on the end is two pages long. The section on the middle is on an A4 page as long as my thumb. This is because when people talk about the middle, they’re talking about it within terms of analyses, where the beginning makes a statement, the ending reveals the film’s final position on said statement, and the middle looks at how it gets there. From a narrative standpoint, that doesn’t provide enough to move a story along or keep things interesting. I have no doubt that we’ve all seen films and read books where the middle was slow, flabby or uninteresting. This is because an awful lot of people

And so, for the sake of saving us all time, I’m going to give you my all purpose, as-used-by-Shakespeare-Tarantino-and-Whedon five act storyline:

1. We have the situation as it is. We have the setting, we have the principal characters before the plot gets going. We have any background conflicts established. For example, it’s in New New Detroit, a city controlled from the shadows by the mob, and the police are powerless to stop it.
   
2. Something changes, which begins the plot. This is the initial drive of the story, as something changes which forces the characters out of their routine and into the unknown. For example, a normal downtrodden citizen of New New Detroit finds out that they can fire lasers out of their left ear. This citizen then becomes Laser Ear, a superhero devoted to stopping crime with his power, and does so for a bit. They find the newfound power has gone to their head, having gone from a submissive, poor member of a city overrun by criminals, but at the same time, Laser Ear is scared to face the real bosses, for fear in their own ability to defeat them.
   
3. Something changes and makes things more complicated. This can be a twist, it can be a raising of the stakes. The entire tone and direction of the narrative can be changed here. All in all, it should be a turning point for the entire film, deeply affecting the film and twisting it into something very different. So at this point in our example, Laser Ear, in their attempts to fight someone, inadvertently destroys a building with a person still inside. Instantly everyone has turned on them – the mob wants them dead, the police have someone they can go after and seem effectual against, an enemy who’s not bribing them, and the populace thinks they’re a criminal who, unlike the mob, has the ability to cause mass destruction. Horrified by what they’ve done, Laser Ear goes into hiding.
   
4. The spiral towards the climax. Here, things begin to settle towards their final shape. We see tensions rising, stakes escalating. We see the characters react on a longer-term timespan to what happened in the third act, and making their decisions about the climax. It should be full of decisions and events – the story should feel like events are falling out of control and if the character doesn’t act now, they’ll lose everything. Here in our example, the mob-controlled government uses the excuse of stopping the Laser Ear menace to enact martial law, allowing them to exert force over a terrified and willing populace. At the same time, they’ve identified Laser Ear and have found their family, keeping them hostage and interrogating them to find Laser Ear. Laser Ear, shaken from their self-loathing and fear by these events, and ultimately deciding to face his fear of confronting the mob directly sneaks out and fights the corrupt cops and gangsters to arrive at the bosses’ hideout.
   
5. The climax itself. The key here is risk and reward – the chances for happiness have never been better, but there’s also the most at stake, and failure here is failure at which point everything is lost. The climax should also contain the ultimate point of the story. If there’s a message, the climax should revolve around it. If there’s a character arc or a lesson to be learned, the climax should be where it is realised. Everything that happens here happens as a result of what has been learned throughout the story. Every mystery comes to light. Ultimately, as a result of the climax, the characters find themselves finally successful or defeated once and for all, but the key is that this is the end. In our example, Laser Ear goes to confront the gang leaders. Laser Ear’s powers defeat most of the gangsters, but one mob boss holds a gun to Laser Ear from behind a family member – dear old great-aunt Maurine - demanding that they surrender. Laser Ear thinks back to the tower collapse. No longer scared and having come to terms with the damage they caused, they lunge for their family member and fire upwards, causing the building to collapse. The mob boss is crushed, but Laser Ear’s skill with the laser and newly-realised confidence allows him to destroy any building that threatens aunt Maurine and escape safely. Laser Ear emerges victorious, Maurine in tow, to a city now free of the mob, cheering their name.

Feel absolutely free to add more acts. The point of an act should be that it is a line in the sand, something from which the plot and characters can only add more acts. But the more there are, the more propulsion the story has, and the tighter and more focused it will be.

In a slenderverse work, I'd suggest a first act that really helps with a naturalistic feel; if you're not going straight into the slenderantics, it's worth using your blog or vlog as a blog or vlog first. Make it so someone couldn't look at it and go "Oh, it's a Slenderblog." For instance, my first blog, Old Celluloid, spent about its first month as a movie review blog. Writing your blog as a regular blog first will really help establish characters, context, setting and situation. I'd recommend it.

In summary:
- A plot should be arranged so that everything escalates and becomes more dramatic as things go on. The secrets come out, the plot becomes more complicated, the obstacles become more insurmountable, and the consequences for failure become steeper. Suspense should build, pace should quicken, urgency should grow and ultimately by the climax there should be no middle ground between winning and total, unrecoverable loss.
- A climax should ultimately contain the final point of the story. It should be the conclusion of the film in the same way an essay has a conclusion – not introducing any new elements, but bringing the established elements to a close, ending all the character arcs and ultimately concluding the story, placing the characters and setting in the state it will be in from here on out.
- Trying to write a story with three acts or other oversimplified, misapplied bullshit is much more likely to result in a dull story. The more complex your structure, the more likely it is to not have room to stray from its focal point.