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The Art & Business of Writing Podcast with Nicolas Cole
Your Characters Should Make Surprising But Believable Choices
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If you want to write more compelling stories, then I have a little writing exercise for you. So I call it Coming up with Surprising but Believable Choices. What's funny about storytelling is that you're always playing within these boundaries. You know, readers want characters or want stories where the characters in the story do the unexpected thing they expect them to do, which is a really important nuance. All right. What this means is every single thing that you choose to share with the reader needs to fit within these guardrails, where it is both surprising and yet unsurprising or believable at the same time. And so I think it'd be helpful to first unpack these words so we understand what we're talking about here and then talk about how to practice this. Lately, I've been really obsessed with this idea of isolating individual writing skills and. And then coming up with exercises to practice just that individual skill, opposed to, you know, what I've done for years, which is just think, oh, I want to write this new project, and, oh, if I just create this big project, then I will get better at being a writer. I think that works earlier in your career because any progress is progress, but the more proficiency you build, the more that you have to isolate individual skills and then repeatedly practice just that skill. Okay, so if you don't know who I am, my name is Nicholas Cole. I've generated over a billion views on my writing. I've written 10 books, including the Art and Business of Online Writing and more recently, Writer Career Paths. And I have this channel where I like sharing helpful writing tips. And so that's why I'm here, and I want to help you become a more successful writer in the digital age. And I have a newsletter on substack called the Art and Business of Writing. So if you ever want to read the version of this that I'm walking you through, then come subscribe to the newsletter. All right, so first, let's talk about maybe the greatest surprising but believable choice ever in storytelling, which is. And if you haven't seen the movie at this point, I hate to be the one to give you the spoiler, but you had, you know, 30 years, so I don't know what to tell you. One of the greatest surprising but still believable choices ever. It was in Star wars when Darth Vader admits to Luke that he is his father. And this was such a. This is a great example of a choice that is both so surprising and yet still believable at the same time. Right. It's surprising because the story has clearly pinned Luke and Vader against each other. You wouldn't think that these enemies were actually related, right? They're family, like the epitome of love. But it's also believable because of some of the limitations of the story. There are only so many Jedi in the world. In hindsight, some of the clues make sense. You know, Luke hasn't known the identity of his parents. He just knows that his father fought in the wars and was a powerful figure. So there are these little Easter eggs dropped throughout where by the time this choice lands, it's not so far outside of the realm of. Of believability. And this is the line that you're straddling whenever you're telling any sort of story. It doesn't even matter if it's nonfiction or fiction. Memoir is a great example of this. The details that you choose to share need to sit within these constraints. It has to be surprising and unexpected and yet also fit within the world of believability and be the thing you expected the character to do. Which is a really funny duality to balance. Now, why are both of these guardrails so important? Well, if we separate them, believable is boring. If I tell you a story and everything that happens is so believable that you see it coming, like, there's no surprise. You're like, yeah, that type of person would have done that type of thing. And there's. There's no element of surprise, then it's really boring. Right? There's no sense of novelty. You need. You need things whether they're big or small, you need little surprises to pull the reader along. Okay, so it can't just be believable, but it also can't just be surprising. I like phrasing this as surprising is a shtick where, yeah, if you make a really absurd choice once, maybe the reader goes, haha, that was crazy, right? But if you just keep stacking absurdity after absurdity, unless, of course, that is like the style that you are trying to go for, then it starts to feel sort of like a joke you've heard over and over and over again. And you're like, all right, I get what you're doing now. It's not believable enough. And so you want to think of these as like bowling. When you go bowling, it's like put on the bumpers, and if the ball goes right, you want to play within the realm of believability. And if the ball goes left, you want to play within the realm of. But it's still surprising. And you don't really want to completely rotate in one direction or the other. You want to stay in the middle. Now, I've been giving some thought as to how you can identify and stress test whether a story is doing this well. And so these are some things that I've pinpointed in both my own writing, but also things that I've read that show. It's an easy giveaway to. To see whether or not a piece of writing has failed the stress test of successfully navigating this, what's known as suspension of disbelief. The first one is that in some way the story contradicts its own internal logic. So all of a sudden the character has a skill that we've never seen them have before. All of a sudden they experience something that doesn't really make sense in this world or in this setting. Those are things that sort of break that suspension of disbelief and. And they make the reader not trust the world that they're in anymore. The second one is coincidences solve problems instead of characters having to figure things out on their own. So this is what's known as a deus ex machina. So this is where it's like, oh, my God. The characters are backed into a corner. Everything is stacked against them. There's no way they're going to survive. And then magically, some big thing appears and now they're safe. And then they win, right? Those little choices, you can get away with them here and there, but they're giveaways that you haven't really stress tested. Some of the decisions that back those characters into that corner where we don't get to see them fight their way out, we don't get to see them overcome the obstacle that they've been put in. Some external force just comes in and saves the day. The third, and this is a big one for me, is dialog sounds like the writer talking, not like the character themselves or not like a person. You can almost always identify this, that you can really identify this in bad movies, for example, where the character becomes the mouthpiece either for the writer inserting the plot, the character's like, because you remember why we have to save Grandma because she forgot to pay the insurance bill. And it's like, well, we could have shown that we don't have to just say that. So the writer is using the character as a mouthpiece to state the plot or, and this is more common in novels, I think, is the character becomes a mouthpiece for the writer's own opinions or perspectives and things that almost don't even feel like they're part of the story. You feel like the writer is inserting their own commentary. These are other good examples of how the writing has drifted outside of the boundaries that it's trying to create. Remember, the joy of a great story is of a great novel, of a great movie, is to create these containers where when you are in that container, when you're in that world, you know the rules of that world. And you can break those rules in a literal sense, but you can also break those rules in a stylistic sense. The fourth one is research fails conspicuously. So it's like you pick the wrong item in the wrong era, or you use the wrong form of speech for the wrong character or for the wrong era. It's clear you didn't do your research. You don't know anything about medicine, but the plot is set in a hospital. And you're like, anyone in medicine would know that you don't know anything about medicine. Right? My sister, for example, is a violinist. And whenever we're watching a movie and the character is playing the violin, she always gets upset. She's like, oh, they're not even holding the violin the right way, you know? So it's little things like that where you want to make sure that for readers who are really educated about the thing that you're writing about, you are delivering on their expectations, you're doing justice to that topic. And then lastly is over and over and over again, the stakes of the story just sort of deflate. They don't go anywhere. You take a tangent and you go down one hallway, and then nothing really happened. Mystery stories, like murder mysteries, are a genre where this mechanism gets broken and overused a lot. Especially nowadays. I feel like whenever I watch some sort of murder mystery show on Netflix, it's very common for the show to make you feel like this character is a big threat for the first episode, and then turns out they never were the threat. And then they do the same thing in the second episode. You're like, oh, it's got to be this character. And then that character was never the threat. And if you do this sparingly, it's a fine mechanism. It works. But if you do it over and over and over again, it kind of becomes a shtick. Right? That's why I say surprising is a shtick. Because if you're so reliant on that to pull the story forward, then every time you take the reader down a new hallway, if the stakes have been Deflated in Hallway 1 and Hallway 2, the reader is going to start thinking, oh, well, why should I even bother going down hallway three? Because I know it's not going to go anywhere. I know the stakes are going to die, deflate, Right? So you start to actually build this relationship with the reader and you set these expectations and then you fail to deliver on them. So how do we practice this? Right, because again, going back to what I said at the beginning, I've been really obsessed lately on how you identify individual skills in the broad craft of writing and then how you create exercises to repeatedly practice that skill. And what I like the way that I've done this for myself and a way I like breaking this down, is recognizing that whenever something happens in your story, it could happen to one character. It could be happening with multiple characters. Whenever something happens, whenever there is movement, you have a new choice. You have a new choice to make. And the game is, how do I make the next choice surprising and believable. And so I think a way of training your brain to identify A, these opportunities and B, the more important sub skill is identifying the different options that you have. Okay, I love using the analogy of chess. It's like if you're playing the game of chess, there are multiple right moves on the chessboard at any given time. And writing is the same way every time you make a choice, there are multiple right moves for where you can move the story next. And so I think it's helpful to train your brain in thinking in options. It's not so much like, all right, I did this. Now what's the one right answer? No, no. Okay, this thing happened. Now what options are available to me? And so the three categories of option that I like thinking about, and I mostly encourage this so you can train your brain to also recognize what isn't a good choice is, first, you have the believable but unsurprising choice. So it checks one of the boxes, but not both. Right. And then second, you have the unbelievable choice, the surprising choice, but it's not believable. So that's the other side of the spectrum. And then third, you have the believable but surprising choice. It's the best of both worlds. And so, for example, if I'm writing a story, and let's say we're writing a story about a high school football star who gets into a near fatal car accident, okay, the believable but unsurprising choice is the high school football star gets hit by a drunk driver. Like we've all seen. I think that's what happened in remember The Titans. Like, how many times does that happen in movies and stories? Like, all the time, right? Like, star, drunk driver. Oh, nothing wrong with that. But, like, very predictable, very believable, very cliche. The second option, the unbelievable choice that would break the rules of this world that we've created would be the high school football star gets hit by his arch rival's mother, who wants to murder him to see her own son succeed. Surprising. But, like, do we really believe that a mom of another player would kill, like, run over with her car, would kill the high school football star just to see her son succeed? Like, maybe if the situation was extreme enough. But, like, that starts to. That starts to break the suspension of disbelief, you know, that starts to get slightly outside the realm where we're like, yeah, I don't even really know what would motivate someone to do something that drastic, Right? So then we go to the third one, which is the believable but surprising choice. So the high school football star gets hit by his alcoholic coach and mentor, whom we've watched struggle with alcohol the whole story, and whom we've also watched the high school football star try to help and repeatedly fail. So that is very interesting, because all of a sudden, this whole story, we're like, oh, look at this dynamic. This kid has so much promise. This coach is clearly being, like, a great mentor and maybe even father figure for this kid, but is struggling as an alcoholic. And we feel the tension of this looming threat. And we want to see them grow together. We want to see them help each other. But because the coach can't overcome his own inner demons, he ends up accidentally killing the person that's closest to him, the person that he was relying on the most. You can see how that choice. There is a surprising element to that. That is a twist. You're like, whoa, I was not expecting that. And I can see the setup leading to that, but at the same time, it's also very believable because of all the things that we're saying came before it. And this is the whole art. And I think something that has taken me a really long time to learn, like, this is such a great example of an individual skill, something that's taken me a long time to learn that in the past. I might view something like this and think, if I want to get better at this skill, what I need to do is I need to write more entire stories. I need to write more entire books, entire novels. And in reality, you can practice skills like these in much smaller containers. You don't actually need to go write an entire new book to practice just this individual skill of thinking in surprising and believable choices. All right, like, I didn't write a book about a high school football star. I just sat here and thought about it for 30 seconds. So you can create a smaller container to practice within. And so here's how I would break this apart as an exercise. Here's how to practice making surprising but believable choices. So first, make a list of all of the things that happen in your story. You might even break it down smaller and just go, what are all the things that happen in Act 1? Or even smaller, what are all the things that happen in chapter one? Or even smaller, what are all the things that happen in the first story. Story that I tell inside of chapter one, try and pick the smallest container you can. And then next, within each thing that happens, within each action, you want to come up with these three different categories of choice. So actually give yourself permission to come up with the believable but unsurprising choice. So this thing just happened in my story. What would be believable but unsurprising? Train your brain to recognize the wrong choice just as much as you're training the brain, your brain to recognize the right choice. You know, then the second one, what is the unbelievable choice? Right? What's the thing that breaks the rules of our world? That's another helpful thing to know. All right, don't do the first one, and don't do the second one. And then once you kind of get the garbage out with don't do believable, and don't just do, you know, unbelievable or surprising, then that will help you get some of the bad ideas out. And then you land on the third one, which is, okay, so what's the believable but surprising choice? And I think if you take the time to do this for even, like, four or five actions in any given story or any given chapter, the amount of clarity that you get over how you twist the wrenches and you move the story along is incredible. And even just, if I'm being honest, even just writing this out as a newsletter and now articulating it in video and audio form for you, even just doing this was such a great mechanism for me to think about it and to practice it. And then I also created the exercise, so then, you know, I can go into a fresh word doc, and when I'm working on a new story, I can go, okay, chapter one. These are the things that happen. How do I improve the choices? How do I make each choice both believable and surprising. So this is something I've been thinking about a lot. I hope it's helpful. I think if you have two takeaways from this, it's one the importance of thinking in surprising but believable choices. But the more important takeaway two is to identify individual skills that you want to improve at as a writer and isolate them with writing exercises. Don't feel like I have to write a whole new novel to get better at writing? No. You identify one sub skill, one specific thing you want to get better at, and then you create a tiny exercise, a tiny container, so that you can repeat that exercise and build that skill over and over and over again. I hope that is the main and meta takeaway here.