250 Things You Should Know About Writing

The simplest motherfucker of a plot is this: things get worse until they get better. A straight-up escalation of conflict. It goes from "Uh-oh, that`s bad," to, "Uh-oh, it`s getting worse," to "Oh, holy shit, it can`t get any worse," to, "I think I maybe fixed it, or at least stopped it from being so totally and completely fucked." When in doubt, just know that your next step as a storyteller is to bring the pain, amp the misery, and escalate the conflict. That`s what they mean by the advice, "Have a man with a gun walk through the door." You can take that literally, sure, but what it means is: the bad news just got worse.

You as storyteller are a malevolent presence blocking the character`s bliss. You must be a total asshole. Imagine that the character is an ant over here, and over there is a nugget of food, a dollop of honey, and all the ant wants is to trot his little ant-y ass over to the food so that he may dine upon it. Think of the infinite ways you can stop him from getting to that food. Flick him into the grass. Block his path with twigs, rocks, a line of dish soap, a squeeze of lighter fluid set aflame. Be the wolf to his little piggy and huff and puff and blow his house down. Pick him up, put hin in the cup-holder in your car, and drive him 100 miles in the opposite direction while taunting him with insults. The audience will hate you. But they`ll keep on hungering for more. Will the ant get to the food? Won`t he? Will he find his friends again? Can he overcome? Primal, simple, declarative problem. You are the villain. The character is the hero. The audience thirst for this most fundamental conflict of storyteller versus character.

It is critical to know what a character wants from the start. She may not know what she wants, but the audience must have that information. Maybe she wants: her enemies destroyed, freedom from oppression, her child returned to her, true love, the perfect falafel, a pet monkey, the ultimate wedding, a secret subterranean base on the motherfucking moon. She can want a number of things, and it`s of the uttermost importance that we know what it is. How else will we know how far she`s come? How else can we see the stakes that are on the table? How else will you frustrate the piss out of the audience by standing in her way?

Writing isn`t magic. Writing is math. It`s placing letters and words and sentences after one another to form a grand equation. Writing is the abracadabra — the power word made manifest — but the story that results is magic. That equation we piece together tells a tale and the arrangement that leads to that tale is where the true art lies, because it takes an ice scraper to pretense and throws an invisible-yet-present tow line from present to past. Writing is craft and mechanics. Storytelling is art and magic.