Do You Focus on the Choices of Your Characters? Choices are crucial to all stories!
Life is a series of choices. And so is a story!
It is said that a human being makes something like 5,000 choices a day. Art is an essentialized and dramatized vision of reality. How many explicit and hard choices do characters in your stories make?
All the key characters in your story should be forced to make tough choices, but this is especially so for the two lead characters. To better understand this vital writing issue, let’s focus on its application to the protagonist.
First, what is a choice?
In a story it’s basically a decision between two ideas, values, or options with big consequences and stakes. Let’s look at some classic stories and see how they are predicated on big life and soul-impactful choices:
In The Godfather, Michael has to choose if he will be an honest civilian and good husband or evil mafioso and lying husband.
In The Browning Version teacher Andrew Crocker-Harris must choose if he will retire as a weak failure or as a man and a success.
In Casablanca, Rick must choose if he will join the war against the Nazis and love the woman he thinks betrayed him or remain isolated from life.
In Tootsie, Michael has to choose if he will be a good man/woman or an asshole.
In An Officer and a Gentleman, Zach Mayo must decide to be a loner or a lover.
In Saving Mr. Banks, P L Travers has to decide if she will deal with the heavy baggage of her dead father and thus be able to sell her Mary Poppins story to Walt Disney.
An audience watches a story such as these classic films to see what the characters will choose. What will be consequences of their choices? How will they react to these consequences? What action will they take or reject taking? And so on. The audience knows and cares (even if just implicitly) that life is choices.
Note that while many stories are predicated on a character making a huge life changing choice these characters also must make many smaller choices during their story journey. All these choices are important dramatically and should drive the story. The conflicts and events will influence the choices. And the choices will cause the conflicts and events. Logic.
Actionable Creative Takeaway
You must focus on choices in your story!
Look honestly at your own life. See the terrible choices? See the successful choices? See the big consequences to both? The lover lost, the career ruined, the child hurt. Or: The lover found, the career made, the child helped, and so on.
Take this life important connection between values, choices, and consequences and apply it explicitly to your stories. A good story, like a good life, is not a series of this happened, then this happened and then this happened. Events, events, events.
Humans have agency! We make choices. If we choose to. Writers should see a story as an escalating series of harder and more consequential choices. Until in the climax the characters make their last choices and that leads to a final victory or defeat.
To stress the point: Never forget that an important and productive way to look at story structure is that it is a series of ever harder, higher-staked, and narrower choices. You must go through your story and make sure it builds towards and plays from the big character choices.
Now you have a choice!
Will you close this page and forget this principle of life and writing? Or will you choose ways to learn and apply this vital lesson for writing all your stories? Choices have consequences….
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