5 Cheap Tricks To Make People Like Your Story

Isn’t that what we all want?

1. Consistent Goal

Wandering characters make for confusing stories.

If your character wants to achieve something specific, the audience expects him or her to follow logical steps to complete the set goal. But if the character starts wandering off course and doing other things instead of achieving his or her goal, the audience is going to be confused and uninterested.

Goals can change, but if they do the change has to be explicit.

2. Dual Conflict.

Your character has a central conflict in his or her story, which is usually an external one, let’s say winning a piano playing contest. To achieve the goal of winning the piano contest, the conflicts the character faces must be external and internal, at least to some degree.

The internal most reflect on the external, so for example, the character can’t play a particular song because it reminds him of problems with his father, no matter how much he plays and injures himself after practicing for hours. He can’t get over the external conflict without resolving the internal conflict first.

Conscious goal vs. unconscious conflict. One is the key to the other.

3. “Enter late, exit early.”

Cut out all unnecessary parts of the story, keep it to the bare minimum.

Same can be said of each scene, cut out moments of characters entering rooms, exciting, talking to waitresses before other characters arrive, driving, anything transitionary that does not add to the story must go.

The audience doesn’t need to watch two characters enter a restaurant, get a table, wait for the waiter to come, order their food, to THEN get to the critical conversation or plot point.

CUT TO THE CHASE, but literally.

4. Theme & Message

People love stories that have a message, a consistent theme, or an idea that runs through it. You don’t have to be too heavy-handed, or the audience will feel you’re being preachy, but all stories are about something and leave some message at the end.

Know what your theme is and reinforce it throughout the narrative.

Character decisions at the end of the story a great moment to highlight the theme and the consequences of the previous choice will underline the message.

“Will Charlie shoot his longtime friend Bob to avenge his brother?”

Theme: Vengeance.

Charlie shot Bob… and later found out he was innocent.

Message: Vengeance is Bad.

5. Imply the ending.

Someone once said, don’t give the audience “4”, give them “2+2.” That’s excellent advice, which works even more so if you are at the end of the story.

If you are as clever as I think you are, you just realized you don’t even need to write the ending! The audience will write it for you.

Let’s use the “story” of our previous example.

“Charlie finds out he killed the only real friend he ever had, the police are coming after him, and what does he do? He loads his gun, gets a bottle of Jack, and sits on his porch. In the distance, red and blue lights shine under the overcast sky.

Charlie chugs a gulp of Whiskey down.”

We know what’s going to happen next, there’s no need to write it.

Now go forth and use the cheap tricks to get people to like your stories.

Write on, dudes!