Consistency and logic in storytelling
After watching “The Long Night” (Game of Thrones S08E03), I had a very sour taste in my mouth. I discussed the episode with friends, browsed online and quickly realized that I’m not an outlier. In fact, a few weeks later and after the 8th season finished, a million disappointed fans signed a petition to remake the show. So, what caused this reaction and what can aspiring writers (or anyone, really) learn from it?
Note — This article IS NOT about Game of Thrones specifically, even though we’ll be referencing the series throughout. It’s become the norm to bash the writing of the 8th season, so I won’t reiterate what others have said already.
Instead, this is an analysis on the way we craft stories and what we can do to avoid the same pitfalls as the writers of GoT.
Consider this for a moment. Why are we all so fascinated by stories?
Great stories can move and shape our society. Some do it quietly, almost without us even noticing, and some do it with acts of imagination or intellect that turn us into breathless witnesses.
The next thing you know, there’s millions of fans following along together, reading all the books, speculating on fan theories, watching movies and dressing up as their favourite characters at international events.
We seek these stories to be immersed in a different world, to let our imagination roam and to escape our reality. Have you ever lost track of time while reading a book you love? Or maybe you binged a TV series all night, and realised it’s too late to sleep when the sun came up? That’s the magic of great stories, that’s our goal.
So, how do you get people in that mental state? Well…you have to thread carefully, aspiring writer.
In the beginning
You’ve decided to create a new world and write about it.
It has it’s own different rules, crazy and inspiring characters and hopefully, an interesting plot to unfold. After the initial set up and throughout the story, your audience must believe that everything happening in the story is consistent - it is believable in its context and it makes sense. As long as the audience believes and trusts the story, they will relate to their favourite characters, share their hopes and conflicts and fear for their lives when in danger.
It doesn’t matter if you’re crafting a story with magic and dragons or technologically advanced civilizations with lightsabers. Logic and consistency are the threads you use as a writer to bind everything together and make it believable. You want readers to be engrossed, viewers unblinking and everyone taking in the wonders of the world that you’ve created.
This all sounds great, but keeping people’s attention consistently is a difficult task, and there are many challenges along the way …
The issues
When you ignore your rules or forget about consistency, people will notice. If you state that something is true, it has to stay that way for the entirety of the story. The viewers must believe, regardless of where it takes place - a fantasy or the real world.
One mistake and the audience can start thinking “Wait…what? That shouldn’t have happened!”. Slip up once, and they’ll be confused. Slip up several times, and they’ll start questioning everything that’s yet to come. They are no longer immersed and you’ve lost your grasp on them. They are back in the real world and looking at your flawed story, questioning everything about it. They may even hate you for it.
If you don’t want that to happen to your audience, here are three very important steps you should follow:
1. The World
As there are certain rules and guidelines in our reality (or simulation for the Elon Musks out there), so there should be in your world. Gravity pulls us down, fire is hot and water makes us wet. This is a constant and our readers can derive conclusions based on this. If a person walks into a burning house and never leaves, we know what to expect without the need for a detailed explanation.
So how does this apply to the episode we mentioned in the beginning? It has been very well established that anyone can die in the world of “Game of Thrones”. So when we see Jon Snow leave defenseless Sam to be surrounded by hundreds of white walkers (an army of undead who destroyed thousands of battle-hardened soldiers), we expect Sam to die as well. The same would apply to almost all major characters in the episode. There are several scenes where we see them overrun by skeletons without any hope of escape. And yet, when the camera comes back to them, they remain unscathed.
Seeing a slobbering fat man survive something that thousands of soldiers could not, removes the threat completely. The enemy is no longer scary, they become absurd or even amusing.
You can build a world with rules to your liking, but you have to stay vigilant. These are the strings that guide your story and every characters’ actions. From page 1, they must remain the same until the very end.
2. The Characters
Let’s imagine a graph representing a character’s decisions.
Static — — — Self-Improving — — — Inconsistent
On the left side, we have characters that never improve, never change and always make the same choices. Unless that’s your desire for a specific storytelling purpose, this would be a rather boring character to follow.
On the opposite side we have characters that are inconsistent. They have a chaotic personality, they can do anything and aren’t bound by any rules. If your characters become this inconsistent, they stop being different from one another. Readers won’t care about them and any tension you’ve tried building up will be destroyed by their inner chaos.
That’s why your characters must have personalities and things they will always do and things they’ll never do. If you describe a character as honest, moral and peaceful in the first few chapters, it would be rather unsettling to read about them decapitating innocents in the next ones. Unless there’s a very serious reason for it in the story (they’ve gone absolutely bonkers), people will intuitively know how characters should and shouldn’t act.
Littlefinger won’t stop climbing up the ladder. Ned Stark will never ignore his moral compass. Harry Potter will never abandon his friends. Ramsay Bolton will always find satisfaction in torturing people. Batman will never kill.
There’s a lot in between Static and Inconsistent characters. This is a spectrum that you can explore freely, but cautiously. In this area, your characters can change and grow, but still remain “themselves”.
3. The Labels
The labeling of the world you’ve created is the third step of this arduous process. And it’s probably the most boring one.
Names, places and terminology.
Labels are the first way you can add characterization to the world and objects in it. They are the first encounter of your readers with something brand new, so you can always use this to your advantage. Even made-up words can carry a lot of weight to them. Mordor doesn’t sound like a great place to live now, does it?
Sometimes a name is all you need.
The mere sounds of names can get your audience to make conclusions, so naming everything will be important and challenging. But keeping everything consistent, that’s doubly important.
Consider creating a glossary for your fictional world. For characters, spell out their full names and titles, as well as any nicknames other characters might have given them. For locations like cities and named buildings, include a list of where they are, who lives in them, and what their significance is. And for words you’ve made up, define them - and use these definitions consistently.
Conclusion
Even though I haven’t published a novel or a screenplay myself, I felt compelled to examine the issues that writers encounter when dealing with long and complex stories. So when you start crafting your magnum opus one day, I hope these pointers help guide you in the process.
And if you feel like you don’t have it in you to write such a story, it’s better to just start somewhere. You will improve your skills and knowledge with time. The first step is the most important one.
There’s a great story in everyone, and yours deserves to be told.
