The 3 Key Principles That Guide Every Great Story
How to tell important stories that feel both familiar, exciting, and alive
Every good story is…drum roll, please…Honest. Simple. And Unpredictable. Now, before I lose you, I know.
That sounds like a cop-out answer.
But that really is the secret to success in writing good stories.
Stories that move us, get a grip on our minds, and hold us far after the credits roll have a few things in common that often go undetected by our watching eye and listening ear. We’re simply along for the ride, unaware of how we’re so captivated or moved by a film.
If you’re a creator, though, like me, you’ve probably spent hours pondering about how to make your story work.
While I can’t promise you magic, and I certainly can’t promise you that telling good stories will be easy, I can promise you that these three principles will send you in the right direction to telling a truly powerful tale.
With that, let’s get into the three principles….
1 — Honesty
Every story we know and love is one that is honest. These stories speak to something true in us all.
This week I had the pleasure of attending youth camp with my church. on the last night, our senior minister got up and talked about an essential truth we need to all remember.
“Everyone feels this way.”
When he kept hammering that point home, I felt all of my defensive parts’ hackles raise. it’s weird to think that every insecurity I have is unoriginal. Every fear, worry, concern, and distortion of unacceptance and inadequacy are experienced simultaneously by just about everyone else in my life.
In the simple words from Dear Evan Hansen, “None of us are alone.”
This is the truth that runs all good stories. While we don’t all have the same experiences, opinions, or feelings about everything, there are universal truths and feelings that we all have.
To really stick his point at the end, the senior minister had each person in the room, young and old, stand for every statement they agreed with:
I am inadequate.
I often feel alone and not seen.
I am often plagued by fear and anxiety.
The list went on and on. And for every single one, just about every individual stood up in a beautiful moment of quiet solidarity between students and adults alike.
Good stories know that at our core, we want to know this — among other things. We want to know that we’re not alone and that we are not isolated in the feelings we have. We want to know that we’re unified with other human beings in our fears, wants, dreams, and insecurities.
Recently I was reminded of the beauty of Pixar movies, and why they hit home for so many people, regardless of their age.
Pixar films speak to something so visceral and vulnerable in us, dragging it out of us in a beautiful moment of powerful and moving fiction.
Finding Nemo is, for all intents and purposes in our emotional brains, about a father finding his son while simultaneously having to learn to let him go. Monsters Inc. is about a man becoming a father by accident. Toy Story is about growing up.
These films speak to core truths inside of us — reminding us that we aren’t alone through the brutal honesty of the human condition, thrown right us at with cartoon cars, monsters, and more.
And we eat up every moment because it’s true.
The beauty of the honest story, too, is that it works no matter the arena. It works whether your characters are toys in a little boy’s bedroom or orphaned princesses in a made-up country. (Sorry, I love Frozen…it’s a guilty pleasure.)
Just like in Star Wars or Lord of the Rings or whatever film is your fancy, the fantastical world and unbelievable powers, experiences, weapons, and places don’t make it any less true.
We know that so much of what we’re watching is real — because it’s creatures, just like us, trying to make their way through the world along a universal but honest and brutal hero’s journey.
2 — Simplicity
Closely related to the idea of emotional honesty, good stories are often, simple, too. This doesn’t mean there can’t be intricate plot points and innovative world-building. But at the end of the day, the story can easily be boiled down to its core.
This week I started reading The Anatomy of Story: 22 Steps to Becoming a MASTER STORYTELLER by John Truby. I would highly recommend it to any and all writers and creative people because it’s already changing my life.
“Stories are a communal currency of humanity.” — Tahir Shah, in Arabian Nights
In his book, Truby makes an excellent point about deepening the premise of your story. He writes about the beauty of Jurassic Park in his second chapter, where he hones in on the idea of a good premise and what he refers to as a “designing principle” that sets your premise apart from everybody else’s:
“Crichton’s story might have from from this designing principle: “What if you took the two greatest heavyweights of evolution — dinosaurs and humans — and forced them to fight to the death in the same ring?” Now that’s a story I want to see.”
The idea here is that a lot of films have the same premise. This is why we have things like tropes and cliches. It’s also why there’s such a phenomenon in the film industry of “twin films” — where two movies come out with similar plots.
It’s also why we get a lot of young adult novels that honestly just feel very similar. I’ve always thought that Divergent and Hunger Games are very similar, with similar premises of a dystopian society set somewhere in America.
“You take people, you put them on a journey, you give them peril, you find out who they really are.”― Joss Whedon
They’re both about a 16-year-old female heroine, separated from a sibling, in a dystopian society, who ends up in a relationship, and has to fight to fix the world…or something like that.
However, these stories, films, and books alike, are still vastly different from each other because the designing principle is different.
In Divergent, the designing principle is about separating a dystopian society into five different factions. That principle both allows for stories of disagreements and drama between the factions and also explores the ideological, logistical, and political reasons for such a division.
Similarly, but in its own vein, Hunger Games very simply poses the question: What if we handled food insecurity in a competition setting? And how evil can the government of a future dystopian America get?
“Stories don’t show the audience the ‘real world’; they show the story world. The story world isn’t a copy of life as it is. It’s life as human beings imagine it could be. It is human life condensed and heightened so that the audience can gain a better understanding of how life itself works.”
― John Truby
While the stories have plenty of room to flesh out and grow into something great, their designing principle is rather narrow and clear, posing interesting questions that pull readers in when they’re studying a back cover.
Designing principles are simple but slightly expanded premises that pull us in and keep us engaged.
3 — Unpredictability
Finally, every good story has to be unpredictable — but at the same time, emotionally honest, true to the character, and followable.
Many a fumbling and eager artist has attempted to make a story that was unpredictable and wild while confusing everyone along the way.
“Every time I go to a movie, it’s magic, no matter what the movie’s about.” — Steven Spielberg
I can (all too easily) recall the times that I wrote what I thought was an incredible skit as a child or the most amazing short film ever — only to watch it later and watch my audience stare at the screen and then at my face in turn in confusion.
I’ve seen other people do the same. Sometimes it looks like a children’s leader at church sneaking a line into the Vacation Bible School skit that no child seems to get, or a movie being so stylistically fascinating that there’s just no story to follow amongst all the special effects.
But still, good stories are unpredictable.
We live for the line we weren’t expecting.
Good stories balance a healthy dose of formulaic/obvious and beautifully ridiculous. I think that How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days is one of the greatest examples of this type of story. In that film, you know exactly what’s going to happen. You know that they’re going to end up together. You know that they’re both going to figure out each other’s plot and have to fight before that happens.
”You can make anything by writing.” — C.S. Lewis
That film promises you two things: She will not lose the guy in ten days. And you have no idea how it’ll happen.
Good stories don’t use the same devices over and over again (I trend I feel like Marvel has been leaning a little too much into recently…) They have a few moments you can see coming, but just as many that you’re taken aback by in a way that leaves you curious and pulled in.
Depending on the story, it has you crying, gasping in surprise or horror, or smiling at the amazing turn of events that you just witnessed.
These great stories are so good that they don’t feel like a story anymore — they’re undetectable as fiction in your mind. You’re truly transported to a different time and place, captivated by the words of someone who’s just making things up.
But for the time you’re reading/watching/hearing the story and in moments afterward, you believe that it’s the truest thing in the world.
There’s no true formula to a great story.
At the end of the day, you as the writer will have to figure out the ins and outs of your great tale that will change the world and positively influence peoples’ lives. But I think these three principles will at least help you get started.
Stay honest, stay simple, and stay unpredictable. Best of luck!
Kindly, Katie
Enjoyed this story? Feel free to read some more of my work!
