The Expanded Ultimate Story Checklist: Is there one character whom the audience will choose to be their hero?

As I said earlier, audiences will always choose one character to represent their point of view and their interests. This is their hero. Even in an ensemble story, or a story about various walks of life, the audience will choose one character to primarily identify with. They have to—that’s how we’re hardwired to process stories. 

You may wish to equally privilege various characters, but the audience will usually choose only one to fully identify with. In Traffic, only Benicio Del Toro’s story is really compelling, because he has the biggest challenge. The other stories are there to make various points, but once we’ve identified with Del Toro, it becomes more and more annoying to cut away from him. We know who our hero is.

So you have to acknowledge that your audience will begin your story by desperately searching for a strong character to identify with, and that they will expect the story to follow the arc of that hero’s problem from beginning to end.

It’s important to remember that your audience must identify with your hero, but they need not sympathize with the hero’s larger goal. “Antihero” stories are extremely hard to write well, but they can become beloved when done right. As we watch Breaking Bad, we fully identify with the tragic hero Walter White, and we even get pulled into rooting for his little schemes in most episodes, but we always hope that his business will ultimately fail and that he will learn the error of his ways, before it’s too late. This powerful irony fuels the show.

But wait, now let’s look at an example that breaks this rule and gets away with it: “A Game of Thrones”

One of the primarily rules in my book (In fact, I elevate it to the status of “Law”,) is that, even if you’re writing an ensemble story, you have to accept that readers will always choose one character to be their hero, and invest their hopes and dreams in that one character. And I still believe that, despite the striking counterexample of this book, which has eight roughly-equal points of view characters, many of whom have a claim to being “the” hero of the book.

Does it get away with it? Yes, it does. How? Well, I make it clear in my book that any rule can be broken, but you have to know you’re breaking it and accept that you’re going to frustrate your audience. My rules are just warnings about expectations your audience will have, some conscious, some unconscious. As a writer, you need to be aware that your audience will seek to identify the one hero of your story, and they’ll be frustrated with you if they can’t do that.

“A Game of Thrones” is the ultimate example of the oft-misunderstood phrase, “The exception proves the rule.” We are acutely aware of this rule as we read because he’s breaking it. Martin knows that we want one hero, and toys with that expectation for a long time before he finally denies it utterly.

Our identification is indeed split. Martin creates empathy for seven of his eight POV characters, (All except Sansa. Even when we’re in her head, we’re just looking down on her) and each of those is the hero of his or her own story, and potentially the hero of the whole series, but for most of this book, we do settle our hopes on one hero: Ned. He is the one trying to solve the book’s biggest mystery, and he is the glue that holds the other heroes together.

In addition to his own chapters, four of the other POV characters are his children, and one is his wife. That just leaves Tyrion and Daenerys, who complicate things. Tyrion is brother to Ned’s nemeses, and we have complicated emotions toward him. We know he’s not our hero, but we can’t help but like him, and we’re even tempted to trust him. When he goes to fight alongside his brother, we feel betrayed that this likable character is siding with evil. Even then, we root for him not to get killed, and at the end when he’s sent to King’s Landing to be the Hand of the King, we’re hoping he will mitigate Joffrey’s evil.

Daenerys is the most audacious break with audience expectations, in that her heroic storyline is almost totally separate from the others. She is the best argument that this is a book with more than one hero. But it’s essential that, at key points, Ned acts the save the lives of both Tyrion and Daenerys. Unlike the next two books, in which Daenerys’s storyline will be totally divorced from the rest of the book, a key turning point in this book is when Ned throws away his job in an attempt to save the life of this would-be queen halfway around the world. Likewise, Ned sends word to his wife at one point to release Tyrion when she has him prisoner in a deadly situation.

So we readers, as I say in my book, are indeed desperately searching around for one hero to invest our hopes in, and we find one, despite the fact that we have so many options to choose from.

Then he gets his head chopped off.

But the whole power of this moment is that it’s so shocking, and it’s so shocking because we’re sure he’s our one hero. That is the whole trick of this book. Martin knows that he’s breaking the law. He’s intentionally creating cognitive dissonance. He’s being puckish. He’s being audacious. He’s blowing our minds.

Of course, after this happens, we’re lost. We’ve never had a book chop off the head of the hero and just keep going before. So once again, we desperately search around for a hero, and don’t know where to turn. (Ironically, I think that most readers will land on Robb, even though he’s not one of the eight POV characters, and won’t be in any subsequent books either.)

Martin is toying with our genre expectations. He seems to think that fantasy readers have too simplistic a sense of moral complexity, and he’s using that to trap us. He knows that we’ll look for the one right hero, and settle on Ned, rather than, say, Jon or Daenerys, then he’ll force us to rewrite our sense of right and wrong and look for heroes in places we may not have looked for them before. That’s his whole point.

If you break a law, you will frustrate your reader. If that’s your whole goal, then go right ahead!

Okay, let’s see how the movies I’ve looked at have done with this rule:

The 40 Year Old Virgin	YES.  Andy.
Alien	NO. Not until very late, when we finally settle on Ripley once she takes over.
An Education	YES. Jenny
The Babadook	Yes and no.  Our identification shifts, but one could argue that Amelia remains the “hero”, because we’re still rooting for her to get over it once she’s possessed, and not for Samuel to defeat her.
Blazing Saddles	YES. Bart
Blue Velvet	YES. Jeffrey.
The Bourne Identity	YES. Jason, although our loyalty to him is tested at times.
Bridesmaids	YES.
Casablanca	YES. Rick.
Chinatown	YES. Jake
Donnie Brasco	YES.  Donnie.
Do the Right Thing	YES. Mookie, for lack of a better one, but he’s relatively passive and we’re never sure if he’s a hero or an anti-hero.  It’s interesting that Mookie is sometimes the POV character and sometimes not.  Sometimes he leads us to the next character and sometimes the camera jumps away from him independently.  It’s almost as if the camera is the hero, sometimes agreeing with Mookie and cutting along with his perspective, sometimes cutting in opposition to his POV to things that impeach what he just said, or impeach what he’s about to say. (The case can also be made that Buggin’ Out is a co-hero or co-anti-hero, because he’s the one who is actually driving the plot and Mookie is just reacting.)
The Farewell	YES. Billi
The Fighter	YES. Mickey.
Frozen	YES. Anna, though it does a good job of also allowing it to be Elsa’s story in secondary way.
The Fugitive	YES. Kimble.
Get Out	YES. Chris
Groundhog Day	YES. Phil.
How to Train Your Dragon	YES. Hiccup.
In a Lonely Place	YES. Dix.
Iron Man	YES. Tony.
Lady Bird	YES. Lady Bird
Raising Arizona	YES. Hi.
Rushmore	YES. Max.
Selma	YES. MLK
The Shining	NO. This movie has one hero at a time but it’s a tag-team effort: first Jack, then Danny, then Jack, then Wendy, then Halloran, then Danny.
Sideways	YES. Miles.
The Silence of the Lambs	YES. Clarice
Star Wars	YES. Luke, though we find Han more appealing.
Sunset Boulevard	YES.  Joe

The Expanded Ultimate Story Checklist: Is the concept simple enough to spend more time on character than plot?

When I started out writing screenplays, I had a weakness for overly complicated plots, because I would ask myself the wrong questions. Is that it? Are there enough twists? Is there enough story? Does it feel big enough? Does it feel like a movie? And so I would pile on twists, escalations, and reversals until it really felt like a movie. After all, only in a movie would all this crazy stuff happen to one person!

At first, my elephantine plots combined with my flabby scene work to create first drafts that were upward of 150 pages. Even a beginner knows he's done something wrong when that happens. (In screenwriting, every page is supposed to equal a minute of screen time, so you don’t want to go over 120 pages.) Soon, I figured out how to make scenes as lean as possible and to strip away enough subplots so my screenplays were squeaking in just under the line at 119 pages.

But I gradually realized that these 119-page wonders were still not working. A lot was happening to my heroes, but they had little time to think about it or react to it. There certainly wasn’t any time to pre-establish what their expectations were before a scene happened, so nothing had any irony when it hit.

I eventually realized my heroes were going on massive external journeys and teensy-weensy internal journeys. My first instinct was to add some “character scenes,” but I was already out of room page-wise. Even if I shaved off another plot twist to give them some rumination downtime, it was too little, too late to create a fully realized character.

Here’s the problem: When I was asking, “Does it feel like a movie?” I thought the key word was movie, but I should have focused on the word feel. If it doesn’t feel like a movie, don’t amplify the movieness of it all; amplify the feeling. This is the difference between complicated and complex. All the complications in the world don’t add complexity, which is what makes a story great.

I suddenly realized my characters spent all their time talking about the plot, explaining it to themselves and explaining it to the audience. This is inevitable when the plot is too complicated. But a good plot should be simple enough that both the characters and the audience understand it just by looking at it.

Once I understood my characters needed to have deeper emotional stakes—and they needed to talk about something other than the plot at least once per scene—I knew my plots needed to be massively downsized. I had been so proud of myself for shrinking my three-hour plots down to two hours, but now they needed to get even leaner: I realized that a good two-hour movie has a one-hour plot.

Die Hard, for all its little twists, is a relatively simple, self-explanatory story: Gunmen have taken over a bank’s headquarters and hold everybody hostage long enough to drill into the vault. The reason this fills two hours is the hero isn’t only figuring out what’s going on, but he’s also dealing with his own personal baggage, since the villains attacked during a massive emotional crisis.

In Die Hard 2, the same hero has no personal baggage, no emotional crisis, and never discusses anything but the plot. The extra room this creates in the script is filled by a far more complicated plot that’s not at all self-explanatory. In the first movie, you can tell what the bad guys want to do just by looking at them. In the second, both sides have to keep explaining every step of the process. Die Hard has a one-hour plot, stretched to two hours by John’s emotional crisis. Die Hard 2 has two hours of pure plot, which leaves us exhausted but not exhilarated.

No matter what type of fiction you’re writing—a novel, a play, a TV episode, etc.—you should always try to have a plot that only fills half your pages, and then let your complex scenes expand to fill the rest with unexpectedly volatile emotional complications.

The 40 Year Old Virgin	YES. Very much so.
Alien	NO. There’s not a lot of plot, but not a lot of character either.  Both are sacrificed in favor of tone.
An Education	YES. Very much so. It’s 90% character.
The Babadook	YES.
Blazing Saddles	YES. Pretty much.  The 90-minute movie takes a full 30 minutes to construct its outlandish premise, but it’s time well spent.
Blue Velvet	Yes and no.  There’s lots of plot, but it mostly takes place off screen and remains unexplained so that the movie can focus on character
The Bourne Identity	YES. there are no plot twists in the second half, just character twists.
Bridesmaids	YES. We all know the steps leading up to a wedding, so there’s almost no time spent on setting up plot, it’s all character.
Casablanca	YES. the plot is very simple.
Chinatown	NO. Not really.  There’s a tremendous amount of plot.
Donnie Brasco	YES.  In the deleted scenes, needless complications, like Donnie getting audited, are cut out.
Do the Right Thing	YES. Very much so.  There’s almost no plot.
The Farewell	YES. there’s very little plot.
The Fighter	YES.
Frozen	Not really, there’s a ton of plot, and many of the plot turns are somewhat awkward.
The Fugitive	YES.
Get Out	YES.
Groundhog Day	YES. Plot and character are inextricable here.
How to Train Your Dragon	YES.
In a Lonely Place	YES. the plot all happens offscreen, all we see are the emotional reactions to it.
Iron Man	YES. There’s actually relatively little plot, especially for a super-hero movie.
Lady Bird	YES. Very much so.
Raising Arizona	NO. Not really.  It’s pretty complicated.  The first ten minutes is all narrated montage.
Rushmore	YES.
Selma	YES. It’s not an epic bio-pic of either man.  It’s about the emotional journey the two men go on over the course of a month or so.
The Shining	YES. As opposed to the book, Jack’s internal problems drive the movie, not the external complications.
Sideways	YES. Very much so.
The Silence of the Lambs	YES. We understand the problems and goals quickly.
Star Wars	Yes and no.  There’s a lot of plot, so much so that we need an exposition pre-roll, but compared to the prequels, it’s fairly straightforward.
Sunset Boulevard	YES. There’s very little plot.

Marvel Reread Club Episode 8: November 1962

Steve and Matt Bird · 008 Marvel Reread Club November 1962

Welcome back to the Marvel Reread Club! This episode tackles November 1962, including Fantastic Four #8, Incredible Hulk #4, Journey Into Mystery #86 featuring Thor, Strange Tales #102 featuring the Human Torch, and Tales to Astonish #37 featuring Ant-Man. Ether buttons! Commies disguised as aliens! Convenient amnesia! Tech bros! Antapults! Check it out!

The Expanded Ultimate Story Checklist: Is this a story anyone can identify with, projected onto a bigger canvas, with higher stakes?

“Write what you know” really means you should write the emotions you know, but put those emotions into a more extreme situation with a lot more at stake. 

This is what it means to dramatize. In real life, nobody wants to have “way too much drama going on right now,” but when it comes to stories, that’s exactly what you want. The same types of things that happen to you are happening to them (the same universal emotions, the same universal dilemmas), but in the fictional version, the highs are higher, the lows are lower, and the potential consequences are far more life shattering.

You totally identify with the hero’s situation and emotions, but you get to vicariously experience the thrill of a much bigger transgression than you would ever actually commit, followed by the pain of the big consequences you’ll never have to suffer, followed by the gratification of a big transformation that is always out of your reach. And if, along the way, you get to inhabit a glamorous (or fascinatingly gruesome) world you would never otherwise get to visit, all the better.

Once again, of course, masterful storytellers can successfully break this rule. TV shows like The Office and Parks and Recreation excel at creating low-stakes, unglamorous worlds in which small interactions and minor complaints become just as compelling as an alien invasion. Once again, those shows are choosing to run uphill, but they prove that it can be done.

The 40 Year Old Virgin	YES. Every man has felt like he’ll never get laid, and this is his ultimate nightmare…and ultimate fantasy, because everybody wants three perfect wingmen.
Alien	YES, it’s the ultimate unsafe workplace.
An Education	YES. Wanting to get away from parents with dangerous older boy, but in this case much older, and a career criminal. (That said, the stakes aren’t really that big, just the usual: losing out on the chance to go to college.)
The Babadook	YES. every parent has resented their children, and vice versa.  Everyone has repressed emotions until they become dangerous.
Blazing Saddles	YES. Very much so.  We’ve all had to prove ourselves, but not with these stakes.
Blue Velvet	YES. A coming of age story in which the adult world our young man discovers is insanely dark and evil.
The Bourne Identity	YES. It’s a metaphor for anyone who is disgusted by what he’s become
Bridesmaids	YES. The stakes are only slightly higher than real life, but a rivalry over a friendship results in plane being forced down, for instance.
Casablanca	YES. we’ve all pined for an ex, and wondered what we would actually do if given a second chance, but this time the war is on the line.
Chinatown	YES. A journey into the world’s darkness, but with the future of LA at stake.
Donnie Brasco	YES.  being promoted over your hapless boss, but your undercover with the mob.
Do the Right Thing	YES. everyday city tensions culminate in a death and a riot.
The Farewell	YES. Wang says that the more specific she made it to her culture the more universal it become.  We’ve all told lies to family to make them feel better, but not usually with life or death stakes.
The Fighter	YES. Very much so.  We all have to break free of our families in order to succeed.
Frozen	YES. It’s a very believable difficult sibling relationship
The Fugitive	YES. The most universal emotion is to feel misundertood / misjudged.
Get Out	YES. Very much so.  We’ve all felt like everybody at a party was talking about us behind our backs, even if we’re white.
Groundhog Day	YES. Very much so.
How to Train Your Dragon	YES. Training a pet, but with two civilizations on the line.
In a Lonely Place	YES.
Iron Man	YES. A universal tale of overcoming hypocrisy and taking responsibility for one’s actions, but with lives on the line.
Lady Bird	NO. this is just the writer/director’s life story, faithfully recreated with its original place and time, with the same stakes as the true story.
Raising Arizona	YES. The urge to have a family at all costs, combined with the fear of family commitment, get pushed to absurd extremes.
Rushmore	YES. We’ve all had unrequited love.
Selma	YES. It’s like a thousand everyday activist stories, but this was the big one.
The Shining	YES. fear of isolation and being trapped in a marriage, set in the most isolated place in America trapped with a monstrous man.
Sideways	YES. Very identifiable, but not really bigger, except for the two “Holy Crap” moments.
The Silence of the Lambs	YES. We’ve all felt that we must accept injustice to get ahead at work.
Star Wars	YES. Very much so.
Sunset Boulevard	YES.