How to Write an Addictive Story (from Page One)
If you want to learn how to write an addictive story, the best place to start is by watching (or reading), you guessed it…addictive stories!
Now, I’m going to be honest. I can pretty much enjoy any romantic comedy, no matter how objectively good (or bad). However, a great romantic comedy stays with me. I want to watch it again and again. Others…not so much.
The romantic comedy I recently watched fell in the others category. I enjoyed it, sure. It had charm and heart and a happy ending, which is all I really need to be satisfied in the moment. However, it also committed some cardinal storytelling sins, which is what I’m going to focus on today.
The movie? When in Rome.
How to Write an Addictive Story: Study All Types of Stories
One of my favorite parts of being a writer is studying story. I love to analyze what makes a story work; what makes me fall in love with it. On the flip side, I also love to analyze what makes a story fall flat. So after I watched this movie, I spent the next couple of days trying to figure out the biggest reasons it didn’t completely work for me.
The first thing I always look at is character. The heart of a story is the character arc: the transformation the hero undergoes from beginning to end so that they come out a different person on the other side. This is the electricity that runs through your story, in a nutshell, if you had to distill everything else down, successful character transformation is how to write an addictive story. And it’s where I’ll focus my attention for When in Rome.
I always look at just a handful of things when studying a character arc. Here are 5 of the most important elements (for a more complete look at what goes into a character arc, check out the Story Map):
Desire
Fear
Lie
Wound
Truth
For a story to have a solid foundation to build upon, the first three of these elements need to be established within the first couple of scenes. Let’s take a look at a story that does this successfully.
Beauty and the Beast
Right away we learn that Belle wants to get out of her provincial town (DESIRE) and that she’s afraid she’ll find herself trapped in an ordinary and uneventful life forever (FEAR).
Lastly, we learn that she believes it is nearly impossible for her to find love or belonging due to the fact that she is so different from everyone around her (LIE). All 3 of these elements are established within the first couple of scenes.
The rest of the story builds upon this solid foundation. Belle does, indeed, find herself trapped, forcing her to face her fear (which in both stories and life causes us to grow!). In doing so, she has to move away from her Lie and into her Truth (that someone’s heart is what makes them lovable, not outward characteristics or eccentricities) in order for her transformation to be complete.
Every beat of a story ought to be moving a hero away from their Lie and toward their Truth until they are fully ready to embrace it by the story’s climax.
But in When in Rome, several of these elements were missing.
Character Arc Ingredients for How to Write An Addictive Story
We know from the first couple of scenes of When in Rome that Beth (our protagonist/hero) wants to succeed at her job. That seems to be her biggest Desire. As for a Fear or Lie…what are they?
In the opening scene, she is confronted by her ex-boyfriend. But when she thinks he is proposing that they get back together, she jumps at the chance! We learn after this that Beth’s Lie is that she’ll give herself fully to a relationship when she finds someone she likes more than her job. Unfortunately, this Lie doesn’t show up in time, and it is undercut by this opening scene where we see her happy to take back a man that clearly does not fall into this category.
In addition, we see no Fear holding her back from relationships or love, which pollutes the idea that her career is her Desire. Is it her career or a relationship? Why can’t she just have both if there’s no Fear keeping her stuck? Her ex-boyfriend complains about her job, but Beth’s actions in their conversation do nothing to affirm the idea that she is more attached to her job than to love.
Perhaps most importantly, Beth’s eagerness for love is at direct odds with a later scene (that comes 55 minutes in) where her Fear finally does take front stage. In this scene we learn that she is afraid of unrequited love. Unfortunately, we don’t get it until nearly halfway through the movie.
Now, if the story had established this in the opening scene, it would have made sense. If we could have seen her Desire for a relationship she cares about more than her career clashing with her Fear of that love being unrequited, and in her conversation we could have deduced that her Lie has been keeping her from finding this relationship because she’s unwilling to commit herself. This would have successfully given us all of the ingredients to set up a satisfying character transformation.
The Consequences of an Un-established Fear
Let’s move forward a little bit in the story.
When Beth throws herself into the love interest’s arms (again showing no fear), it’s not obvious why she's doing any of it. Isn't she supposed to be focusing on her career? Doesn’t she not really believe in love? It’s even less obvious why she rejects his advances later on. After she sees him kissing another woman, it clearly bothers her, but we don’t know why, so it doesn't seem that meaningful.
This is important. Whenever something happens to a protagonist, we have to understand fully what sort of impact that event has on this person and why. Seeing a man you kinda sorta like kissing another woman would be a bummer for anybody. But that’s not interesting. Why is it especially bad for Beth? Why is this part of her story that makes it worth telling? We don’t get answers to these questions, which again weakens her overall transformation.
Her character development thus far does not explain why she wouldn’t take his explanation for the kissing as good enough. Her ex from the first scene didn’t cheat on her as far as we know, and she doesn’t personally appear to have any deep wounds surrounding infidelity. (There is a hint that her father has been unfaithful to her mother, but it doesn’t seem to bother her.)
This brings us to another important element: the hero’s Wound or Ghost. I have no idea what Beth’s Wound is.
Again, the closest I can guess is that her father was unfaithful to her mother. But again, she seems to have a closer relationship with her father than with her mother, harboring no resentment, hurt, or betrayal. When thinking of how to write an addictive story, it's important to have important pieces of backstory for your hero, and the number one part of their backstory you need to know is their Wound. Their wound is the springboard for nearly everything else.
Using the Character’s Wound as a Springboard for How to Write an Addictive Story
I’ve talked about this a lot.
For example, Jane Eyre has a Wound of not receiving love from her aunt (her aunt wanted her to be submissive, and was very irritated with Jane’s fiery spirit and repeatedly locked her up in order to try and make her more submissive). This establishes Jane’s Lie of love requiring submission and servitude, as well as her Desire for love and freedom, and her Fear of being in submission and imprisonment. This is a recipe for excellent internal conflict that will drive her story forward. Jane wants love, as well as freedom, but she believes she cannot have both (because of her Wound). You can already see that some serious transformation has got to take place in order for Jane to achieve her Desire and complete her story.
So, getting back to When in Rome, because there has been no foundation establishing Beth’s Fear, we can’t really watch her grow. We don’t get her Fear until 55 minutes in, when she’s already in a relationship with the love interest!
How to Write an Addictive Story: Clean Character Transformation
We do get Beth’s Lie pretty early on (“I have a relationship with my job. I love my job. And when I find a guy that I like more than my job, that’s how I’ll know he’s the one.”) Which makes us think that her Desire is to find a guy she likes more than her job. Okay, fine. This could be a perfectly respectable transformation. But her transformation doesn’t align with this. Her transformation has to do with the Fear that we get in the second half of the story. The Fear of unrequited love.
Perhaps you’re thinking, “Wait a second. What if her Lie is just that: a lie? Something she tells herself that she knows isn’t really true.” Unfortunately, that doesn’t work. A Lie has to be something a character really believes. Something they have to examine throughout their story even though it makes them uncomfortable. Until they are finally willing to reject that Lie and embrace a new and healthier Truth.
A Lie that Aligns with the Hero’s Transformation
So, for example, if Beth believed: “It’s not worth getting into a relationship because they’ll never care about you as much as you care about them,” that would be something she could examine and finally learn to reject.
Another way to look at this is that we should be able to pull her transformation from the Truth she should be barreling toward throughout her story, which we come to understand is something along the lines of, “Love is worth the risk, even if it’s unrequited.”
See how perfectly that fits with her Fear of unrequited love? But how does it fit with her Lie?…It doesn’t. In the end, she tells her love interest she knows he’s the one because she likes him more than her job. This doesn’t signify any transformation at all. It’s in complete alignment with the Lie she has been telling herself from the beginning.
However, she also tells him it’s worth loving him even if he doesn’t love her back (even if his love isn’t real). Now, this signifies growth. Unfortunately, we as an audience didn’t have time to savor it. Because we only understood she was afraid of unrequited love at the 55-minute mark!
In essence, we have a messy dispersion of crucial elements of information.
Setting Up the Final Transformation
I'm going to play in imaginary land for a moment, thinking of what I might change if I really wanted to figure out how to write an addictive version of this story. Here goes:
In the opening scene, Beth is unwilling to flirt with the idea of taking her ex-boyfriend back because she is so desperately afraid of being caught again in a cycle of unrequited love after she found out he was cheating on her (FEAR of unrequited love clashing with DESIRE for love).
When her sister visits her, Beth admits that the real reason she has a relationship with her job is because it will always love her back (LIE).
At her sister’s wedding, we get to see how much of a toll her parent’s relationship has taken on her (anger at her father and sympathy for her mother, neither of which are emotions we see in her at all) (WOUND).
She is scared of giving her love interest a second chance because she already thinks he’s not that interested in her after she sees him kissing another woman.
Finally, through a set of obstacles and mishaps, Beth learns to embrace her Truth: Love is worth the risk, no matter the outcome.
All of these things lining up would have created a much more solid foundation for her transformation to build upon. One block building upon the other.
Show Don't Tell
One more side note (because it was an illuminating instance for me to learn what not to do as a writer). In one of Beth’s moments of clarity that is supposed to be moving her away from her Lie and toward her Truth, she tells a story of one of her favorite paintings featuring one of Picasso’s muses:
Picasso loved this girl so much that he left his wife for her, even though she was a teenager and thirty years his junior. But then he set his sights on someone else. However, this girl never stopped loving Picasso. And years later, when she learned of his death, she took her own life.
This is a great example that demonstrates Beth’s Fear and Lie in an interesting way. She cries as she tells the story, which shows us how deep her own Fear of this idea of unrequited love is. Great! Stop there. Instead, she goes on. She says,
“Every time I’ve ever put myself out there, I’ve gotten hurt. Every time. It’s like, I meet a guy and think it’s great and anyone else would just be thinking about how much greater it’s gonna get. But I’m constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop.”
Umm, what? You are? That would have been helpful information to have earlier! When have we ever seen this?
Don't Talk Down to Your Audience
But that’s beside the point, we’ve already covered this lapse.
My issue is going deeper. It’s with the fact that she even says this out loud. All of a sudden she has this burning clarity about what her most intense, deep-seated issue is? That’s unlikely. The point is for her to grow, which means she probably isn’t so acutely aware of what her biggest obstacle to growth is.
However, for argument’s sake, let’s say it’s possible that she is aware. There are plenty of stories where the author uses dialogue successfully to show us the hero’s Fear, it’s just not usually quite so spot on. Typically there’s a layer of what the hero THINKS their problem is, versus what it ACTUALLY is - for example, Beth THINKS her problem is that she’s never found a guy whom she likes more than her job. But her ACTUAL problem is that she’s so scared of unrequited love that she never fully gives herself over to a relationship - her ex points this out early on and it goes over her head. When exactly did she learn so painfully clearly what was actually going on? We didn’t see the growth because we never saw her Fear. So this scene feels like it comes out of nowhere (which we never want to happen when thinking about how to write an addictive story).
Amazingly, that’s not my only issue. Besides all of this, Beth just explained step by step what her beautiful story about Picasso and her reaction to it already told us. This makes me feel like I’m being talked down to. Like I couldn’t possibly have understood from her very clear story, and instead, she needs to explain in painful terms to this man why she’s upset.
Learn from Story
As a writer, this is something I do NOT want to do. I want to trust my audience and use more subtle storytelling devices to demonstrate my character’s growth. And you should, too! You can do better. Learn from these mistakes and make your writing sing.
As I mentioned at this beginning, I actually enjoyed this story. In fact, I’ll pretty much enjoy any story you put in front of me (especially a romantic comedy). But that doesn’t mean I’m going to take my writer’s hat off. I want to learn from the stories I consume, to understand what makes me fall in love with them, as well as what makes them fall a little flat. And hopefully, in the process, I can become a better storyteller myself.
The fastest way to write a strong story is with an effective outline that plots your novel’s beating heart.
In Outline Your Novel, you’ll learn exactly what these beats are, why they matter, and how to outline them effectively to make your story sing.
