Fixing a Broken Story

If you’ve written your share of stories, you know the feeling. You started this story with a great idea, but now you’re just struggling. Nothing comes automatically. All the parts seem to repel each other, rather than coming together into a whole. Your story feels broken.

It might be tempting to seek the solution with your initial idea or your first chapter. Similarly, it’s tempting to seek the solution in the plot. Maybe I just need more action scenes! Maybe I should just pick up the pace!

But no, the real answer (almost all the time) is that you actually have a broken main character, which results in a broken theme. That’s the whole point of this course. Stories only happen because the main character wills it so, and they only matter if the audience feels empathy for them.

Here are some reminders. Both to improve your story and your motivation for working on it.

Pick a theme that matters to you (deeply)

When all else fails, pick one theme for your story, and make it something you care about. Deeply. Something you cannot help but write about. Something about which you just have to express your thoughts.

Now, some people might view theme as these one-word concepts. The theme of this story is … “friendship” or “love” or “authenticity”.

But, as you’ve seen throughout this course, it’s more helpful to frame it as a belief. As a moral statement or imperative. So you’d say: “authenticity is worth more than financial success”

Now you write your whole story to research this belief. In the end, the point is for characters to either accept or reject this theme.

This doesn’t work if the theme is phrased as a single word. (Nobody “rejects” friendship.) Or if the theme is worded vaguely, because then the response is most likely “it depends” ( + a shrug).

As always, simple and focused beats anything else. If you worry that your single theme is not enough to sustain a story, you probably picked something that lacks depth, or something you don’t actually care about that much. Single themes can and do sustain great stories all the time. Even themes we’ve seen time and time again, because they’re so interesting that they can be explored in numerous ways.

Start with character

Maybe you usually start with plot first. Maybe you have these major ideas or scenes that you want to get to, and character comes later.

Well, then I’d recommend doing it the other way around! As stated, we care about stories because of empathy for the characters. If you feel your story is broken, if you feel you don’t care for it anymore, then it’s a clear issue with character empathy.

So start your stories by developing the best possible character first! Create a character who is truly interesting and for whom you truly feel empathy. Let their decisions and personality guide the plot going forward.

I know that this shift really helped me lose some insecurity about stories. After writing many stories, they all start to feel the same to you. “Here we go, another battle scene. And there we go, another reveal for a mystery.” The actions of stories don’t matter—and are all roughly the same—if you haven’t established great character first.

The link between character and plot

This brings me to the thing I personally struggled with the most.

I was always afraid to scrap large parts of a story and do it again. I was afraid to pick the wrong character at the start and only realize halfway the story, as it just felt like an insurmountable task to redo all that.

In my eyes, character creates plot, and never the other way around. So if you’ve made a mistake in character design at the start, you have to do the whole plot again from scratch. Because using a new (hopefully better) character will result in a completely new storyline. And this, not surprisingly, made me hesitant and uncertain about revisions.

I mean, haven’t I told you that the character should be uniquely suited for the plot? That they should have a clear purpose in the story? That their character should be challenged, time and time again, by the plot?

But then I realized a new truth. If you have a plot that you like, maybe some scenes which you really want to keep, you can still change the character later with minimal work.

How? By inventing a character that would achieve the same plot points, just for a different reason or on a different path.

An example

I might have a really good climax in which people battle in the capital. In my first draft, the main character is a fighter at heart. They just want to destroy everything that stands in their way, slay enemies, and prove they’re the best. That’s why they’re pressent at the battle, that’s why it happens.

But say I don’t like the character. They’re a bit superficial and the theme of the story doesn’t resonate. But I want to keep those final few chapters! They’re great!

What to do? I invent a new character that has a reason to be there, and only requires changing some paragraphs of the fighting scenes. Maybe they go to the capital to get revenge instead! Or maybe a family member was captured, and they go into the battle to free them!

This new character would end up (roughly) in the same place, but for an entirely different reason (that fits this new personality).

This approach is a way to fix broken stories (through “better” characters), without needing to rewrite the whole damn plot. Usually, such changes merely require some thinking, and then smart revisions in several chapters across the book.

In the end, I think writers are always juggling the three aspects (plot, character, setting), putting one before the other at different times. And that’s a good thing. Rewriting everything from scratch if one of them changes, would probably mean no more books are ever published.

As you write the story, you simply decide (about more and more things) that A works, but B does not. So let’s rewrite B in a way such that it does work, together with A. You do this until you see that all the elements work, and you’ve fixed your broken story.