Compelling versus Complicated

This is probably the hardest balance to strike. If your story is too simple, it feels boring and meaningless. If your story is too complicated, people literally don’t understand it and will stop caring. You want the middle ground: a story that is compelling, but not complicated.

For me, this certainly remains the biggest struggle. I have a hyperactive brain that wants to always put more interesting stuff into a project! So I wrote stories with 5+ viewpoint characters, stories with 10 pirates that were all important, and so on. Yes, with practice and tricks you can make those work, but it’s hard to do and will still be too overwhelming for many readers.

So, what’s the difference? I’ve thought about this a lot and experimented with many ideas. Below is my best summary of how to write a deep and rich story, without making it difficult and complicated.

As you read this, though, remember this general rule.

It’s easier to simplify a complicated story, than to take an overly simple story and make it more compelling later.

The first draft of your story will almost always be too long and too convoluted. That’s fine. Simplifying is the next step. If your first draft is too short and simplistic, however, it’s hard to grow it into more at a later stage.

What’s the problem?

What does it mean when somebody says “well, that was a complicated movie”?

They usually mean the following: “I did not understand what happened or why”.

The “complexity” of a story is not some objective measurement, like calling a story complicated once it has more then 500 pages, or more than 10 characters.

It’s about understanding (or experience) from the audience.

A story can have lots of moving parts, but if they work well together, the story is easy to follow. Conversely, a story can have one extremely simplistic plot, but if it’s told badly it becomes complicated.

So no, you are not in the clear by playing it safe and writing a simplistic story, because execution matters.

And yes, you can still write that epic with many storylines, or that murder mystery with an extremely intricate puzzle.

You just have to sidestep some common pitfalls.

Pitfalls

These are pitfalls. So don’t do the things the heading says!

Loose Ends

People learn and remember based on association.

If you have two storylines that have nothing in common, they will be incredibly hard to remember. The story becomes complicated.

If those same storylines constantly reference and influence each other, they are much easier to remember! The story has now become deep and rich.

This is true for the (major) storylines, but also the smaller things.

If you introduce an object in chapter 3 (giving it some time, description, setup) … and it never returns … then it’s a “loose end”. It’s another bit of information floating in your audience’s brain, not connected to anything.

Do it once, okay. Do it twice or more often and these loose ends drag down your story like dead weight.

To prevent a loose end, let that object return later with a purpose. Even better, make it return several times, across different locations and storylines, so the audience can associate it with many other aspects of the story.

This combines into the following rule.

If you have multiple storylines, they must influence each other and be combined at some point (usually the end).

Yes, this might seem too “restrictive”. I’d like to tell you otherwise, but all my experience has solidified this as a core part of storytelling. The first step to prevent making a story (with many threads) complicating, is to ensure all those threads meet up before the end.

This also has a natural consequence: you cannot add too many “ideas” into your story. Because each idea must reoccur several times and paid off at some point. That takes time, that takes words. So if you want any hope of making your story the right length, you need to be disciplined when it comes to adding new ideas.

No theme or conflicting themes

Earlier, when talking about themes, I remarked the importance of sticking to one theme. Now you have another reason why.

Stories are much easier to follow if everything is (somehow) related to the same theme, the same main thread. (This is also a sort-of consequence of the pitfall above about association.)

This obviously implies there must be a theme. In my view, stories always have a theme. It’s just about whether you accidentally added one, or did so on purpose.

You can have “subthemes”. But these should feed into the single main theme in some way.

The major moments are about something else

Each story has major moments. Scenes more important than others. Scenes to which you’ve been building for a while, such as a climax.

An easy way to make a story confusing is to make these major moments about entirely different things. Or to pick the wrong scenes to turn into major moments.

This is another reason why I firmly believe that different storylines must combine in the climax. Otherwise, you get a story with multiple “climaxes” at different times, making it unclear what should be major moments and what not.

A list of motivations

Very, very guilty of this one.

Writers know they should give the character a goal and a really strong desire to reach it. So they give them a motivation. Alright … but it feels like it’s not enough. They give them another motivation. Next chapter, they introduce another reason for having that goal.

You get characters who are angry because …

• Their boss is mean
• Somebody ran over their dog last week
• Their partner suddenly broke up after a relationship of five years
• They broke their leg and can’t exercise anymore

All of those at the same time! They must be very frustrated!

But this is confusing. A story should be a heightened, streamlined version of reality to provide the most interest. In a story, characters should have one clear motivation that the audience will not forget.

For example: “Sarah is angry because her best friend stole money from her”

That’s it. Don’t add anything else. Don’t think this is too little.

Sounds very simple, but keeping things simple is always the hardest skill in art.

If you really like grey characters or diving deep into personalities, you can add multiple motivations. But if you do, they should still be associated with each other.

For example, Sarah is angry because …

• Her best friend stole money
• Her partner took another job that earns less money
• Her parents don’t want to support her financially

All of those are related to the same theme of “Sarah has money issues”. Still simple and easy to remember, but with more layers.

Unnecessary characters

We often invent characters to serve a purpose. I might think “oh, we need some best friend or sidekick for our hero, let’s add one”, or “we need a really strong fighter on this quest, let’s add a character who can do that”

Often, however, this is a singular purpose. Once fulfilled, the character becomes useless.

You see this often in TV shows. They made a first season, not knowing if they’d be greenlit for a second one. When they make the second one … they suddenly have all these characters that fans love, but serve no purpose! So they get shoved around, standing in the background, doing practically nothing for a full season. It hurts. It drags a story down.

Don’t add characters for one scene or one big moment. Add them because they will continue to be interesting, no matter where the story goes.

Or, if that is hard to achieve, combine several “single-purpose” characters into one character.

And if you find two characters serving the exact same purpose, then you can obviously cut one of them entirely.

Doing this, you reduce the pool of characters ( = simpler story), while making each character itself more interesting and layered ( = rich story).

Whiplash

Often, we try to balance stories. We try to add some “heart” (some sad or emotional moments), but also some “humor” (funny or silly scenes).

The bad way to do it, would be to rapidly switch between those two extremes. It gives the audience whiplash. It is confusing and overwhelming. It feels like telling two separate stories, but trying to cram them into one.

As I’ve stated numerous times, the meat of the story is not in the extremes or the big moments. The meat of each story is the little scenes that provide the glue, the bits of “progress” along the way.

Use the progress to properly build towards your extremes. You can have both sadness and humor in the same story, but …

• The transition should be gradual.
• The moments should be earned.
• And the extremes should still be closely linked and related, to prevent it feeling like two separate stories.

If you do it well, those two extremes actually provide great contrast. The sad scenes make the funny ones extra funny. Similarly, the funny scenes—with banter among the characters—make it all the more emotional when a main character dies a few chapters later.

Inconsistent Writing

Of course, all other writing rules still apply. A story rapidly becomes complicated if the prose is bad and the writing vague!

More specifically, these are common mistakes.

• The writing switches tenses (sometimes past tense, sometimes present tense) => Pick one and stick to it
• You have too many different viewpoint characters. Especially bad if you suddenly switch perspective to different characters within a scene (“head hopping”) => Pick a tiny cast of characters to narrate chapters
• Your sentences are too long and you use too much “purple prose” => When in doubt, write shorter and simpler
• That a sentence is grammatically correct or has the right information, doe snot mean it’s the right sentence. => Seek clarity above all, flow (or rhythm) to your writing second, anything else after that
• Your chapters or scenes go on for too long. => Arrive late, Exit early, and always question whether something needs to exist.
• Your narrative makes big changes (scene break, location change, …) without clearly communicating this. => Use some clear sign—such as whitespace, a symbol, a simple sentence on its own—to communicate to the reader we just jumped to a different setting.

Conclusion

The difference between a compelling and complicated story will always be a subjective one. (There are many movies that I find interesting and deep, and others complicated and pretentious.)

It’s up to experience and your own intuition to find a balance. But the best test is to let others read your story. Others who don’t know anything about it yet. They will show disinterest or stop reading (for a while) if they find the story too complicated.

The other test is to check the following.

• A complicated story has dead weight. It allows you to cut away large chunks of the story without changing or breaking anything. (Either it’s literally not associated with anything else, or other parts of the story are still equally vaguely setup as before.)
• A compelling story does not allow this. Nothing can be cut without consequence. Everything is tied together. Each character, each scene, each storyline, it’s all of vital importance. In the end, they all combine to defeat the villain, and if even one piece was missing, they would not have won!

Yes, this might seem boring or predictable. If a story has multiple storylines, they’ll likely meet up and combine at some point. If the story focuses on mentioning a magical object (several times), you know it will be really important later.

(And if it doesn’t happen, even if surprising, it will be dissatisfying. Similar to a setup that has no payoff.)

But I feel this is one of the core truths of storytelling. I tried breaking such rules, but it didn’t work. Not a single time.

The key word is association to help the audience learn and remember. If everything is connected, it’s more easily remembered. If something is mentioned or used multiple times, in different settings, it will surely be remembered.

And if the audience truly learns the parts of the story, there’s a much greater chance they will understand the whole of it. And a story you understand, is never a complicated story in your eyes.