Choice is a word we bandy about a lot in modern times, especially in catchy little “thought-leader” quotes on social media. Over the weekend, someone posted this little nugget of wisdom:
Some uncomfortable math:
Your bank account is a record of your decisions
Your body is a record of your habits
Your relationships are a record of your priorities
None of this is luck. All of this is compounding.
Social Media Know-It-All I Shan’t Name
IMO, this post isn’t about “uncomfortable math,” it’s moral laundering. Decisions don’t exist in a vacuum. Systems, illness, caretaking, instability and plain bad frigging luck all shape the ledger. This is true in life, but even more true in fiction.
See, the weird thing about choice, is it is an inherently human conundrum. Unlike animals guided solely by instinct, we humans possess the concept of a “self.”
We have an ego or id or whatever it is that makes us apex drama queens. It is that conscious self that permits self-reflection, which I am a huge fan of…so long as we at least flirt with a little bit of reality.
Life is not binary or clearly marked with signage.
I get why folks post these passive-aggressive snipes labeled “life lessons.” With a surface read, they feel true.
It’s easy to get folks clapping like seals, heads bobbing as if they’ve ever faced a binary world in their lives. Life is virtually never a choice between one terrible, stupid, reckless option versus the sane, level-headed, adult one.
I’d even venture to say that 99% of life is choosing the least crappy decision out of a list of horrible options while gambling the fallout is something we can handle.
Ideally later.
If LIFE is life like this, and fiction is really LIFE in distillate, what kind of choice are you offering your characters?
NO Choice
If you want to know how professional writers turn out a book or two or ten a year? Whether they’re a plotter, pantser or something in between, they understand story structure.
Deeply.
If we pan back and look at what great storytelling is, it is all about choice. And our characters must have agency. Pretty words alone are not enough. No reader is solely there for our decision to use “cerulean” instead of “blue”. They want a story with stakes.
Big ones.
If our characters keep going from thing to thing and place to place out of no volition of their own? They’re not a character. They’re flotsam. Maybe jetsam. Depends on whether we threw our character overboard or churned them up from the sea bed.
What choice did your character make to get where they are?
Choices are Rarely Obvious or Simple
If this is true in life, then why the hell are we holding the reader’s hands and taking away the very reason they want to read fiction?
First, let’s pause a brief minute and ponder a half a minute as to why anyone, in a world with TikTok and Netflix, would want to read your book? Or mine? Reading is hard, brain intensive and requires focused concentration.
So why are people reading?
For the same reason we hop on roller coasters. We want a safe place for catharsis. To teeter at the edge of the abyss…while strapped in safely in a seat that’s passed nine hundred separate inspections. Yet, don’t we also forget that while we are on the ride believing we’ll surely DIE?
Our audience already understands how life works because—DUH—they’re living one. They also smell bull sprinkles from a mile away. Sure, maybe there are some genres where there is a bit more coddling. I’m not going to pretend that The Baby-Sitters Club has anything remotely in common with Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian as far as genre and tone. But what do they both actually share?
CHOICES.
Sticky ones.
If I can give y’all any writing advice at all, it’s this. Learn to be hard on your characters. Then get harder and meaner. Hurl everything they believe they love through the metaphorical wood chipper, or (like Fargo) an actual one.
Choice should never be binary, A or B? It needs to be A, B, C left town, D is shacking up with Q, and S wants child support for X, Y & Z.
Life and Fiction is About Sticky Compromise
How many times in life do we get a break? Really? As in real, breathing people? Life is just one decision after another and that has only gotten exponentially worse in the Information Age.
We actually now have a word for the crappy way we feel at the end of the day, when we will happily eat cereal for dinner because we’re cooked (well done, of course).
Decision fatigue.
Do you think people get decision fatigue because life is a pretty path of petals?
Send the email now or wait and hope for better options? Fix the AC or get a new washer and dryer? Tell your partner you love them but also if they don’t stop snoring you might have to find an awesome expensive defense attorney?
Nothing easy.
Ever.
And that is life, not fiction. In stories the problems are grand, stakes are massive, failure is not an option.
In life, problems are grand, stakes are massive, and we experience actual failure all the frigging time. We don’t find true love, land the dream job, take out the evil HR Empire. This is why we read fiction. Messy but with a satisfactory ending…not some fresh toke on a fire hose.
Enjoy the RIDE!
With rollercoasters, have all the twists and turns you want, but design must play along with the laws of physics or things go terribly wrong.
Same in stories.
Additionally, just like rides have a clear beginning and clear destination, so should our stories. It’s the how we take the rider reader from beginning to the end that makes all the difference.
Which is weird because most of the time, we know how stories will end, don’t we? Well, kind of. We know the good guys will likely win, just aren’t exactly sure how. And that is what makes us tense, where we storytellers can strip away control.
How many of you sat at the edge of your seats when Frodo and Samwise finally stepped into Mordor? Did you worry when the spider tried to make Frodo into a snack? Wonder if Samwise would get there in time? I mean actually worry?
No.
WHY?
We “worried”, sure. Yet we all knew on some level they’d be successful (unlike life). If Tolkien had just let everyone fail pointlessly to illustrate some existential morass…we’d have Russian Lit. If they made that into a movie—once the reader revolts subsided—we wouldn’t have one of the most iconic movies of the modern age.
We’d have a French film.
And everyone died. The end.
Yet, somehow Tolkien threaded between Dostoevsky and Sundance’s latest rave and gave audiences movies they never tire of rewatching even though we all know the Ring is destroyed. How did Tolkien/Peter Jackson manage this tension?
Choice.
Or rather, the illusion of having one.
See this is where choices—particularly messy choices—make the difference. Once our story starts becoming predictable, we leave a nice convenient place to put a bookmark.
In our business, BOOKMARKS=DEATH.
Never, ever leave a logical place to stop reading your stories. The only acceptable place to leave your story needs to be at the end, when the reader is giddy, breathless, shaken and can’t wait to do it again.
Now Use Your AI
Obviously, this is a personal decision. Once you have your log-line (your story in ONE sentence), feel free to riff from there. Though I, personally, don’t like outlining every detail of my story, I do begin with at least a general idea where I’m going.
This starts truncating choices from there into an increasingly narrower decision tree.
We let the reader “know” a vague idea of how our story ends (true love, happily for now, business saved, family restored, babysitter club in tact, justice served); we just don’t explain how we intend on getting them there.
Every scene begins with a GOAL (external or internal). In the scene, there are three options: win, lose, draw.
Our MC should get hammered most of the book (mostly lose and draw with a rare win), but this is where we need to be careful. This is where sticky choices can help. Messy “good enough considering” choices keep our characters out of The Land of Too Stupid to Live.
Instead of obvious good and bad choices, we should mirror life, then amplify the hell out of it.
AI can actually be an excellent soundboard. When your MC hits a choke (choice) point, what is the obvious good decision? Now scrap that. Also the obvious bad one. Brainstorm until you drill down into maybe the MC’s third or tenth choice.
If we get the reader’s the adrenaline pumping, that’s awesome because stress narrows focus. They might “see” the first couple sane options but if we dig down and serve up the less obvious? It won’t make sense until after the ride is over.
And retrospectively, they’ll see it wasn’t merely brilliant but inevitable, which is why they’ll tell all their friends and preorder our next book.
Stories Have a Clear Finish Line (Ending)
So does life, but that is beyond the scope of this blog. I want y’all to imagine your reader. Then answer WHY your book? Why spend limited money and time they don’t believe they have to engage in an activity most people rate alongside doing their taxes?
Most people don’t read because they believe reading is boring. But, for those who do read or who will read…WHY?
We have desires that may or may not come to fruition in life. Stories offer a place where the underdog wins, right and wrong matter, characters defy all the odds and WIN. Stories give us respite from reality long enough to reignite what makes us utterly human.
Belief.
What Are Your Thoughts?
I LOVE hearing from you!
What choice in your story scares you to make, and why?
Where in your current project is your character avoiding the hardest decision, even though it’s the one that would change everything?
Have you ever realized mid-draft that your character had no real agency—just motion? If so, what did you change to fix it?
What’s the messiest, least satisfying choice you’ve forced a character to make, and how did it affect the story?
Have you ever used AI to brainstorm story decisions or turning points? Did it help you uncover a less obvious option you hadn’t considered?
The post Why Choice—Not Talent—Drives Great Stories appeared first on Kristen Lamb.
