The Most Important Question a Writer Can Ask
Why?
That’s the question creators must ask themselves.
(The Questions That Drive a Novel vs. Short Story.)
Whether you’re writing a novel, short story, poem, comic book script, or screenplay, you ultimately need to ask yourself, Why?
Why a novel and not a short story?
Why a comic and not a poem?
Why a screenplay and not a novel?
But that’s just the medium. The way you’ve decided to tell your story.
Sometimes stories can be told several different ways. It’s always best to determine the right track early on, as otherwise you might spend weeks and months working on a project before realizing it might be better suited another way.
But still, that’s not the main Why? Believe it or not, if you’re looking at things at a macro vs micro level, the medium in which you tell your story falls under the latter.
The macro is the overarching Why?
Why this story and not some other story?
Why make this one particular character the protagonist and not another?
Why is the bad guy doing what he’s doing?
As I write this piece in the middle of August of 2024, the biggest movie of the summer is Deadpool & Wolverine, which just crossed the $1 billion-dollar mark at the box office.
In a joint interview for Variety, director and co-writer Shawn Levy, along with stars Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman, touch briefly on the importance of Why?
Jackman noted how he’d decided he wanted to return to his iconic character of Wolverine. And knowing that Ryan and Shawn were still pitching Marvel ideas for a third Deadpool movie, he contacted them as soon as possible.
Hugh Jackman: “It was August 14th, I want to say. Driving down to the beach and it was the summer and I was on a vacation, and on my way there, my mind was just drifting, and it just came to me, ‘I really want to do this.’ And I knew it 100% and couldn’t wait to stop the car. Literally stopped the car, got out, and called Ryan. And I said, ‘I want to do this.’ He said, ‘Are you serious?’ I said, ‘I’m serious.’ And then I hung up the phone and thought, ‘I should probably call my agent,’ but basically I’d just said yes. And I said to both of these guys, I said, ‘We really want to do this, we’ve got to make a really good reason for it to exist.’ After Logan, you know, I was really happy with Logan, I felt we’d sort of landed the plane really well, and so we have to find a way to make this exist in its own right.”
Shawn Levy: “And that was the why. The why is the duo. That Deadpool 1, Deadpool 2, are fantastic movies, Hugh’s been in incredible Wolverine movies, but this pairing, that’s new and that’s a why. And so the writing of the story and the making of the movie really became kind of an exploration of, well, what does this become when these icons and these men, these characters, are thrust together?”
You see, the Why? can branch off into other essential questions. It’s not just, Why is my protagonist doing what he’s doing?
It can also be:
What is his motivation?
How does he intend to solve this mystery?
Where is the story going after the second act?
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These questions and more are often those whispered in the back of our heads when we’re working on our stories. Our subconscious knows how vital they are and tries to remind us of them every step of the way.
Still, humans are stubborn creatures, and there are times when we want to hammer a square peg in a round hole, no matter how much physics tells us it’s not possible. That’s why you sometimes encounter a protagonist who makes wild decisions. Decisions so wild you find yourself mumbling, “Why would they do something like that?!? It makes no sense!”
Ninety-nine percent of the time it’s because the author didn’t ask themselves that all-important question.
Why?
Instead, for convenience’s sake, they force the character into situations those characters would typically avoid or have them say or do something that goes against what we, the reader, have come to understand about that character.
The other one percent of the time, the author did ask themselves Why? but just didn’t care to put in the effort to make the story or the character’s motivation or whatever else make sense.
In the end, writers eventually figure out what works best for them. It took me several years to appreciate the importance of Why? and now it’s something I can’t not think about whenever I approach a new project.
Sure, I might have an amazing concept in mind, or I might have come up with a new twist on an old idea, or maybe I’ve even constructed a unique character, but in the end if I can’t answer that simple, all-important question, none of it will matter.
Check out Robert Smartwood’s Enemy of the State here:
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