What's the story?

When, a few years ago, I started writing a book, friends would ask me what it was about. I’d say it was about a lot of things - a world where no one believes in anything, conspiracy theory, drugs, the lost dreams of the Sixties and Seventies - but that wasn’t what they wanted to hear. They wanted to know what the story was. In truth I didn’t have one. I thought I could write a novel based on ideas rather than character and story.

It took me a few years to come round to realising how crucial story was to fiction, and by then I had completely re-written the book (ditching ten characters and planting a bomb at the end of the first chapter). Isn’t all this obvious? It should be, but a surprising number of otherwise well written novels, full of good ideas, by fellow writers, especially those with aspirations to the literary, fall down on this one crucial feature: the story is weak.

One feature of writers’ groups, courses and peer review sites is that they tend to criticise paragraph by paragraph, sometimes line by line. It’s easy to get feedback on shifting point-of-view, telling-not-showing, the flatness of your descriptions, clumsy constructions, redundant phrases, repetition, weak characterisation, repetition, awkward dialogue, unnecessary adverbs and forced similes. What we miss out on is the development of story over the course of the book.

Story, for me, is inseparable from character. The story is what happens to the protagonist, the obstacles and temptations put in the protagonist’s way; character is defined by how your protagonist deals with them. Character doesn’t exist without story, and story doesn’t exist without character.

I’ve had arguments with other writers over character. Some believe you create characters in some sort of virtual Frankenstein lab, and you don’t let them out until all the body and brain parts are in place. Some seem to think if make them well enough they’ll whisper in you ear and tell you their tales.

I believe we only learn what characters are like when we witness them behave, when they have desires, when they have to make decisions, when they have to interact with other people. The colour of their eyes and hair are unimportant, we need to see how they function in the world, what they want, how they set out to achieve it, how they survive. The story is the structure of events that reveals all that.

These are some of the flaws I’ve seen in others’ stories. Most of them I’ve also been guilty of myself. More than once. They are the sort of things that only become apparent when you read the whole book.

• The protagonist witnesses a series of events but remains curiously unaffected by them. The character makes few decisions. (OK, there are precedents for passive central characters but successful ones are few and far between.)
   
• Lots of things happen, but the protagonist responds in exactly the same way each