What Drives your Story?

Story Drives: 

Some time ago, I wrote about how important it is to know what drives your character, what makes a character do what he/she does.  I apologize if I've mentioned this before, but it couldn't hurt to revisit it [I checked and couldn't find it.]  This post is on what drives your story.  I recently read someone's story in which the main character meanders from event to event without anything driving him.  When he gets done with one major life event like a job or military or even a family, he simply goes and does something else.  That's fine for a PERSON, or even a biography, but it won't work for a STORY.  A story is about something, one specific event, set of events, character, etc.  It has a clear beginning, middle, and end, or it isn't, by nature, a story.  If you find people asking the 'so what?' question repeatedly or wondering what your story is about, it's time to sit down and figure out what drives your story itself.

Orson Scott Card talks about four kinds of story drives: 1. milieu or location  2. question, as in whodunit, 3. plot, as in what's wrong with the world and how can it be fixed? and 4. character as in what's wrong with your character and what does he/she do about it?  If you know your genre, chances are you can figure out what drives your story.  A book that primarily takes you on a tour of any location is a milieu book.  This can include fantasy or science fiction in which the magical land is the most important aspect of the story.  Think the Lord of the Rings trilogy, if you think of it as a world in which prototypical characters of various races appear in a struggle, or "Gulliver's Travels," wherein an outsider comes into a foreign land and learns all about it.  A mystery is most often question-driven because the story isn't finished until the primary question, whodunit most often, is answered.  Adventure yarns, science fiction stories, fantasy novels, and fairy tales are mostly plot-driven.  Something is wrong.  The story is about how the something is fixed.  Think Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game series, particularly the first.  4. Character-driven stories can include science fiction or fantasy but are more likely to include romance, literary fiction, and the like, stories that are not complete until the character is happy in his/her own skin.

The Contract

The story drive chosen is a kind of unspoken contract with your reader.  Once the reader understands the promise made by the text--that you won't finish the story until he or she has learned everything about the world or the question is answered or the world is put to rights or the character gets their satisfying happily ever after--he or she will find it highly dissatisfying if you don't complete your promised story.  I've read novels about a whodunit that don't answer the question but end in a happily ever after.  It's very unsatisfying.  A story about a lonely, sad character may end in the solution to a question, but if she's not happy, I, as the reader, am not happy.  I ran into this with the recent "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" movie.  We start with a world launched into zombie war and end with "and they live happily ever after."  At which time, the zombies return in force.  I imagine movie makers were setting up for a sequel, but the sequel isn't likely to come because the movie doesn't complete the contract it promised.  Audiences don't like that.

Example:

The Harry Potter series manages to balance out all four story drives.  We start with a lonely boy who is immediately handed a question--who am I?--which leads to other questions, all of which are resolved by turns as he enters a foreign magical world and attempts to resolve the problem in the world as well as his own loneliness.  All four drives come to satisfying endings.  This is part of the books' appeal.  Rowling makes several contracts with the reader, all of which get a satisfying resolution.

Now, You

If you're struggling with a story you're writing, unsure if it's hitting the mark, figure out which contract you are making with your reader.  Are you promising to show off an awesome world, answer a question or questions, fix a world, or make a character happy?  Do you fulfill your promise?  If not, how can you fix that?