As a technologist working in Silicon Valley, I’m used to writing. Notes, articles and white papers are commonplace exercises. Just the facts, ma’am. Keep personalities out of it. And the technique served me well. I even used it for a moderately successful how-to book.
A couple of years ago I started a narrative non-fiction project set in the late 1980s about a couple who spend the better part of a year backpacking from Cairo to Cape Town and found myself completely unprepared for the genre. At the end of my first draft, I had something like a Lonely Planet guide to traveling rough through Africa, except that it was for a world that existed three decades before. In other words, not very compelling or useful. Instead of telling a story, I was describing what happened. No thank you, ma’am.
When my harshest critic pointed this out, she told me to dig deeper into the characters, to understand why they would give a year of their lives for this adventure, I nearly gave the project up. Engineers often become engineers because we don’t understand people or their motivations. I struggled to find a starting point, a path into this couple’s minds. What finally got me through the project was a technique I use for life and work. I started with the Why and only then moved to the What and the How.
The Why in this case is a person’s motivation. It drives the What, the things you need to accomplish. The How is the step by step path to accomplishing the What. Business and engineering professionals use this technique almost every day, but if you’re scratching your head thinking it’s all too abstract and general, let me describe how I applied it to my project.
That same critic educated me that most people who read for pleasure want to see a journey of personal growth and change in the characters. The What and How hint at the journey, but it’s rare that those alone get you there. To show personal progress, I needed to understand the character’s motivations, their internal fears and wants, the Why of their lives. The professional writers among you will find this obvious but it wasn’t for me. There are many Why’s – greed, ambition, the desire for recognition, a meaningful relationship. Each has its own origin story inside a person’s heart and each is worth exploring. In this story I decided the key motivator was the relationship between the couple.
Fortunately, the Why of relationships hasn’t changed in recorded history. We are a gregarious species and wither away without meaningful contact. Isolation is as corrosive to the soul as battery acid is to the skin. Our fears may cause us to build walls to keeps others out, but inside those walls is a lonely voice crying out for a human connection. This is as close to a “universal truth’ as I know.
Once you’ve got a handle on the Why, you’ll almost certainly understand what’s holding your characters back – substance abuse in their family, being the victim of sexual predation, divorced parents, a fear of abandonment among the possibilities. You’ll see what creates the gap between what people say they want and where they are. This path of growth, or lack of it, is the driver of the story. How often have we heard this from creative writing professionals?
Assuming you now know the Why of your character, going from where they are to who they want to be is the What; each of these What elements introduces tension into the story. For example, intimacy is a prerequisite to a meaningful connection, but it’s in tension with our desire for space and independence. We seek novelty but we also want security and stability. We want to be able to trust another person but we fear being vulnerable. Exploring and resolving these tensions is a rich area that both keeps the story moving and, as you resolve each, helps you understand the characters a little better.
The What takes you to the How. Normally this is where we spend too much time. The How is what actually happens. It’s, for example, the nuts and bolts of achieving intimacy, of bringing adventure into a relationship – but not too much – of building trust that can so easily be destroyed through almost any betrayal. If a reader accepts your character’s motivation and linked them to the What, they’re ready to trudge through the How.
Why, What and How is a tool. If you’re a naturally empathetic person, you probably do this every day without even thinking. For those of us who are more left-brained, constantly asking Why a character is doing something is a tool to understand others as they change through the course of life and writing.