How to Make Sure Your Story Lives Up to Its Potential

The first thing I have to tell you today is that I’m going to try really hard not to gush about Guillermo del Toro’s blockbuster Pacific Rim. The second thing I’m going to tell you is that I’m probably going to fail. This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in years. It was plotted perfectly, structured perfectly, set up perfectly. There is not a single thing about this movie I would want to change. We could grab a lot of lessons from this for our own writing, and I will be discussing more takeaways in future posts. Today, I want us to focus on how completely this story lives up to its potential.

How Did This Story Live Up to Its Potential?

In a nutshell, Pacific Rim is a movie that knew exactly what it wanted to be—and aced it. This is a mecha adventure story with a tight plot about robot pilots fighting alien monsters who arrive through a wormhole in the Pacific Ocean. Every choice this story makes—from characters to conflict to music to action sequences is tightly focused on advancing a singular vision. It itself, the story is not a particularly unique take on familiar tropes, but added up, it lives up to its potential fully thanks to an adept execution of cohesion and resonance.

So often, we see stories that don’t quite know what they want to be. They try to be bigger, or funnier, or more intimate, or more serious than is really good for them. This happens when writers lose sight of what their stories is really about. Matrix eloaded and Matrix Revolutions comes to mind. Another good (or bad, depending on how you look at it) example would be Chronicles of Riddick. These are particularly obvious examples, since they’re sequels of stories (The Matrix and Pitch Black, respectively) that did know what they were about.

For Your Story to Live Up to Its Potential, You Have to Know What It’s About

When you sit down to write a story, you want it to be awesome. It can be tempting to start throwing in a little of everything. But very few stories are big enough to handle everything. If you add too much disparate stuff to a story, you’re only going to water it down.

For your story to live up to its potential, it’s crazy important to first identify what your story is about.

• What is your goal in creating this story?
• Who’s your audience?

The answers to these questions are your mission statement for your book. Write it down and post it above your computer, where you can remind yourself every day that this is the story you’re writing. You won’t please every reader in the world, but for those who like what you’re doing, you’ll smack it clean out of the park.

Wordplayers, tell me your opinions! What is your mission statement for your book? How are you making sure your story lives up to its potential? Tell me in the comments!