This week’s video talks about why appropriate repercussions will always be the earmark of your story’s best scenes.
Video Transcript:
Stories are about stuff that happens. But even more, they’re about stuff that happens because other stuff happened.
In short, they’re about repercussions.
Every event in your story needs to create character reactions that are so radical and progressive the story couldn’t be the same without them. This harks back to the standard advice that if you can pull any scene from your story without changing the overall plot, then that event probably isn’t important enough to the plot to stay in the book.
What this all comes down to is this: everything your character does in your story must result in repercussions. The bigger the character’s action, the bigger the repercussion. Otherwise, no matter how big and impressive and generally awesome your latest scene, it simply has no impact on the plot. And if it has no impact on the plot—if everyone just goes on their merry way as if nothing really happened—then you’ve essentially told readers that this big, awesome event really wasn’t that big or awesome.
This goes beyond just making sure all your characters react to events, which I’ve talked about before. This is about making sure your characters never get off easy.
For example, a fantasy I read recently featured a shocking scene in which the protagonist kills someone by tossing her over his balcony. It’s a scene that completely shifts the paradigm of the story, in ways that had the potential to be extremely interesting. As it turned out, however, this scene ended up being completely inconsequential to the story because the character experienced zero repercussions. His bodyguards cover up the murder; his family forgives him. There’s not even much soul-searching going on.
Not only did the author zap the potency right out of this powerful scene, he also weakened the causality of his entire story and its world by proving that his protagonist will never be held accountable for any of his decisions or actions.
Tell me your opinion: What repercussions result from your story’s best scenes?
