What makes for a good story idea? In their most basic form, all stories have been done before. Girl meets boy? It’s been done hundreds of times. Boy goes to wizard school? Ditto. The chosen one must save the world? You can find that one from ancient Greece to the latest superhero blockbuster. When it comes to writing a compelling story, the how of your story is often more important than the what. I talk more about the difference between idea and execution in this post. But as the author, how should you think about your story idea to set yourself up for success? How do you make sure that your story has a strong foundation? There is one thing you need to know before you start writing your story: your driving narrative question.

What Is a Driving Narrative Question?

Before you start writing a story, you should understand what motivates readers to start and finish stories. We keep reading The Hunger Games to find out whether Katniss will survive the games. We keep reading The Lord of the Rings to find out what will happen to Frodo, the One Ring, and the fate of Middle Earth. We keep reading A Game of Thrones to find out who will survive and come out on top in this struggle for power. Every story poses a question that motivates the reader to keep going until the end: Will Katniss survive? Will Frodo save Middle Earth? Who will win the throne? We call this question the driving narrative question because it is what hooks readers and motivates them to keep reading until the end.

How the Driving Narrative Question Creates a Three-Part Shape

Here’s another way of thinking about it. Your story’s beginning should pose a question that the middle explores and the ending answers. That is one of the most basic ways to define a story’s three-part shape. Aristotle liked to call the three parts Act I, Act II, and Act III; Todorov liked to call the three parts equilibrium, disequilibrium, and new equilibrium. But philosophers aside, I find it most practical to think of the story’s three parts as question, exploration, and answer. Every scene in your story should work toward asking, exploring, or answering your driving narrative question. You could write the most dramatic fight scenes, but if they have nothing to do with your story’s driving narrative question, the reader will still find them boring.

On the other hand, with the driving narrative question in sight, the reader will find mundane-seeming scenes riveting. I’ve heard the famous author Patrick Rothfuss talk about this topic. In his book, he wanted to make readers cry over the simple event of a character losing a library card. While my eyes didn’t literally tear up when Kvothe’s library access was revoked, the scene still felt gut-wrenching. That is the brilliance of the driving narrative question. As long as you keep your story’s focus on that question, you won’t be distracted by irrelevant rabbit holes. Your story will be sharp, focused. You’ll be able to hook your reader and never let go.

Even if you consider yourself a “pantser,” you should still figure out your driving narrative question before you start writing. Yes, you can make things up as you go. Yes, you should open yourself up to writing unexpected twists that even you didn’t see coming. But without a driving narrative question guiding you, it is incredibly easy to get lost in irrelevant scenes and pointless action. You don’t need to map out every detail of your story’s three-part shape. You just need to know the question that will naturally give your story that three-part shape.

What Makes a Driving Narrative Question Strong

For the driving narrative question to be engaging, it needs to have three key elements:

• a relatable and interesting protagonist,
• interesting obstacles,
• and high stakes.

A Relatable Protagonist

An interesting protagonist piques the reader’s curiosity. A relatable protagonist gives the reader a reason to care. There are some exceptions where it’s sufficient for the protagonist to be only interesting and not relatable, as per the oddball leads like Sherlock Holmes and Ebenezer Scrooge. But in such cases, the characters are so quirky or strange that they make up for the lack of relatability by being fascinating enigmas. Usually, the most effective way to make a reader invested in the protagonist is to make the protagonist relatable and interesting. Let’s take The Hunger Games as an example.

In The Hunger Games, the story quickly establishes that Katniss is stubborn and good with a bow. She uses these traits to provide for and protect her family, an aim she places above any other goal. The fierce love that she has for her sister Prim makes Katniss very sympathetic. Her unique personality, skillset, and family situation make Katniss interesting as well.

Interesting Obstacles

There are two main sources of interesting obstacles: the world’s dynamics and the story’s central antagonistic force. Again, let’s return to The Hunger Games to see what I mean.

Interesting World Dynamics

The post-apocalyptic Panam is quite the interesting setting. An interesting setting, like an interesting protagonist, piques the reader’s curiosity. But more than just that, the setting can also serve to create interesting situations and conflicts. President Snow is the central antagonist of the series, but he didn’t cause the mining accident that killed Katniss’s father, he didn’t directly make Katniss’s family poor, and he didn’t pick Prim’s name at the Reaping. All those sources of conflict were created by the world’s interesting (and horrifying) cultural, economic, and social dynamics.

An Interesting Antagonist

But beyond interesting dynamics, the world will still need an interesting antagonistic force. Now, I say antagonistic force because sometimes the primary force that works against the protagonist’s goals isn’t another character. Sometimes it’s the environment (such as in the film The Day After Tomorrow), or a monster (the TV series Stranger Things), or the protagonist’s own internal demons (the Stephen King story Secret Window). There is usually some sort of antagonistic character to add interpersonal conflict. That character may not be the main antagonist though.

Regardless of type, the antagonist (or antagonistic force) needs to interesting. When an antagonist is a person, the best way to make antagonists interesting is to make them complex and relatable in some way. Readers can still disagree with an antagonist even if they find the antagonist sympathetic.

In The Hunger Games, President Snow is an incredibly complex and interesting character. His central goal is to maintain social order and control. Critically, he is willing to do whatever he deems necessary to protect that social order. That aim, to preserve social order and security, isn’t a bad aim in and of itself. It is Snow’s additional belief that order is more important than individual life that corrupts an otherwise constructive goal. That complexity allows the audience to sympathize with Snow’s perspective even if they do not agree with it. This complexity is also what allows us to acknowledge how good intentions can lead to destructive actions. These kinds of characters give us space to explore our own potential for darkness. Perhaps they even prepare us to avoid feeding that potential darkness within ourselves.

But morality and philosophy aside, such complex antagonists are also gosh-darn interesting and make for fascinating stories.

High Stakes

This one seems pretty straight forward. Still, it’s surprisingly easy for authors to forget about the stakes, especially at the beginning of the story. A story’s high stakes work in tandem with the relatable protagonist. You need a relatable protagonist for the reader to care about the stakes. You also need high stakes to make the reader interested in the protagonist’s journey.

The stakes can’t just be abstract; they need to feel personal. If you want to have a “save the world” arc, you need to make saving the world personal to the protagonist. Otherwise, the stakes won’t feel immediate and real. Have you ever heard the quote, “A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic”? We find it so much easier to process an individual’s story than a multitude’s. The same principle applies to stakes. For stakes to feel as real as they can, they need to be personal and immediate to a relatable protagonist.

Without question, the stakes in The Hunger Games are high, personal, and immediate to Katniss. Twenty-four go into the arena and only one comes out. Katniss’s survival and her family’s well-being are all on the line. The stakes are incredibly high, and the odds are not in Katniss’s favour. These nuanced and high stakes are a major part of what makes Katniss’s story so compelling.

Bringing It All Together

So, for a driving narrative question to be compelling, it needs to include a relatable protagonist, interesting obstacles, and high stakes. The interesting obstacles originate from the setting generally and a central antagonist specifically. Here are some more examples of driving narrative questions from popular stories with these three parts highlighted:

• The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien: Will Frodo (relatable protagonist) succeed in destroying the One Ring (interesting obstacles) and saving not only his beloved home Hobbiton, but the whole of Middle Earth (high stakes)?
• Outlander by Diana Gabaldon: Will Claire (relatable protagonist) successfully navigate her time-travelling escapade to eighteenth-century Scotland (interesting obstacles), survive, and succeed in making it back to her husband in the twentieth century (high stakes)?
  • This series’ driving narrative question eventually morphs into this: Will Claire (relatable protagonist), along with her eighteenth-century lover Jamie, survive (high stakes) the era’s political upheavals, overcome the barriers of time, and be together (interesting obstacles)?
• The Harry Potter Series by J.K. Rowling: Will Harry Potter (relatable protagonist) defeat Lord Voldemort (interesting obstacles) and save his friends and the whole of the wizarding world (high stakes)?
• Stranger Things Netflix Series: Will Joyce, Jim, Mike, Eleven, Nancy, and Jonathan (all relatable protagonists) solve the mystery of Will and Barbara’s disappearances (interesting obstacles) and protect the town from the mysterious and deadly threat that looms in the town’s shadows (high stakes)?

A Note on Complex Questions

As you may have noticed in the above examples, driving narrative questions can be flexible. They can shift over the course of a book and series, such as in the Outlander example above. There can also be more than one driving narrative question in a single story.

The Netflix series Stranger Things is an excellent example of a story with multiple protagonists. Different protagonists often follow different driving narrative questions. Will Joyce prove that her bizarre experiences aren’t hallucinations and follow those strange clues to find her missing son? Will Mike find his missing friend and discover how Eleven’s appearance and Will’s disappearance are related? Will the cop Jim solve the two missing persons cases? Will Nancy find out what happened to her missing friend Barbara?

Each of these individual driving narrative questions directly relate to the series’ overall driving narrative question: why are kids going missing in Hawkins? Without keeping each protagonist’s arc directly related to the overall driving narrative question, the large cast of protagonists wouldn’t have worked. The story would have been too convoluted.

If you’re writing a big cast of protagonists, remember that each individual’s arc needs to be connected to the others. Otherwise, the large cast of characters won’t click and the story won’t feel coherent. Often, the best way to make a large cast click is to make sure all of the character arcs contribute to one overarching driving narrative question.

Summary

Driving narrative questions are the backbone of good storytelling. Even if you don’t want to outline your entire story ahead of time, you need to have a strong grasp on that one question. That question needs to include a relatable protagonist, interesting obstacles, and high stakes. Otherwise, you risk writing a story that lacks direction.

If I could only give authors one piece of storytelling advice, it would be this: make sure your beginning poses a question that the middle explores and the ending answers. The second piece of advice would be to make sure that question involves a relatable protagonist, interesting obstacles, and high stakes. Remember those two pieces of advice and you will be on the right track to crafting a stunning story.