Tell me if this sounds familiar. You’re playing a game, or reading a book, or watching a movie. All of a sudden, the story just sort of… stops. It ends, but there’s no proper resolution or denoument. You run to the Internet to vent your rage, but a great wailing of fanboys has preceeded you. “It’s one part of a trilogy,” they cry. “You can’t expect an ending!”

Not so! While we at Kwanzoo prefer to engage people with interstitial quiz widgets instead of narratives, we can tell you that writing in a serialized format doesn’t mean you have to leave your audience feeling like they’ve been smacked in the face. Over the course of a couple of posts, we’ll be reviewing storytelling theory and how it applies to trilogies and other kinds of series.

First, a basic model of storytelling, and why doing it badly irritates people so much:

A story is when a character is confronted with a complication, and, through a series of events, struggles with and resolves this complication. The skeleton of any story, the ur-story if you will, goes complication —> action —> resolution.

Sometimes you’ll see people refer to the complication as the “conflict,” but that can be misleading. Conflict implies two parties, so to view it in those terms, you have to make up an antagonist where it’s not useful to think of one, like “Man vs. Nature” or “Man vs. Himself.”

A complication is anything that keeps a character from keeping on doing whatever they’re doing. It can be an alien invasion of Earth. It can be a diagnosis of terminal cancer. It can be a wacky cousin showing up on his or her doorstep. It can be a royal father getting killed by a usurping uncle.

A “resolution” doesn’t mean everything goes back to normal and everyone lives happily ever after, though that would qualify as one. The resolution to the alien invasion plot above is probably destroying the mothership and kicking them all off of Earth or something similar.

In a resolution, the character successfully deals with the complication, whatever form that might take. In the terminal cancer, it might be the character fighting it off, or it might be the character accepting death after denying it.

(It’s possible to write a story where the character doesn’t learn a dang thing, but the audience does. That’s the advanced class, though, and this is 101 stuff.)

The part where the character takes action, the meat of the story, is fairly self explanatory. I won’t go into foci, or acts, too much, because the main point I want to make is aout complications and resolutions.

Human beings love stories. We’re wired for it. We’ll assemble a mix of random and incomprehensible events (aka life) into stories with beginnings, middles and ends and extract meaning from them. Stories are primal.

The point is, once you start a story and present someone with a complication, you’ve got them hooked. They’ll walk on broken glass to find out what happens.

The flip side of that is that if you don’t give them that resolution, it’s more annoying to them than the sound of nails on a chalkboard. That’s what’s happening in the example in the first paragraph.

So, how do you provide your audience with a satisfying resolution at each point in a serialized story, if each episode is only one part of a bigger narrative with its own beginning and ending?

It’s pretty easy, actually. Next week, I’ll show you how to reliably pull it off.

On to part two

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