It’s time once again for Story Cauldron. This week, let’s dive into an important aspect of storytelling: the struggle to achieve a goal. When you break them down, most compelling stories follow a protagonist on a journey to achieve something, be it winning the love of their life, or getting a job, or slaying a dragon. And it’s their journey that we enjoy.

Years ago a former storyboard artist at Pixar shared a secret with the world. Actually, it was more than a single secret. On Twitter, Emma Coats shared 22 golden nuggets about the craft of writing and what makes a good story.

As they have come to be known, Pixar’s 22 Rules of Storytelling offer a somewhat haphazard, but always useful, list of aphorisms about writing that are incredibly useful whenever writing a novel, short story, screenplay, or other fictional work.

Although I’ve been a writer of fiction and nonfiction for decades, I still find a lot of inspiration from reviewing the rules—which, of course, aren’t really rules at all, but ideas for improving your storytelling.

The thing is, the rules are very short—most are just a sentence or two. To fully appreciate what Coats was trying to accomplish, it’s worth looking at the rules in more detail. To that end, here’s my analysis of the very first rule:

“You admire a character for trying more than for their successes.”

Why the attempt matters

Every great story is, at its core, a tale of a protagonist’s struggle. The main character is somehow broken, untested, or lacking in something they need or want.

The protagonist might want to solve a mystery, find the treasure, or discover true love. They also generally need to understand a greater truth about themselves or the world, or how they can become a better person in some way. As the story unfolds, they set out to achieve both of these ‘external’ and ‘internal’ goals, even if they don’t know it yet. But in a good story, the author doesn’t make it easy for them to figure out how to do these things.

For example, consider Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. Her external goal is to return to Kansas, and her internal need is to figure out that that if she’s not happy with her life, she holds the power to change things. But as anyone can tell you, neither of those goals come easy to Dorothy. She needs to go on an arduous journey filled with danger (and characters oddly reminiscent of the people she left behind) before she can succeed.

The struggle is everything

We love to see a protagonist succeed, but it’s their struggles that fascinate us. We relate to the incremental steps a protagonist takes towards achieving their goal — the things the character learns about themselves, their friends, the world they’re in, and even their enemies. As humans, we innately connect with someone else’s journey to figure out a problem and come up with a plan. And as we watch them work things out, trying and failing, we will root for them along the way.

Indeed, a great and memorable protagonist undergoes tremendous internal and external struggles that mimic those within our own lives. When the character encounters roadblocks, we share their frustration. When their antagonist deprives them of their goal, we want to scream. Our hearts beat a little faster when the Wicked Witch of the West releases her flying monkeys, and we recognize the same crushing disappointment when the Wizard doesn’t give Dorothy her greatest desire. At that moment, we are all Dorothy. Her pain is our pain, and it’s both agonizing and thrilling.

Successes need to be hard-won

We find a character interesting because they dig down deep to figure out a solution to the roadblocks that are in their path. They try and fail, try and fail, and finally, try and succeed. It is only in those efforts that we learn to love them and follow along with them. And they have to really work at it. If their goal is too easy to achieve, we’ll feel cheated.

Consider poor Dorothy again. She’s heard all about this wizard and expects he can help her get home. Her journey along the yellow brick road to meet him gets harder and harder, but finally—finally!—she reaches the Emerald City. But not so fast. Instead of giving her what she wants, the wizard just sends her on a mission. At his direction, she defeats the wicked witch and returns again, only to find out that the wizard isn’t all he said he was. And then he abandons her as he leaves!

It’s only then that she learns that she had the power to change her circumstances all along. Her final success, which came only after all of her striving, makes the story worthwhile. After all, if Glinda the Good Witch had told Dorothy at the beginning that all she had to do was click her heels together three times, then the story would have been an absolute failure!

I think The Wizard of Oz makes such an impact because we’ve all been there. Even as kids, we all know what it’s like to not get what we wanted, to work hard for nothing, to get cheated, and for people to get in our way. But somehow, we keep going. It’s a universal human experience.

Applying the concept of trying and failing to your own writing

You can take this lesson and apply it to any writing that you do. If you’re writing fiction, it’s pretty self-evident. Put your protagonist in terrible, impossible-to-solve situations, and as they slowly dig themselves out of the hole you put them in, the audience will be fascinated. Don’t make it easy for them. The worst thing an author can do is to give their characters gadgets or magic that solve all their problems at exactly the right moment. So make your characters work for every success, and your stories will be far more interesting.

The same concept can be applied to nonfiction. Think of all the how-to books you’ve read where the author told you about where they started. Maybe they were down on their luck, or penniless, or had been fired from a job. They had a problem and they figured out a way to solve it. If you can get a reader to connect to your struggle, they’ll be invested in everything else you have to say. Take them on a journey, show them how you learn something over time.

When you learn to incorporate the concept of trying and failing into all of your writing, your own success will follow.

Have you checked out my new serial novel, “The Boy Who Can Taste Color”? It’s my new young adult novel with faeries and witches and teenagers who can’t seem to stay out of trouble. If you’re new to Story Cauldron or missed last week’s email, you can click below and start reading! And when you read it, please let me know what you think, and stay tuned for chapter 2 later this week!

Read chapter 1 now