How to Write a Story with a Message

An idea, an impulse, for a story arises. You sketch out a plot. You develop some characters. You decide your point of view. You even have a message that you want your novel or screenplay to illuminate. But the questions remain: Do you have a compelling story worth writing? Or are you merely dressing up an agenda and shouting it at your audience? What is the difference between having an agenda and writing one?

Consider the following scenario: Let’s suppose a young woman, Ketia Marks, has just lost her husband to a car accident. She has very few kin, none who live nearby, but belongs to a church in town. The aunt who flew in for the funeral left immediately afterward, and the church women who descended on her house with food haven’t yet bothered to pick up their dishes. Not quite two weeks since her loss, Ketia is waking up from the shock of it all and feels utterly lost and alone.

Then let’s suppose another woman from the church choir decides to pay Ketia a visit. And let’s make her not just any woman, but a woman who has also experienced tragic grief—her son died several years before while she and her family were serving on the mission field. She spent those years coming to terms with her anger at the God she believes in, developing a new understanding of his promises, and contemplating the path forward. She thinks she has an answer and hopes it will also help others.

She shows up this morning unannounced. Ketia opens the door.

Sharon stood on the porch with two to-go cups from the local coffee shop. Her broad smile pushed her spectacles up a little higher on her cheeks. “Can I come in?”

Our character feels a little lift in her spirit. Someone has noticed her.

Ketia stepped back to make room for the woman to enter. Had Sharon been at the funeral? She wouldn't blame her if not. She remembered the awful way her son had died. On the mission field, inadequate care. The whole church had prayed for his survival.

The woman strode into the room and sat in the recliner Jim had favored. She placed the coffees on the small table between her and the sofa. “Come have a seat,” she said, patting the cushion. “You’ve had a rough week.”

Good, we think. This woman has empathy for our character. She is offering a safe place for our character to grow and heal and maybe make some sense of the unexpected circumstances she finds herself in.

Ketia closed the door and wandered toward the sofa. She picked up one of the coffee cups as she sat. A bit of coffee might taste good with someone around who understood. “How do you do it? I feel I’ve been flattened like a pancake on the floor and I have to try to peel myself up every min—”

“Yes, in times like this you need an eternal perspective.”

The plastic coffee lid nearly to her lips, Ketia paused. “I-I think I have that. It’s just so hard. So unexpected—”

“Now, see, that’s your problem, the way you think. Listen, Ketia, here’s what you need to do—you need to get involved in a project that will put your mind in a good place. You need to stop thinking of your dead husband and get out of self-pity mode.”

“S-self-pity?” Her hand began to tremble so that the coffee sloshed out onto the lid. She set the cup back on the table.

“Bill and I are returning to Africa in two months. I’m convinced that serving the Lord overseas is the best way to honor the dead. If you’re not sharing the gospel in dark places, then what are you doing that’s worthwhile, right? We thought you’d like to be one of the first to contribute to our support fund. What do you say?”

 Floaters lined up across Ketia’s field of vision, and she pressed her hand against her forehead, but the intruder just kept talking and talking.

Shocked by Sharon’s shallow callousness? This revulsion is what audiences feel—all with their own grief and problems—when they get sideswiped by an agenda in story. But writers do it all the time.

Sharon has a message, but not one readily received by anyone uninitiated into her club and certainly not one for which she makes a compelling case. Her message is an underlying motive to gain something for herself rather than benefit her audience. She thinks that by imposing her personal mission on Ketia, she is acting benevolently and virtuously; she is blind to Ketia’s true need and fails to earn the right to help Ketia with her grief. This same problem is true of many storytellers.

For more on evangelizing through story, read my article, How to Share the Gospel through Story

Unfortunately, story art in many corners of the industry (not just Christian) is devolving into words on pages and images on screens that are just as pushy, self-absorbed, and lacking in empathy as this character. Readers come to a story genuinely willing to engage, expecting at the least entertainment but also hoping for a story that moves them and enlightens them in some way about the good life. Like Katia, they often discover they have invited someone into their personal space who would rather promote themselves and their pet issues than the human needs of the audience.

So how do we write with message? Because surely story without a message is merely a narration of events and characters strung together by wasted ink or film. It’s the person recounting every moment of a day, from waking to flossing to using the facilities to every word that has been uttered within hearing, without any sense of filter or purpose.

Just as our characters have underlying motives, so do we all as writers. But while it’s good for them—to heighten conflict—it isn’t good for us. Here are three questions to help you discern whether you are creating a sales pitch or writing a story that shines a “clean light into the dingy corners of the human psyche and society.”[1]

 Dramatic Driving Force 

Have you formulated an active moral premise?

 We live by story. As screenwriter Robert McKee explains, “Story is not only our most prolific art form but rivals all activities—work, play, eating, exercise—for our waking hours. We tell and take in stories as much as we sleep—and even then we dream.”[2] We live by story because story points us to patterns of human interaction that equip us for the good life.[3] Therefore, storytellers are tasked with more than entertaining; they must try to piece together the patterns and textures of human interaction in a way that rings true.

 We all have some sense of how the patterns work, but we differ on interpretation. In our diverse society, we no longer share a meta-narrative with our closest neighbors. Even among family members we have widely different values. We disagree profoundly on what the good life looks like. We daily stomp on each other’s way of life. So it’s not enough to present a predetermined conclusion, as our intruding character Sharon does above; we must propose an active cause-and-effect principle to serve as the basis for a literary argument.

McKee calls this active cause-and-effect principle the “controlling idea,” the “story’s ultimate meaning expressed through the action and aesthetic emotion of the last act’s climax.”[4] But because an active, causative principle is more than an “idea,” I choose to use the word premise as playwright Lajos Egri uses it in The Art of Dramatic Writing: a proposition that serves as the basis for a literary argument.[5] And for our purposes, I am going to expand the name of this dramatic driving force to the “moral premise” because like it or not, a literary proposition that argues for how to equip ourselves for life carries moral weight.

A moral premise is different from theme, which might statically look at man’s inhumanity to man or racism or class division as a recurrent thread in the story. A literary work can have more than one thematic thread (or motif) but only one driving force.

A moral premise must embody action; it is never static. Something about our humanity or human experience drives, leads to, causes, or begets an outcome. Thus, it is more than a moral judgment (stealing is wrong or abortion is murder) or a moral imperative (we must reverse global warming). A moral premise explains what kind of forces “set emotion going,”[6] drive character choices, and cause change.

In the movie Dead Poet’s Society, for instance, where a new English teacher at a boy’s boarding school bucks the institution’s rote teaching methods and inspires a group of young men through transcendentalist poetry and ideas, the premise might be metered, free expression gives life to a community. The flip side of that premise might also be true: unyielding conformity leads to death of the spirit. You as the author must decide which side of the premise you want to champion and have come it come out on top. (Spoiler alert: Considering that the movie ends with the protagonist bucking authority and quoting poetry in response to his beloved teacher being kicked out of the school, we have a clue which side this author chose.)

 When you look at the story idea or plot or characters or the unique situation that is driving your creation, do you have an active moral premise that will “crystallize” your plot or idea and drive your story toward its conclusion? Or have you merely decided on a conclusion you want to clothe in narrative? Be sure to “formulate a premise” so that your “plot or idea will not be separate from the [story] as a whole, but will be an integral part of it.”[7]

The Art of the Argument

Does your story organically explore and exhaust all other options to reach its conclusion?

 After we form a moral premise, we must walk with the audience through that argument to see if we can prove our case. We must question it and fight against it and put every obstacle in front of it. If the conclusion buckles when I press my full weight against it—or it answers, “Because I said so”—perhaps the conclusion isn’t the right one after all.

Do you want, for instance, to write a story that paints abortion as evil? Just having characters say abortion is wrong or showing them persuading a girl to choose adoption instead won’t work. You must form an active premise that takes the story argument somewhere, like disregard for life in the womb causes society to self-destruct. Then, if that premise is the heart of your story, you must prove it. And when it comes to framing and editing your story for literary argument, you must look at every detail as though you were a ruthless emperor. All roads must lead to Rome.

Carefully analyze what you are adopting into your story world as an assumption and what you plan to prove literarily. Your characters necessarily bring world views and agendas to the conflict. Their assumptions are fine, even useful. Yours may not be. You must break down your plot, setting, and character motivations (internal and external) and study the necessary outcome of such choices according to true human experience.

As Egri says, using the example of a young, middle-class, ambitious woman who goes from respectable family to a life of prostitution, “It is your task, as the playwright, to exhaust every other possibility and then show, logically, how she finds her way into the type of life she would most wish to avoid. It is up to you to prove that nothing else remains for her. If, for any reason, we feel that prostitution wasn’t the only way out for Irene, you have failed as a craftsman and as a dramatist.”[8]

So consider, does the necessary outcome of your character’s choices and your story choices explain your message? If not, you must reframe some portion of your moral premise or your story (whether character trait or conflict or obstacle) until the necessary outcome and the message meet.

Let’s explore J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series as an illustration of this concept. While each book of the series has an independent moral premise driving it and holding it together, the series as a whole also argues for an overarching premise: Selfless love conquers death. To expand the premise into its two sides, we might say immortal life sought through conquering others begets death (Voldemort) while laying down one’s life for others begets life (Harry).

We learn in the first book that the whole story was set in motion by Lily Potter dying to save Harry, giving him special protection from the curse Voldemort directs at him. As each book progresses, Harry learns more and more about who he is, who Voldemort is, and what Voldemort is doing. He tries to prevent the return of evil; he tries to thwart evil; he tries to sidestep evil; he tries to ignore evil; eventually he must face evil and lay down his power.

And while he ends each book as a successful hero, each journey to overcome Voldemort changes him and prepares him for the final act, proving to him that love defeats hate, that he is the one chosen for this moment, and that a necessary step to defeating evil is recognizing that a bit of that evil is lodged in ourselves. He has done everything else he can. Every part of the seven books lead to this moment where Harry must lay down his life for the sake of his friends and Voldemort’s defeat.

He doesn’t sacrifice himself just so there will be a Christ-figure in the book. He doesn’t sacrifice himself to gain glory. He doesn’t sacrifice himself to prove that people should worship wizards and witchcraft. None of those reasons would fulfill the moral premise. He moves into this decision because he has exhausted all other options and found them wanting. He has come to understand love. He has come to understand the great evil of taking life and lording over others in power. He knows the great despair of death awaiting everyone he loves. And so he chooses the one valiant act remaining, the only one that still makes sense: to lay down his life for his friends, and in doing so, he conquers the evil inside him as well as the evil Voldemort that feeds himself with death.

 What happens if Harry does anything other than choose to sacrifice himself, if this final aesthetic emotion and action in the climax doesn’t match the driving force of the premise? We get pushed out of the story world. We get that nagging feeling the author is feeding us snake oil. The story doesn’t work.

For a story to retain all its power, a reader much be enveloped in the world, fully immersed in the lives of the characters as though they were standing beside them, experiencing their exploits first hand. Any little blip that reminds readers that they are, in fact, reading diminishes the reality of the characters and the world in the reader’s mind. A writer’s agenda, by definition, is the writer (outside the story world) reaching through the story world to broadcast an underlying motive. It doesn’t work.

A moral premise, however, draws readers into the story by inviting them to engage in the dialectic that organically arises from the characters, character motivations, plot, setting, and situation. And a well-drawn premise keeps a story from sagging in the middle with extraneous scenes and dialogue.

 Change for All 

Have you engaged empathetically with the reader and competing conclusions?

 What authors learn about their own underlying motives and biases during the writing process is immensely important. If you as an author aren’t growing in empathy and understanding of the issues, temptations, and your characters’ missteps as you develop a story, you are doing the reader a disservice.

If you set out to proclaim a moral judgment, like our intruder Sharon, your agenda will blind you to the authentic internal workings of your characters because you will fail to ask, “Is this so?” and “Why is this so?” Agenda reinforces bias so that we think we are standing on the reader’s porch for a benevolent mission when we are serving only ourselves. It causes us to pity those who disagree rather than see ourselves in their shoes.

Agenda in story points the finger—you are bad, this one sin is bad, people who look and act like you are bad, you need to change. Active moral premise, however, implicates us all—we as the human race are all susceptible to think and behave in ways that lead to bad (or good) outcomes—if we want to change the outcome, we need to change us all.

Are you coming at your agendas and issues with wise humility as you craft your message? As Harry Potter reminds us, there’s a piece of the dark lord residing in even the best of us. Explore it if you want to fight against it. Intimately understanding our enemy and speaking its language helps us know its greatest weakness.

Final Thoughts

We come to story to answer questions: How does love act in this situation? How is justice served or not served? How should I interpret the patterns in my life and find ways to improve their outcome? What drives me to make the choices I never thought I’d make? What ideas do I want to emulate? What do I long for?

How will you answer?

When it comes to matters of faith or world view convictions in storytelling, many of us, Christian and non-Christian alike, offer a snake-oil, surface-level response: “Adopt my faith or world view, and it will solve your problems.” Instead, I beg you to prove literarily that solving my problem requires the content of your faith. Do that, and you will change the world with your message.

[1] Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting, 1st ed. (New York: ReganBooks, 1997), 13.

[2] McKee, Story, 11.

[3] See Kenneth Burke, Equipment for Living: The Literary Reviews of Kenneth Burke, ed. Nathaniel A. Rivers and Ryan P. Weber (West Lafayette, Ind: Parlor Press, 2010).

[4] McKee, Story, 112.

[5] While Egri uses the word premise to avoid the complications and misinterpretations of other words like “central idea,” “driving force,” or “theme,” McKee uses the word premise, as do many in the industry, in its sense of something assumed, the initiating “What would happen if…” idea. I chose this word primarily because no other option has the active meaning of “a proposition stated or assumed as leading to a conclusion.” See Lajos Egri, The Art of Dramatic Writing: Its Basis in the Creative Interpretation of Human Motives, rev. ed. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960), 2 and McKee, Story, 112.

[6] Egri, The Art of Dramatic Writing, 6.

[7] Egri, The Art of Dramatic Writing, 59.

[8] Egri, The Art of Dramatic Writing, 59.