Welcome to Candle Craft

By Royal McGraw

Royal McGraw has written professionally for film, television, comics, and games for over 20 years. He led development on the mobile smash hit Choices: Stories You Play and currently serves as CEO of Candlelight Games.

Welcome! This is the first installment of a multi-part series intended to provide you with 10 Quick And Actionable Adjustments that you can make to your own writing process to improve your storytelling. Some of these process adjustments will be strategic, offering suggestions to improve how you think about storytelling from a big-picture standpoint. Some of these process adjustments will be tactical, offering suggestions to improve how you think about tackling scenes or even individual lines of dialogue. In all cases, these lessons have been hard-won, gleaned from over 20 years of experience writing across a variety of different mediums.

Before we get started…

What Is A Story?

From a very high-level, stories are easy to describe:

Stories are a fundamental aspect of human culture. Stories are ways to convey experiences, ideas, and values from one person to another. Stories are culture and entertainment.

But this is a concept, not a definition. Before we can dive into quick and actionable adjustments to improve your storytelling, we need to pause and adopt a shared understanding of what exactly we mean when we say the word “story.” 

To that end, let’s start with a few definitions from great minds that have come before us:

In The Poetics (330 BCE), Aristotle refers to story as an instinctually “imitative act”, with the social station of the imitated characters determining whether the resulting story is a comedy or a tragedy. To Aristotle, a successfully realized story is “whole… that which has a beginning, middle, and end.”

In The Hero With a Thousand Faces (1968, 2nd Ed.), Joseph Campbell argues that stories are “the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into cultural manifestation.” He further defines the most common form of story as being “separation – initiation – return.”

In Story (1994), Robert McKee notes that a story is “one huge master event… that takes life from one condition at the opening to a changed condition at the end.”

In the above quotes, we see a few ideas that pop up multiple times:

• Stories have 3 stages

• Stories evoke a feeling of unity or wholeness

Now here’s the rub: everything written above is an excellent description of a well-told story. But how exactly is it useful? In practice, what are the three stages in your story? How do you know if your work evokes a feeling of completeness?

The problem is that simply describing a well-made car doesn’t help a novice mechanic build a car, let alone a well-made one. In order to improve our craft, we need to get under the hood where it’s dirty and greasy. We need to pull apart the engine and mess around with the gears. We need to break things apart and understand them before we attempt to recreate them.

For the purposes of Candle Craft, we’re stripping down our definition of story to the absolute bare minimum that you can actionably test your own work against while writing.

So with that in mind, our definition of story is exactly one word:

CHANGE

Why “change”? Simply put: you can write a million words of gloriously evocative prose, but if you don’t demonstrate change, all you’ve done is deliver description. On the other hand, if you’ve successfully demonstrated change, word count doesn’t matter. 

In fact, the concept of beginning, middle and end doesn’t matter. The concept of completeness or wholeness doesn’t matter. If you’ve successfully demonstrated change, you’ve written a story.

This matters because change is not subjective. Change is an objective razor you can hold your own work against while you write. And if we aim to improve our work, we must be able to measure our work. Going forward, change (and the elements that describe change) will be our unit of measurement.

So with all of that said, you’re not here because you want to write just any story. You’re here because you want to write a very good story.

And that brings us back to Candle Craft. Over the next 10 installments, we’re going to build on the concepts discussed here to jumpstart your personal writing journey. Next up: TWO-BEAT STORIES.