11.6 Five Common Storytelling Mistakes

Another way to learn about stories is to analyze the ones that don’t work. You could look around for novels or movies that you think failed in their storytelling, but they may be difficult to find since they were written by professionals. It’s easier to look to other contexts for examples, such as family gatherings or a night out at a bar. Can you think of a relative or co-worker whose stories you dread hearing? What is wrong with the way they do it? Perhaps they make some of these mistakes:

• Too much unnecessary detail. People lose patience with long stories, and nothing makes a story feel long like a lot of detail that doesn’t contribute much. Some storytellers get hung up on trying to remember the name of a particular person, forgetting that the name makes no difference to the listener.
• Forgetting necessary details. It takes work to figure out what needs to be foreshadowed and what background information the audience needs to hear so that the end of the story has the intended impact. It’s no surprise, then, that many storytellers get to the end of a story and realize “Oh, I forgot to tell you that Tom’s room had two beds in it.”
• No ending / no point. In the original Star Trek series, the set designers made a lot of fancy-looking ductwork for the engine room, labeling it with the initials “GNDN.” This was an inside joke: GNDN stood for “Goes Nowhere, Does Nothing.” Now, when someone asks me what I thought about a pointless story, I’ll say “It was a gundun.”
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• Not giving the audience a reason to care about the protagonist. There are many reasons that an audience might care about a character in a story: they’re kind, they’re vulnerable, they’re being thwarted by oppressive forces, they’re carrying scars from previous failures, or the audience simply identifies with them. Some storytellers forget all of these elements, and as a result the audience loses interest in how the story turns out.
• Telling, not showing. Explicitly telling the audience what kind of person the protagonist is, and how they should feel about events, rarely works.