It’s gotta be on the page: Critiquing Tim Grahl’s ‘No Doubt’ (Part 4)
Summary: We look at a confusing catalyst for Ethan’s central decision in ‘No Doubt’ and explore why it’s unclear and what might help fix the problem.
When my brother and I were in university, we shared an apartment for a year. It was a great experience, filled with all the sorts of things you might expect: Having friends over (alas, far too rarely), watching movies together, griping at each other about who left the dirty dishes in the sink . . .
We also cooked together. When it came to meal planning and prep, we had complementary skills, so this worked out nicely. We were never elaborate, but we did just fine for two young men in their twenties on a tight budget (thank-you-very-much).
Of course, that doesn’t mean everything was always perfect.
On one particularly memorable morning, we were making potato wedges. Everything was fine until it was time to add spices. I sprinkled on some oregano and ground pepper, but it needed something more.
My brother loves to cook with dried basil. I have no idea why he latched onto that in particular, but hey – we all have our quirks. Earlier that year, he had bought a huge jar of the stuff.
I thought basil might round off the oregano (sort of a play on Italian herb seasoning), so I grabbed the jar. In one smooth motion, I turned it over above the potatoes and gave it a healthy shake.
It was only then, regrettably far past the point of no return, that I discovered a small but important detail: The jar lid was not fastened properly. When I shook the jar, off popped the lid. And – with the alarming exuberance of a herd of five-year-olds newly released to descend upon a 1990’s era McDonalds playspace – out onto my delicate potato wedges launched the entire contents of the jar.
In less than two seconds, the food:spices ratio in the pan neatly inverted. It appeared as though some arcane alchemy had transmuted crispy, succulent potato into dreary, dessicated basil.
We tried to recover that meal. We dumped out the extra spices and fished out the doomed potato wedges. We must have spent fifteen minutes painstakingly scraping the surfaces of the little guys one by one, trying not to burn our fingers in the process.
Alas, it was not to be. As with the five-year-olds in the McDonald’s ballpit, the stuff clung on and absolutely refused to be dislodged. It covered everything in a hot, flaky, sticky, bitter mess.
The food was inedible.
To prepare a delicious dish, you need the right ingredients in the right proportions.
And, while my problem was that I had far too much of one ingredient, the opposite can also happen. An otherwise beautiful dish can falter if key ingredients are missing.
Storytelling isn’t really that different. You’re the “cook.” Your audience is coming to you expecting a good meal.
It would be silly for a chef at a fine restaurant to serve up a caesar salad and ask his guests to provide the lettuce and parmesan. It’s the job of the chef to know what the dish needs and make sure it’s on the plate.
So also, as a storyteller, you must provide everything your audience needs.
It must be on the page.
Recap
This is the fourth note in a series analyzing Tim Grahl’s short story, “No Doubt”.
In the first note, we established our agenda for this project. We’re evaluating Tim’s story in terms of five fundamentals of storytelling: clarity, believability, engagingness, affect, and meaningfulness.
Now, we’re exploring clarity. What does Tim’s story do well and poorly when it comes to making it easy to understand what’s happening and why?
- Intro
- Clear: orient your audience
- Clear: don’t pull your punches
- Clear: it’s gotta be on the page ← Where we are currently
- Believable
- Engaging
- Affecting
- Meaningful
As a reminder, clarity is about intent. Does your audience receive your story in the way you intended?
In this note, we’ll continue our discussion on clarity by looking at how Tim sets up Ethan’s central decision in the story. We’ll look specifically at how better setup could make this crucial turning point easier to understand.
Ethan makes a decision
The pivotal moment in Ethan’s character story happens on Christmas Eve when he decides to abandon his post at his parents’ store and go see his crush, Meg, sing at her church.
Tim leads into it with escalating tension as Ethan works throughout the day. The hours pass, and Ethan is increasingly caught between his desire to connect with Meg and the obligation he owes to his parents to stay at the store and work the holiday shift. The pressure builds and builds, and as we talked about in an earlier note, Tim does that part exceptionally well.
Then, we get the moment itself:
Now, as the clock ticked off the remaining minutes before he would stand Meg up at the church, he sighed and handed a receipt to the puffy coated man in front of him, then turned to the next batch of items.
“Please, can we go? Please!”
A girl about Ethan’s age pleaded with her mother.
“It’s probably not even true,” the mom responded.
“Bobby swears it’s true. It was at Backbeats this morning right after they opened. He was working the counter. She just walked in, asked him where the No Doubt CDs were, signed every single one of them with a Sharpie from her pocket, then walked out.”
“We don’t have time today. They’ve probably already sold them all anyway.”
“Can we just go check? Please!”
The mom stopped and looked at Ethan who had frozen in place, staring at the two of them. His jaw clenched and he set the box of stuffing back on the conveyor. He untied his apron, threw it on the counter, snatched his bag out from under the register, turned, and walked out the front doors.
What . . . ?
I must confess, I bumped hard on this scene. I had to stop and re-read the passage to be sure I hadn’t missed something. It felt like Ethan’s decision came out of nowhere.
Tim sets us up to want – to even expect – Ethan to leave the store and go see Meg at some point. The plot construction leans heavily toward that, and it’s gratifying when it happens.
But in this moment, it’s not exactly likely.
Given the events of the story so far, sheer inertia suggests Ethan would obey his parents and just deal with the consequences later. He stands up Meg. She’s disappointed. He’s sad and angry and frustrated, but it’s not his fault. What choice did he have? Ethan goes back to being a loser, and Meg moves on.
Of course, that’s a pretty awful story. Nobody wants to read something like that, so Tim gives us a better alternative: Something happens that motivates Ethan to act.
It’s just not clear what that something is. On the first read, it wasn’t even clear to me that, when it was happening, that’s what was going on.
Powder keg
In storytelling, building pressure is akin to stocking up barrels of gunpowder in an armory. You amass more and more fuel. And fuel in a story wants to burn.
But, you can’t just snap your fingers and magically transform all that powder into an explosion. As artistic and magical as storytelling can be, at base, it’s more physics than alchemy. For your story to feel realistic, every fire demands a spark.
Tim knows this, and he gives us his spark. Ethan overhears a girl saying some “she” walked into a local record store and signed No Doubt CDs. We don’t know who the “she” is, but from Ethan’s reaction, we can see it’s significant.
The question is why. Why is this the catalyst that causes Ethan to act?
Let’s inventory the things that we know in the story at this point:
- Ethan has a crush on Meg.
- Ethan is surprised that Meg has suddenly given him attention.
- Meg has invited Ethan to her performance and suggested that they meet after.
- Meg says she’s gotten Ethan a gift, which she’ll give him when they meet.
- Meg likes Gwen Stefani (implied by a description of what Meg is wearing in the opening scene).
- Ethan told Meg he would go to the performance, and he really wants to.
- But Ethan’s parents expect him to be at work instead.
Somehow, we have to create a bridge from these raw ingredients to the conclusion that, in Ethan’s mind, disobeying his parents, leaving the store, and buying the CD for Meg is the most reasonable thing to do. Tim gives us a lot of pieces to work with – we can kind of squint and see the the solution in the distance over the next hill – but we still need something more in order to make the connection cleanly.
The missing link
At this point, we must do a bit of guesswork, because Tim hasn’t put anything else explicitly in the text. (Near the end of the story we get a few more details. But those happen after the decision, so we can’t consider them as support for this moment.)
Whatever the bridging element is, it needs to be both a fit (that is, it connects logically and specifically to the girl’s mention of the signed CDs) and also a force (it has enough drive to compel Ethan to action).
Fit
When it comes to fit, the most likely candidate seems to be reciprocity. In the opening scene, Meg tells Ethan she’s gotten him a gift. He could feel he ought to do something for her in return. (Tim even seems to imply this as a motivation in later scenes. We just don’t yet have anything about it at this point.)
We’ve already gotten a hint that Meg has an affinity for Gwen Stefani. When Tim introduces Meg, she’s wearing something with Stefani on it. And Stefani is No Doubt’s lead singer. The implication is that Stefani is the “she” who went into the record store and signed the No Doubt CDs.
Thus, from everything we know (and can guess), the CD is a perfect gift for Meg. It “fits the bill” for fittedness.
Force
But there’s a problem.
Reciprocity gives us a goal for Ethan, but is it compelling enough? Would it really be the thing that launches him into disobeying his parents? Probably not.
It’s a fine fit but not a particularly strong force. We need something more.
Thankfully, the story construction already carries the seeds of a stronger motivation. What if Ethan’s reciprocity were somehow tied to his sense of identity and self-worth?
Like many boys his age, Ethan lacks self-confidence. When Meg invites him to her performance, he’s caught off guard. He likes her, of course . . . but he’s surprised that she could also like him. It’s unexpected and gratifying.
But did she make the right choice? The onus is suddenly on Ethan to prove (both to her and to himself) that she did. He needs somehow to vindicate her regard.
The signed CD becomes a way to do that. A physical token of Ethan’s worthiness. It shows that he’s thoughtful and kind. He notices. He reciprocates.
In a small way, Ethan’s identity is tied up in this. And that — finally — that is a compelling enough force.
He leaves his parents store to reciprocate, but only because in so doing, he can prove himself.
Ethan doesn’t have to think about this consciously, of course. Neither, really, do we in Tim’s audience. But we need to at least somehow feel the pressure, the urgency, that it bestows.
The new math could be something like this:
- Ethan wants to go to the performance.
- But he can’t go – both because his parents want him working at the store and also because he doesn’t feel worthy unless he has some meaningful way to reciprocate. He lacks a way to do that . . .
- . . . But then the perfect gift appears. An opportunity like this may never come again. Ethan must go.
Auditing exposition
Tim gives us enough to infer, but only if we stop and think about it for a while. And that friction inhibits clarity.
Instead the ideas need to come effortlessly. And that means everything must be properly set up. So how do we achieve that?
At this point, we benefit from an audit. What do we have already, either directly in the text or by implication, and what is missing that might need to be added?
| Setup | In the text? |
|---|---|
| 1) Ethan has a crush on Meg. | ✅ Explicit |
| 2) Meg invites Ethan to see her performance, and he says he’ll go. | ✅ Explicit |
| 3) Meg tells Ethan she’s gotten him a gift, which she’ll give to him after the performance. | ✅ Explicit |
| 4) Ethan wants to be deserving of Meg’s unexpected regard. | ❌ Absent |
| 5) He realizes he can get Meg a gift as a way to reciprocate. That would help demonstrate his appreciation. | ❌ Absent |
| 6) But Ethan doesn’t know what to get Meg. | ❌ Absent |
| 7) Meg loves Gwen Stefani, so anything related to the artist would be an appropriately thoughtful gift. | 👉 Implied |
| 8) Gwen Stefani signs CDs at a local record store. | 👉 Implied |
| 9) The signed CD would be the perfect gift. | 👉 Implied |
We have a sort of three-legged stool architecture:
- Ethan’s crush and Meg’s invitation.
- Ethan’s desire to reciprocate and need for a gift idea.
- Meg’s love for Gwen Stefani.
At the risk of overly stretching the metaphor . . . These three streams of information converge on the “seat” of the stool: the No Doubt CD. Ethan’s decision rests on that.
Tim has given us the first and third legs of the stool. Only the second is missing. Therefore, to clarify Ethan’s decision, the main thing we must focus on is the second leg.
- Ethan wants to be deserving of Meg’s unexpected regard.
- He realizes he can get Meg a gift as a way to reciprocate. That would help demonstrate his appreciation.
- But he doesn’t know what to get.
How can Tim set this up?
Unsolicited writing advice
If I were pitching this to Tim, I’d suggest one major change. He could make Ethan’s desire to reciprocate into it’s own mini plot.
We start with Ethan wanting to do something for Meg. But there’s a problem: He doesn’t know what to do. He must try to think of the right thing. This creates a new, tangible sub-goal in the story.
Then, when he talks with his parents in the second sequence, he can go through a try-fail cycle. He ask his mom for ideas. What should he do for a friend who’s gotten him a gift? Tim could play this up with Ethan’s mom misunderstanding the situation and suggesting ideas that aren’t relevant. That could further frustrate Ethan (and increase the tension of his dilemma). He feels he ought to do something, but the solution he’s tried (asking for advice) hasn’t helped. Now, he’s out of ideas. His situation is even worse than before.
This focuses audience attention on the problem. It identifies the specific gap that needs to be filled and invites us to subconsciously anticipate a solution.
That way, when the girl comes in talking about the signed CDs, we make the connection at the same moment Ethan does. Rather than creating confusion, this story beat now becomes an epiphany. Ethan has been desperately looking for a gift for Meg, and this is exactly what he needed.
From there, the dominoes cascade. The last thing holding Ethan back has been removed. All day, he’s been on the fence. He wants to go, but he can’t show up empty handed (reciprocity). Only a loser would do that (identity). Then the perfect idea arrives, and he resolves with certainty to go.
For the rest of us
“Okay this is all fine,” you may say, “but how does this help me improve my storytelling?”
I don’t have any particularly novel insights, but in writing through this, I’ve come again to appreciate the value of just seeing what you actually have on the page (and what you don’t).
As painful and boring as audits can be, they can also be enlightening.
We all suffer from the curse of knowledge. There’s so much of our stories that lives in our heads and hearts. We know our characters and worlds and plots intimately. But the truth is, for our audiences, if something’s not on the page, it doesn’t exist. B
So if you’re stuck, if your beta readers are complaining about something being confusing or feeling like it came out of nowhere, it might help to do an audit. Sit down, list out the bits of information your audience needs, and then identify whether or not those bits exist in your text so far.
You might be surprised at what you discover.
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