The Four Horsemen of Great Fiction

Start with your Emotional Core, Story Thesis, Story Archetype, and Central Debate

Riders on the storm!

Have you ever wondered what creates really great stories? What is the differentiation between a bland, formulaic story and a sweeping epic like Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, or Interview with a Vampire? Why is that some stories land with a thud, despite being technically precise?

Here’s my theory: The Four Horsemen of Great Fiction.

Emotional Core. All the greatest works of fiction have an Emotional Core (EC) - some deep emotional truth or impetus that the author needed to feel and express. For example, Anne Rice poured the grief of losing a daughter to leukemia into Interview with a Vampire. The EC of that book was grief, a particularly painful and profound form in the loss of a child. For Lord of the Rings it was the trauma of World War I, where JRR Tolkien fought as an officer on the side of the British. For Star Wars, it was a combination of a love of Japanese samurai films, WWII dogfighting films, and a love of racing cars (which almost killed George Lucas, btw). Andy Weir poured his love of NASA into The Martian, which turned it into a blockbuster.

Story Thesis. This is sometimes called “theme” or “motif” but I find these terms to be useless and dry. The story thesis is what the author is trying to say. There’s some theory the author has about how the world works. In The Witcher and Game of Thrones, the authors’ theory about the world is that it is grimdark, hope is pointless, and it’s better to just be cynical, nihilistic, and realistic. To put it another way, the story thesis of these novels is depressive realism. Another way of articulating Story Thesis is that it is a core belief that the author has about the world. “Love will always conquer all” could be one. For Star Wars I would argue that the Story Thesis has to do with the Force, basically that there’s a mystical energy current that shapes the fates of all. Very often, Story Thesis comes out unconsciously. Many authors, even famous ones, talk about how you need to write through your novel to discover the theme that is trying to emerge from you.

Story Archetype. In commercial fiction, these are called “comp titles.” But I like to take it a bit further. My first novel, Heavy Silver, had the archetype of “The British Empire, but in space!” There are many archetypal stories out there. The War Epic, the Bodice Ripper, and so on. Stories might even remix several archetypes. While some novice authors want to imagine that they will do something well and truly unique! this is a fool’s errand. Every story archetype has been told a million times, so it’s best just to cut to the chase and find a template that will serve as the basis for your story. Many commercial authors will bank on this a bit too heavily, as well as Hollywood guild writers. This is why some writing feels formulaic and generic. However, when a story archetype is augmented with the other ingredients, it can become a truly unique work of fiction.

Central Debate. This is the underlying question, the undergirding tension of the book you’re trying to write. Does good really triumph over evil? Is America the hero or the villain of the world? How can we save Matt Damon from Mars? Will the pretty people finally hook up for some steamy sex? Sometimes, the Central Debate is said loud and clear, even in the title. I’m looking at you Pride and Prejudice. There it, right on the cover: the Central Debate. Can a prejudiced man and proud woman get over themselves to find love? For Interview I would argue the central debate has to do with finding peace after profound loss. Brad Pitt’s morose vampire is constantly trying to find a sense of release, and is cursed with immortal life instead. So, how does one find an end to torment after losing everyone you love?

Great storytellers mix all these ingredients together, deliberately or unconsciously, in a sort of Promethean alchemy. Many authors do it on accident the first time, and then fail to recapture that je nais sais quoi. However, I found that by always starting a story by reflecting on and unpacking these four ingredients, I can reliably concoct a compelling story. These are written at the top of my outlines. Here’s what it might look like:

Emotional Core: Humans are aggravating and vexing, but I can’t live without them.

Story Thesis: The best way to get by in the world is to maximize your social status.

Story Archetype: Alan Turing’s life, but in medieval fantasy land with magic and dragons

Central Debate: How can one get over their miserly and cantankerous ways and reconnect to humanity when they are cursed with being different?

I made this up entirely on the fly. But, just looking at it, you can imagine how the Emotional Core might be poured into the protagonist, and will speak to his or her flaws and emotional journey. By taking inspiration from Alan Turing’s life, we can imagine a backdrop of catastrophic war and prejudice hounding a wizard’s life or some such.

To test it, just copy/paste the above into an AI chatbot of your choice and ask it to brainstorm a comprehensive outline for the story. Yeah, it will be a bit generic, but you’ll see that it sets you on a course with a very coherent journey, the guiding North Star, or a lighthouse on the horizon.

Emotional Core

The primary thing that all writers must start with is why they want to write. When I got started, I listened to famous writers, like Brandon Sanderson and Mary Robinette Kowal. Some of these authors talk about how there’s a story in you trying to claw its way out. At first, I was a bit dubious about this claim. Many writers throughout history have spoken of this nearly transcendent, almost spiritual experience of writing. While I do believe that there is likely some metaphysics involved in the writing process, I think we can characterize this phenomenon in more mundane terms. Now, rather than ramble at you about this idea, I’ll just give you a bunch of examples.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. This is pretty traumatic, if you don’t know the story. As a teenager, Stieg Larsson witnessed a friend get gang-raped by three men and he was too petrified to intervene. She never forgave him. This trauma haunted him the rest of his life, and served as the emotional fodder for his now-famous work of fiction, which has of course been converted to a series of films. As a way to cope with and process his trauma, he turned to fiction—which is a rather common choice for some people. Whether it’s the trauma of war, domestic violence, espionage, ethnic cleansing, genocide—writing through the experience is a way to process and immortalize it. My wife has a theory that this is the purpose of the Iliad, a sort of Bronze Age version of Saving Private Ryan.

The Martian. The good news is that emotional cores don’t always have to be negative. Having watched interviews and read about Andy Weir, it’s very clear that the heart of his work is his love of NASA. He is very much the archetypal space nerd—he eats, sleeps, and breaths all things NASA. Beyond that, he’s an engineer and problem solver. He started programming at 15 and his father was a physicist, so it sort of runs in his blood. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves, the Central Debate of The Martian is the problem solving bit. My chief point here is to show that the Emotional Core of a story can be positive or negative, though many of the most memorable stories come from painful, traumatic, or difficult emotions.

Interview with the Vampire. This is another case of a negative emotion—the trauma of losing a child—serving as the emotional heart of a story. Anne Rice’s daughter, Michele, died of leukemia just before she turned six years old. There are few things in life as painful as losing a child, and as a way to process this event, Anne turned to fiction. There’s not really much else to say, but if you watch or read the story with this in mind, you see it woven throughout.

Now, unfortunately I cannot give you too many more examples, as it requires authors and directors to speak candidly about why they wrote what they did. So, where does that mythical, explosive energy come from that famous authors talk about? When a story is just burning in their veins and must come out? We can take a page from Jung’s book and think of it as psychic energy. No, not ESP. Psychic just meaning “mental/mind” energy.

The way Jung described it is that any event in life—good or bad—adds energy to your system. That energy must ultimately be expressed, integrated, and fully experienced. Trauma, because it is difficult and painful, is often suppressed and compartmentalized. That psychic energy is stored up but wants to get out. Some people express such things destructively: through substance abuse, other addictive behaviors, domestic violence, self-harm, or lashing out at others. Writing can be a way to make sense of and transmute trauma into something meaningful.

Story Thesis

Every story should be trying to say something True. This idea also comes from my wife. Early in our relationship, when we were discussing what made some stories good and others fall flat, we realized that the best stories resonate with Truth. We use “Truth with a capital T” to describe that je ne sais quoi about the stories that just strike a chord deep in your soul, even if you cannot articulate why. One of the things that Potterheads like about Harry Potter is that it resonates with them as “realistic” in its depiction of despair. It’s a story rife with child abuse, miserly teachers, and progressively disintegrating world that is unnecessarily cruel—these things tend to resonate with victims of broken homes, bullying, and neurodiverse people who never fit in. The Wizarding World is a great metaphor for the secret lives of survivors, gifted kids, and so on.

The Fifth Element. For the longest time, the Bruce Willis/Milla Jovovich pairup was my favorite sci-fi romp of all time. I had it on VHS and I watched a couple times per month. In this case, the thesis is right there in the title: love conquers all. There’s a few ways you could articulate it: love is the fifth primeval force of the universe; love is the greatest force of nature; love is why we exist. There is something so deeply and transcendently True about this thesis, and the concept is so damn simple. If you were to describe the principle to someone who’d never seen the movie, they’d think it was cheesy, clichéd and a total trope. I mean, it is all those things. But it is self aware and perfectly executed, due in no small part to Gary Oldman.

Ghost in the Shell. My high school girlfriend got me into anime. Thanks Becca. Anyways, Ghost in the Shell, the original OAV, has another simple thesis: there is something unique about being human. Motoko Kusanagi, the MC, is constantly having an existential crisis because her body has been fully replaced by machine. She’s a “fully prosthetic cyborg” meaning that the only original part of her body is her brain. The entire thesis of the Ghost in the Shell series is to tease apart what is quintessentially human, and to find the boundary be human and transhuman and posthuman. This theme is carried further in the Standalone Complex series where the sentient AI tanks, called tachikomas, are constantly chattering about the subjective nature of being.

Anna Karenina. My somewhat controversial opinion is that the purpose of Anna Karenina is to document borderline personality disorder (BPD) or bipolar disorder, before they were recognized by the medical establishment. A modern mental health reading of Anna Karenina shows a character who is routinely jealous, suspicious, alienating people, and explosive, who ends up totally alone. It is well established that Leo Tolstoy poured some of his own struggles with mental health into his eponymous character, including suicidal ideation. Again, see the previous section of Emotional Core, where writers often use fiction to make sense of and process their own struggles. The core thesis here, the True thing that Leo is asserting, is hey, look at how serious this set of disorders is, being mentally ill sucks!

A story thesis can be anything, and it does not even have to be universally accepted as True. It only has to be True to you, the author. What I will say is that the more broadly a story resonates as True, the farther it will spread.

Story Archetype

An archetype is just a pattern or template, but it’s a cool word because it sounds more mythic. All stories follow patterns, which are studied to death. I won’t go so far as Joseph Campbell and claim that it’s all a monomyth (e.g. one single story told infinitely). See my post on my Seven Act Story Structure, which allows for more flexibility than the Campbellian monomyth. At the same time, the idea of archetypal character journeys, plot structures, and worlds is extremely helpful.

Lord of the Rings. This is “World War I, but in medieval fantasy land!” There’s not much else to say. Mechanized stormtroopers in the form of Uruk-hai, the disregard of nature, the wanton cruelty of empire-building—it’s all there. The scramble to create an Alliance against the Axis of Evil.

Star Wars. The beloved franchise started as “A samurai film, but in space!” George Lucas was a huge fan of Kurosawa. Darth Vader looks like a samurai, and the Jedi use meditation to connect with the Force, aka the Dao. The Jedi code is basically bushido.

Ten Things I Hate About You. This one is famously, and explicitly, a modern retelling of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. Again, not much else to say.

As previously mentioned, you can think of these as blueprints or comp titles. But, as a novelist, I will leave you with this advice: do yourself a favor and don’t try to reinvent the wheel. It’s all been done before. Just remix a few genres, tropes, and archetypes, and put your Emotional Core into it. Your personal Truth in the form of the Story Thesis and the beating heart of your Emotional Core will ensure that your story is uniquely yours.

Central Debate

Finally, we come to the Central Debate: this is the overarching source of tension in a story. Sometimes, as with The Martian, it is very obvious. How the hell will we rescue Matt Damon from another planet?

My Fair Lady. Probably one of Audrey Hepburn’s most adorable and fun roles, the Central Debate of this film is “Can you reform a low class woman into a lady by teaching her to speak well?” Pretty obvious. Very high concept.

Altered Carbon. This is a more open-ended question, namely about the intersection of wealth and power in a future where the wealthy can live forever. If I had to distill it down into a single question, it would be something like this: “How will privilege change in a future where technology allows the wealthy to live forever?”

The Expanse. This is a relatively simple concept: How will interplanetary politics pan out? The core debate here has to do with great power politics across the solar system, viewed through the lens of economics, cultural differences, and military prowess.

Mary Robinette Kowal calls this the “ask-answer” paradigm, but she changed it to “question-answer” because ask-answer sounds like ass cancer when you say it out loud. But the idea is that the author proposes a question at the beginning of the story (or in the backdrop) and spends the rest of the novel or film unpacking the answer.

Homework

I’ll leave you with some homework ideas. You may take it or leave it.

1. Whenever you’re watching a film, show, or reading a book, try and identify or articulate the Four Horsemen. This is a fun exercise, particularly if you have a partner in crime. For instance, this is how my wife and I realized that Han Solo is the main character of Empire Strikes Back. Luke has none of the plot beats. It’s all Han. I know, right?

2. Write down the Four Horsemen for your works. Whether you’ve already finished something or are in the middle of something else, or just getting started.

Bonus Advice: Always lean in

Many new authors pull back from their Emotional Truth. They are afraid it’s too raw, or they are too shy, or that it’s not “appropriate” to do so.

Nope. Go full YOLO. Pour everything you’ve got into every story. Don’t hold out on your audience, and don’t hold back. They will know that something is missing.

Full send. Pull out all the stops, and unleash hell.

Or, as caesar once said:

Cry YOLO and let slip the dogs of war!

Or something like that… Don’t quote me on that last one.