Sometimes, my life as a book coach/ writer and my life as a high school history teacher collide in spectacular ways. I happened to be writing some newsletter content about why heroes need story goals at around the same time that I was teaching my world history students about Buddhism. And it occurred to me that the central teachings of Buddhism (also called the 4 Noble Truths) can be applied to story craft.
If you are unfamiliar or rusty, here are the 4 Noble Truths of Buddhism:
All living beings experience suffering
Suffering is caused by desire or attachments.
To end suffering, one must curb desires or let go of attachments.
One can curb desires and limit attachments by following the Eightfold Path (a life of moderation).
The Four Noble Truths of Storytelling
Here’s my adaptation for story craft
All heroes experience suffering.
Heroes suffer because they want something.
Your hero can’t get what they want because internal and external obstacles stand in their way.
Your hero struggles to overcome those obstacles while trying to get what they want. In the end, whether they achieve their goal or not, your hero is changed by doing battle with those obstacles.
Does your story have all four noble truths?
This is a good test to see if you have the basic building blocks of a character-driven story. If you find that you are missing some of these elements, you can brainstorm these questions to develop your story:
What concrete, tangible thing does your main character want?
Why does your character want this thing? What deep emotional need do they think it’s going to fill?
What steps does your hero need to take to reach their goal?
How will your reader be able to measure your hero’s progress towards the goal? (Or, lack of progress.)
What is preventing your hero from having what they want right now? Think about both the external obstacles and the internal ones.
How do these obstacles and your hero’s desire cause them to suffer? How do you show that suffering on the page?
Some writers shy away from making their characters suffer, because they love their hero and don’t want to cause them pain. Other writers are scarily good at torturing their protagonist. The trick is in moderation.
Too little suffering and the story will lack emotional resonance. Too much suffering can turn the reader off. It’s also important to put the hero through the right kind of pain.
Your hero’s goals, their obstacles, and their pain should ideally all be relevant to the arc of transformation, which should ultimately be a reflection of your story point. So, if your hero is a judgmental teenage girl who will learn to see more complexity in the world, forcing her to carpool with her mean nemesis (the plot of She Drives Me Crazy) is just the right kind of anguish, while killing off her beloved childhood pet might be unnecessarily cruel. (Don’t worry, no pets die in She Drives Me Crazy. It’s sweet. Go read it.)
Your main character is your reader’s avatar into the story. The hero’s suffering is what will engage your reader. It means your reader gets to experience the conflict, the learning, and the catharsis without needing to actually experience the consequences or pain for themselves. It’s a way for readers to engage with pain that they won’t or can’t experience for themselves, increasing their empathy for other people.
And isn’t that the point of storytelling after all?