How to Write the Perfect Story
Understand what makes a perfect story and how to write one yourself.
How To Write a Game is a free publication written by Ryan Matejka, an organic human who loves to write. If you like this, please consider making a small donation.
Let’s not beat around the bush any longer — you want to write the absolute best story for your game. You want your story to be a critical and commercial darling that wins you praise, awards, and recognition for your brilliance for years to come. You want it to be perfect.
So you study the art of storytelling: you learn everything there is to know about scenes, characters, themes, form, setting, exposition, plot, conflict, and structure. Then you study the art of writing: you become an expert in spelling, grammar, punctuation, synonyms, antonyms, nouns, verbs, pronouns, adjectives, conjunctions, propositions, and formatting. Lastly, you study people: you get a double PhD in psychology and sociology, you spend hours each day observing and interviewing people in dozens of settings, and you get a firm grasp on trends, memes, likes, dislikes, needs, and desires of each macroculture and microculture.
Now, armed with all the universe’s knowledge of storytelling, writing, and people, you know exactly what interactive story everyone wants and needs to experience, you write it up in a single sitting alone in your room, release the video game after the usual amount of delays, and the awards start piling in. Literally everyone loves it. It gets perfect scores across the board on every platform and in every country. Even the trolls relent that yes, you’ve done it: you’ve written the perfect story. The only catch is that the majority of these events occurred in a lucid dream as you passed from life into death because it is physically impossible to do in a human lifetime.
But don’t be discouraged, perfection is attainable. You simply need to reconsider what it means for a story to be “perfect.”
The Myth of Perfection
Perfection Is Not Popularity
As illustrated above, attempting to craft a story with absolute universal appeal is a fool’s errand. No matter how beloved a story is, you are bound to find many people who don’t like it, don’t connect to it, and don’t understand what everyone else loves about it. Furthermore, stories designed for mass appeal can ironically appeal to very few people.
Perfection Is Not Technical Precision
Attempting to craft a technically perfect story — meaning that it strictly follows all the rules of storytelling so that every set-up has a payoff, every character has a satisfying arc, and every moment and word is filled with multitudes of value — while admirable, is not realistic. Art is subjective, so you’ll either go mad pulling your hair out hemming and hawing over the smallest of details and then dealing with the domino effect of changes, or you’ll be bored out of your mind following a set blueprint without doing anything original or interesting — the result of which threatens to be precise and mathematical but not necessarily of any artistic value to anyone.
So What Makes a Story Perfect?
Take a moment to think about your favorite story and ask yourself why it’s your favorite. It may not be the most popular story and most certainly is not flawless, yet you probably keep thinking about and going back to experience it because it speaks to something inside you.
That is the perfect story: the one that is perfect for you. Any other version of perfection you strive for is one that you do not fully understand, do not have the tools to create, and cannot accurately evaluate.
Think of it like this: when you plan a vacation it’s important to research the popular tourist spots and ask your friends for recommendations, but it’s even more important to decide for yourself which, if any, of those things you’re truly interested in. Why would you wait in a long line to climb the Eiffel Tower if you’re deathly scared of heights and crowds when there’s a quiet little cat cafe just down the road that you’ve been following on Instagram for years?
The same goes for writing a perfect story. While it’s important not to alienate players’ expectations and desires, it is far more important not to alienate yourself. No matter what your favorite story is, I guarantee that what makes it perfect for you is the writer(s) had a personal interest and investment in it. They wrote something that truly spoke to what they cared about, creating something human and beautiful that you connected with more than you ever could with a calculated attempt to pander or perfect.
Perfection is Authenticity
As writers, we hope our stories will resonate with lots of people. Unfortunately, there are no guarantees that anything we write will resonate with anyone—unless we look inward for validation and write a story that resonates with ourselves. A story that resonates with its author has a built-in hardcore fan and is more likely to resonate with other people than one that does not. After all, we are a sympathetic and social species, so we are naturally drawn to stories that bring us into the writer’s head and make us feel connected to them.
That said, the reality is that in the video game industry, you cannot always write whatever you want. There are technical limitations, brand guidelines, and people to answer to—you may write for a game that is about something you know almost nothing about and would never write about if given free rein. However, not only is writing authentically still possible in these cases but doing so can help provide direction and develop an emotional investment in the otherwise alien project.
I never saw myself writing a story with a chef as the protagonist. Even while I was writing for the Cook, Serve, Delicious! series I avoided writing about the experience of being a chef as much as possible. For the second game in the series, I instead wrote in-game emails referencing my favorite movies and books and my personal life, and I created characters and short stories within those parameters that resonated with me, many of which went on to become fan favorites.
Then, when it came time to write for the narrative-heavy spinoff game, Cook Serve Forever, my writing partner Nicholas Kraak and I talked at length about what we did and didn’t want in our version of that game’s story. We put together an inspiration board full of art, music, and movies that we wanted to affect the writing of our story, much of which would probably surprise you (e.g.; one scene was guided by a single line from the 2011 film adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, while yet another took inspiration from a brief moment in my childrens’ favorite movie, PAW Patrol: The Movie). We worked hard to put as much of ourselves into the game as possible despite it not being “our” game.
The result is a story I would have never thought to write on my own, but that feels very much like it 100% represents me and what I want to say to the world even though it’s contained in someone else’s video game. At the time of writing this, the full game and story are yet to be released so I cannot say for sure how it will be received, but I can say with honesty and pride that there’s absolutely nothing that I would have done differently with the story in retrospect—it is perfect for me.
So I urge you that with everything you write: be true to yourself.
On that note, I have a very special announcement to make. But more on that in next week’s issue of How To Write a Game.