Why You Must Prioritize Transformation Over Tragedy

What interests a reader more: a dramatic story about loss, betrayal or hardship OR a story about overcoming the odds or rising up from the ashes to reach new heights?

For everyone who immediately says, BOTH, I don’t disagree with you. However, as a literary agent, I’ve noticed that during pitches, hopeful authors tend to emphasize the details and facts of their story but under develop the transformational journey in the story.

I remember one pitch where the writer lost a spouse in a plane crash on a mountain. Sadly, the spouse’s body was unable to be recovered. Miraculously, the investigative team found the spouse’s wedding ring as they inspected the crash site. However, the manuscript was centered around the plane crash and recovery of the ring. As a potential reader, I felt compassion for the loss and celebrated finding the ring. However, behind that, I didn’t know how to connect to the story.

To achieve the goal of inspiring, entertaining, or motivating your reader, you must shift from emphasizing the details of the tragedy and invite your readers to come along for the magical moments of transformation.

Best-selling novelist Matthew Dicks is the author of the book  StoryWorthy: Engage, Teach, Persuade, and Change Your Life through the Power of Storytelling , one of my favorite books on storytelling (here’s a post from earlier this year). Dicks is a thirty-six-time Moth StorySLAM champion and shares a valuable tool that you can use to avoid the mistake of expecting that the facts or details of a story will be enough to carry a novel or compel a reader to recommend your book to a friend.

One of Dicks’ most famous stage stories is titled “This Is Going to Suck.” On December 23, 1988, seventeen-year-old Dicks was in a head-on collision that sent half his body through the windshield while his legs remained wedged under his 1976 Datsun dashboard. He tells the audience: “Minutes after the accident, I was dead. I was lying on the side of the road without a pulse or respiration.”

Dicks relates how the EMS team revived him and the ride to the hospital. While he waits for surgery on his wrecked legs, Dicks finds out that his parents are going to check on the car before coming to the hospital to be with him. He felt abandoned and frightened.

The audience is shocked as they hear about his death and revival. They are grateful that Dicks lived to tell this story, and he can see their disgust at his parents’ actions. However, what moves the audience to tears is this next part that occurs while Dicks is alone and in pain:

“Except it turns out that I’m not alone, because my friends from McDonald’s (his job) find out about the accident, and quickly filled the waiting room. When the nurses realize that my parents aren’t going to make it to the hospital before I rolled in surgery, they pushed my gurney to the other side of the emergency, prop open the double doors and allow my to stand in the doorway to see me. The girls tell me that they love me, the boys shout extremely inappropriate things to make me laugh, and they chant my name as I’m rolled down the hallway to the operating room.” (pg. 109)

Dicks points out that the details of his accident are scary and big, but without his friends showing up, it’s just another car accident story. What moves his audience to tears when they hear the story is their understanding of Dick’s loneliness and what it feels like when people who up when a person is at their lowest.

In Storyworthy, Dicks teaches that any meaningful story must contain a five-second moment that captures the internal transformation in which you or your character experienced a dynamic shift or a-ha moment. This five-second moment could be changing mindset or making a decision that would change the trajectory of one’s life. Inner transformation examples include acknowledging a wrong belief, choosing to forgive, making a different choice, turning around from a chosen path, shifting alliances, or facing a fear.

In Dicks’ story, his five-second moment of transformation was realizing that he wasn’t alone even though his parents were more concerned about the car instead of him. “It was the moment when I realized that I had family after all.”

Readers are searching for this type of transformation in your stories. Yes, it’s tragic to experience infidelity, loss, betrayal, abuse, divorce, abuse, etc; however, without demonstrating the journey of transformation that begins with those 5-second moments, nothing changes for your reader. They may pause, but you want to give them a chance to relate and connect. This is what inspires and motivates. Tap into your readers’ desire to be seen, loved, to live with purpose, connect with someone or something greater than themselves – and if you do, your reader will thank you. Even though it will take time to identify those five-second moments, it’s worth it! Point out these transformational moments for your readers so that they can connect to your story in the way you’ve always dreamed they would.

JOIN THE CONVERSATION: What type of transformation moments do you think that your readers are looking for in your stories? Can you share an example from either your book or WIP so that we can learn from each other?