In this post I touched on the concept of tracking. There’s more to be said. In many ways, tracking is what storytelling is all about.
If you’re telling a traditional narrative tale, everything needs to track. Every main character needs to track. Every external situation that affects the plot need to track.
Tracking means if you introduce a key story element, it should intrigue the audience and make them want to see more. The second time they see it, it needs to have gotten worse, gotten more complicated, or progressed. And every time after that, it should continue to worsen, complicate, and/or progress.
Every action needs a consequence, with each action increasing intrigue, tension, and drama.
If a character meets their idol, a star hockey player, the next time we see the character, they should be plastering their room with posters of their idol, having a beer with their idol, or arguing with their idol until they get slapped with a restraining order. The next time, the situation should be even more thorny: cutting hair and dressing like the idol, in a romantic relationship with the idol, or breaking into the idol’s house to steal his Stanley Cup.
When a story tracks. this cause and effect moves characters through the story. One thing leads to another. This is how plots are built.
Tracking needs to happen in every part of your story: your main plot, subplots, and runners.
When we say “this story doesn’t track,” we mean the progression of the unfolding events is either too predictable, too easy to follow, or (most often) too unchanging.
If a scene or line in your story isn’t tracking, either cut it or introduce significant change and see if you can get it tracking.
How is tracking different from escalation?
I've been rewatching LA Confidential recently. Man (it's a sausage-fest of a movie, very 90s in that way), does it track. And escalate.
My favorite example of a movie where no detail is wasted is Cronenberg's The Fly (1986).