I was talking to a girl at ComicCon, the kind of person who has a million creative projects at the same time. As many people do, she has a story she wants to write, with amazing characters she wants to share with the world, but writing is hard and a first novel can be daunting. Here’s what I told her.
Now, this applies to the people who REALLY want to see their story done. These are the main pillars of the cathedral that is your story. Let’s begin.
1- YOUR GOAL IS TO WRITE A COMPLETE FIRST DRAFT. It will be shit. But it will be complete. You can build on it and rewrite, but the most important thing is to WRITE TILL THE END OF THE STORY.
2- SIT DOWN AND WORK. That’s the difference between writers and the million people who say they have a story that they’ll write someday.
Alright, let’s get technical, and start by the end.
3- Art is about causing your public to have emotions. Decide right now what emotion you want to leave your readers with when they close your book. Is it happy, sad, bittersweet, hopeful? Pick one. (This can be changed later if you rewrite and find some other ending, but we are working on the first draft.)
— Maybe you have a nice gimmick, a cool idea for a story, like idk, ‘What if you cloned yourself and that clone took over your life’. This is interesting, but it’s not a story in itself. A story needs emotions. If you don’t pick the emotions you want your reader to feel, your idea is just a gimmick.
4- Now that you have the final emotion, decide your ending in accordance to said emotion. Are characters dying? Is the bad guy defeated? Is everyone splitting up or leaving together as a found family?
Then we go back to the beginning.
5- You probably have a million characters you all want to write. Pick one to be your protagonist. Yes, just one. Multi-characters stories are harder to write and demand experience and time. We want this novel to exist, and not be stuck in limbo forever. Anyway, people tend to always prefer side characters. Who has heard of someone having a protagonist as a fave?? Your side characters will be loved, no worry.
How to find your protagonist: It’s the person who makes decisions and makes the plot advance. Simple as that. Not to be mistaken for the leader of a group.
6- Now that you have your protagonist, you decide what is normal for them. That is your beginning.
7- And then, you break that normality in some horrible way that will prevent your protagonist to come back to it. That is your inciting incident.
8- You google Three-Act-Structure and get one of these babies.
(But Talhí, I hear you say, why should I follow this? It’s been overdone, and my story doesn’t follow this, and I have more to write than this… Well, that’s your choice. I’m not the boss of you. I’m just saying that this is a solid model for western storytelling and it’s been proven to work time and time again. You can create outside of this, but again, the main goal here is to get your novel on paper. This is a solid template.)
9- You probably have a general idea of events you want to happen in the story. Place these scenes where you feel they should go on the structure. Like, a confrontation with the main bad guy goes in climax of act three, and the confrontation with the main henchman goes to climax of act two, etc. Be mindful of the rising action and tension: a cute misadventure in the woods would probably go earlier in the story than a fight to the death.
10- Now, a secret: What separates bad writing from good writing? Bad writing is adding a bunch of events in the middle and have the characters go through them like a checklist of scenes. You can often see this in movies. But good writing links the events. Each and every event that happens has to be a result of your character making a decision. Then, an obstacle happens, and your character makes another decision, that leads to your next event/obstacle.
11- Another secret: A character will gain power, money, weapons and allies through the story. In videogames, this is useful to defeat the bad guy. But storytelling is not videogames. Having a superpowerful hero at the end is boring. What we want is keeping the reader in suspense. So you’ll have to take everything from them. Leave them powerless and alone. And then, break their leg. I mean, not literally, although you can do that too, but have them super disadvantaged. And then they can use the personal growth they got in the adventure to prevail. (What is more interesting: a character fleeing from a facility but with weapons and kickass moves, or a character fleeing the same facility without weapons or shoes and with a broken arm? Who do you root for?)
The rest of the crew: I go with what Pixar does for characters: Main character gets three or more characteristics. That’s your Woody. Second tier character gets two characteristics. That’s your Buzz. Third tier characters get one characteristic, like Rex and Mister Potato Head. Keep control of your character tiers and never give too much time to the lower tiers ones, it doesn’t help your story.
Herd your cats: Characters will want to wander in every direction, and you’ll want to follow them. Keep them in groups, and even though you can follow a side character for a scene or two, focus 80 to 90% of your story on your protagonist.
DND is not a novel: I’m pretty sure your campaign is super fun, but you can’t just put it on paper and call it a novel. It needs a narrative arc and serious editing. You can use a campaign as a base, but it needs to be worked as a novel, because you’re changing mediums, and a novel has different requirements.
That’s pretty much what I can remember for now. This should help you with the bones of your novel, and you can add the meat on that. I hope it helps. But honestly, the best advice I can give you is
SIT DOWN AND DO THE THING.
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