Story Genius: How to Use Brain Science to Go Beyond Outlining and Write a Riveting Novel (Before You Waste Three Years Writing 327 Pages That Go Nowhere)

by Lisa Cron

As the great Southern writer Flannery O’Connor once noted, “Most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one.”

Story is about how the things that happen in the plot affect the protagonist, and how he or she changes internally as a result.

Anything that doesn’t impact the protagonist’s internal struggle, regardless of how beautifully written or “objectively” dramatic it is, will stop the story cold, breaking the spell that captivated readers, and unceremoniously catapulting them back into their own lives.

Story is about an internal struggle, not an external one. It’s about what the protagonist has to learn, to overcome, to deal with internally in order to solve the problem that the external plot poses.

There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories. —URSULA K. LEGUIN

It is emotion, rather than logic, that telegraphs meaning, thus emotion is what your novel must be wired to transmit, straight from the protagonist to us.

The point is, even the sharpest knives in the drawer can’t cut it alone.

The purpose of story—of every story—is to help us interpret, and anticipate, the actions of ourselves and of others.

story is about how the things that happen affect someone in pursuit of a difficult goal, and how that person changes internally as a result.

And that internal change? That, my friends, is what the story is actually about: how your protagonist’s external dilemma—aka the plot—changes her worldview.

Story is about what happens internally, not externally.

the protagonist’s internal struggle is the story’s third rail, the live wire that sparks our interest and drives the story forward.

The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean. —ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

That’s why when it comes to effective writing, story is the only nonnegotiable.

You Can’t Have an After Without a Before

The first half establishes where the problem came from and who the protagonist is to begin with, so that the plot you then create can force her to struggle with that problem and, in the process, change.

Here’s the key: 1. The point is what is borne out in the protagonist’s inner struggle. 2. The What If centers on the external plot that will trigger that struggle, ultimately making the point.

As Samuel Johnson so aptly pointed out, “The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, and familiar things new.”4

the evolutionary job of story is to funnel said chaos through one very grounding filter: the specific effect that chaos has on the protagonist, who becomes our avatar.

Without a main character, the reader has no skin in the game,

You’re not looking for a general anyone, you’re looking for a specific someone. A someone whose past will make what happens to them the moment they step onto the first page of your novel, inevitable.

Envisioning who your protagonist is on the day before your novel starts will enable you to start figuring out exactly how he got there.

The essence of drama is that man cannot walk away from the consequences of his own deeds. —HAROLD HAYES

“We all have different experiences, expectations and interests, so we paint the meanings we create for the language we hear in our own idiosyncratic color”

Here’s the secret: being able to see it through your protagonist’s POV means letting us hear what she’s thinking as it happens—and not what she’s thinking in general, but her struggle to figure out what’s going on and what the hell to do about it. These thoughts will be woven throughout every paragraph in your novel.

These are the same questions you’ll ask yourself when writing—or envisioning—any scene. They are • What does my protagonist go into the scene believing? • Why does she believe it? • What is my protagonist’s goal in the scene? • What does my protagonist expect will happen in this scene?

In fact, even if you are planning to write your novel in the third person, I would advise you to write every backstory scene in the first person—whether it’s your protagonist’s backstory or that of a secondary character.

On the internal level, the question is, what would my protagonist’s belief/past experience cause him to do in this situation? On the external level, the question is, how will the other character(s) and the world react to what my protagonist will do?

In other words, stories build based on the causal relationship between what just happened, and what’s about to happen as a result.

Everything must have a beginning…and that beginning must be linked to something that went before. —MARY SHELLEY

JFK said it best. When asked how he became a war hero, he grinned and replied, “It was involuntary. They sank my boat.”1

If I see an ending, I can work backward. —ARTHUR MILLER

John Irving’s advice: “Whenever possible, tell the entire story of the novel in the first sentence.”2

As T. S. Eliot said, “The end of our exploring will be to arrive at where we started and know the place for the first time.”

Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t. —MARK TWAIN

By now your mantra should be, specifics beget specifics.

You’re looking for only the moments when what happened between the protagonist and the character in question has story relevance.

It always seems impossible until it’s done. —ATTRIBUTED TO NELSON MANDELA