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.”1 But here’s the part she missed: before we can learn to write a story, we have to know what a story actually is.

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

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.

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 purpose of story—of every story—is to help us interpret, and anticipate, the actions of ourselves and of others. And you have to admit, it’s a far less messy alternative than all that unspooling. The takeaway is: We don’t turn to story to escape reality. We turn to story to navigate reality.

a story is whatever someone finds entertaining—which could be, well, anything. Not very helpful for writers, is it? But there is one thing those British scholars got right: stories must indeed entertain, just like food has to taste good, otherwise no matter how nutritious it is, it gets shoved to the back of the fridge, next to the container of moldering kale. If novels didn’t entertain us, we wouldn’t pay attention to them, and they’d molder unread on the shelf.

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

What happens in the story is the plot,

The someone is the protagonist,

The difficult goal is, at its most basic, what’s known as the story problem.

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.

What does “writing well” really mean? Here’s a roundup of the usual suspects: it means coming up with great characters, interesting situations, dramatic scenes, intense conflict, compelling dialogue, gorgeous metaphors, and beautiful sentences, and then sprinkling in a lot of sensory details because that’s what they say brings a story to life. That done, all you then have to do is unleash your creativity—cue the fairy godmother or the muse or a really inspiring dark night of the soul—and voilà! A story appears. Sounds like a surefire recipe for success. Except for the small fact that it doesn’t work.

At its most basic, a story is about how someone grapples with a problem they can’t avoid, and how they change in the process.

But here’s a counterintuitive fact: the prospect of endless possibility isn’t freeing, it’s paralyzing. Myriad studies have shown that the more choices we have, the less likely we are to choose anything.

The point is what is borne out in the protagonist’s inner struggle.

The What If centers on the external plot that will trigger that struggle, ultimately making the point.

The point is what transforms a neutral What If into one with the power to begin ...