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

All stories revolve around how someone solves a single, escalating problem they can’t avoid.

not merely a surface problem, either, but one that causes the protagonist to struggle with a specific internal conflict at every turn,

the events in the plot must be created to force the protagonist to make a specific really hard internal change. And that means you need to know, specifically, what that internal change will be before you begin creating a plot.

You can’t write about how someone changes unless you know, specifically, what they’re changing from. You can’t write about a problem unless you know, specifically, what caused it.

decide what point you want your story to make, because the point will tell you exactly what kind of internal problem your story will be about.

events by themselves mean nothing; it’s what those events mean to someone that has us compulsively turning pages.

the point doesn’t stem from the events; rather, it stems from the struggle they trigger

The goal is to envision your protagonist as he is on the day before your novel begins.

write a paragraph or two that sums up who your protagonist is at that very moment

The deeper question, the question the story is actually about, is this: What will those things mean to her?

what your protagonist wants (his desire) and the misbelief that keeps him from it (think: fear).

What makes readers care about whether or not your protagonist gets what she wants depends on one thing: knowing what getting it will mean to her.

something your protagonist honestly

believes to be true. How your protagonist overcomes this misbelief is what your story is about.

The goal isn’t to show us that she’s changing; the goal is to show us what, specifically, she’s changing from and what she’s changing to—internally.

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.

every character filters the world through his or her own internal logic, based on what the events in their past forced them to face. The goal is to find the defining moment in their past.

It’s not the external dramatic scope of the moment that matters; it’s your protagonist’s internal reaction to it that counts.

the protagonist’s past is a big part of a novel’s force of opposition.

change is spurred by outside forces that can’t be avoided.

story is about how, in trying to put out a seemingly minor blaze, the protagonist inadvertently fans the flames, until by the end, it’s a raging inferno.

if at any point your protagonist can simply decide to give up without suffering great personal cost due to her inaction, you do not have a story.

A novel blueprint is a scene-by-scene progression of your external plot, as driven by the internal struggle each event triggers in your protagonist.

it’s easy to miss the crucial fact that your protagonist’s worldview must also change a little bit in each scene as he or she struggles with what to do, what action to take.

It’s actually about what the event has taught your protagonist.

knowing why the protagonist does everything he does is precisely the point.

the goal is to shove your protagonist as far out of his comfort zone as possible, the better for him to ultimately realize that it wasn’t nearly as comfortable, or as safe, as he’d thought.

What will happen plotwise that will finally allow her to see her misbelief for what it is? And when it happens, how will she make sense of it, internally?

build your story by creating a plot that will constantly force your increasingly reluctant protagonist to change.

Does this scene actually have a place in my novel’s cause-and-effect trajectory? Does it follow from the scene that came before it, and does it lead to the one that comes next?

how will this event drive Ruby’s internal journey and so propel my story forward?

Make sure each event causes the next one to happen, in an escalating succession as things go from bad to worse. 2. Tie each event to the internal change it triggers in your protagonist, giving a glimpse of why, and how it then triggers the next thing that happens.

once a plot point has cleared the first two “Whys,” the answer to this question will determine whether it belongs in your novel.

everything that happens affects, and is affected by, everything else. We are all connected, and very often those connections are precisely what reveal the “Why” behind what’s really going on.

in the end every scene will advance multiple subplots, deepen characters, and foreshadow the future, each of those layers was developed and woven in separately.

How will it affect the main storyline? Which, of course, has itself been created with one question in mind: How will it affect the protagonist’s struggle?

External events that were set into motion before the novel began, and that have impending consequences that will affect the protagonist’s quest • Secondary characters (basically, anyone other than the protagonist)

Since you know that none of these characters is the protagonist, you are going to create them, and their agenda, with one purpose in mind: to help facilitate the protagonist’s story.

Your protagonist needs to react internally to everything that happens, in the moment, as he struggles to make sense of it and so bend it to his advantage.

he can’t notice or comment on anything—even if it’s just a description of what someone is wearing—unless he then draws a strategic conclusion that affects what he’s doing or how he interprets what’s happening.

emotion emanates from how the character makes sense of what’s happening, rather than mentioning the nearest big emotion that sums it up.

What stokes a story’s momentum isn’t simply what happens; it’s what it costs the protagonist internally to make the decisions that drive the external action.