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

Plotters come so close to being right. Developing a blueprint of the novel you’re writing before you tackle page one is essential. The trouble is, they’ve focused on developing the wrong thing—the external plot—rather than the internal story. Their focus is on the external “what,” rather than the protagonist’s preexisting, internal “why.” Thus plotters begin by laying out the surface events of the story—beginning on page one—with little regard to the protagonist’s specific past, which is the very thing that determines not only what will happen in the plot, but how she sees her world, what she does, and most importantly, why. Plotters have it backward: 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. Outlining the plot first is like saying, “I’m going to write about the most difficult, life-altering series of events in the life of someone whom I know absolutely nothing about.”