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

it’s about trying to put out one small fire that turns out to be far more potent than it first appeared. So sure, a novel can start with a small fire. Novels often do. But here’s the thing: a 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. It sounds so reassuringly logical that it’s a little surprising how often writers instead create a plot made up of a series of separate obstacles, each aimed at tackling an individual facet of the protagonist’s struggle. This approach causes readers to bail in droves, or it would, if there were droves to begin with. Here’s why: • Every time the protagonist solves a problem it feels like the novel has ended. The momentum stops because the reader now has nothing to anticipate, and so no reason to read forward. • Each obstacle tends to carry the same approximate weight and meaning, so it begins to feel like, second verse, same as the first. And the third, and the fourth. • Although the writer has painstakingly designed each obstacle to test a certain part of the protagonist’s mettle, the reader never makes that connection, because it’s conceptual. Plus, what the protagonist learns from having solved the first problem has no effect on what she must do to solve the second, so the reader starts to wonder what the point is.