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

Just as the protagonist’s POV isn’t like a camera lens, neither is a scene written as if you’re narrating something that you’re watching on a video screen. Instead, you want to plant us inside your protagonist’s head as the event unfolds. 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.

WHAT TO DO Now it’s your turn. Can you envision the moment in your protagonist’s life when his misbelief took root? Perhaps you have a vague idea, and that’s fine. Take a minute and sketch it out the way Jennie did in a simple paragraph. If you’re writing a mystery, courtroom drama, or police procedural, your focus might be as much on the crime as on the investigator, if not more so, thus you might do this for the bad guy and for your sleuth, whether she is a detective, lawyer, investigator, spy, or curious next-door neighbor. Remember: 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.

Your next goal will be to transform this life-altering turning point into a full-fledged scene—so you know not only what happened, but exactly how your protagonist made sense of it as it did. It might be a huge event, like Wanda discovering her house has been razed. Or something tiny and seemingly mundane, like Wanda’s dad arriving at her student play ten minutes late. It’s not the external dramatic scope of the moment that matters; it’s your protagonist’s internal reaction to it that counts. Your main job is to track how her viewpoint changes throughout the scene. She will go into the scene believing one thing, and come out believing something else altogether. You’re going to show us how the new misbelief clobbers the old one.

as you create this defining moment, you’ll still be reaching into the past and gathering a handful of specifics in order to set it up. That’s why before you begin writing the scene, you need to answer four questions. 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?

WHAT TO DO You’ve been playing along, haven’t you? I’m betting that as you read each of Jennie’s answers, you were thinking about what your protagonist will go into their origin scene believing. Take a moment now (okay, maybe longer) and jot down your answers to each of the four questions. It’s good practice, because this is something you’ll want to do before any scene you write.

Writing the Scene Itself It’s now time to write the scene in which your protagonist’s expectations will most definitely not be met, and in which his worldview will be skewed. He may emerge emotionally battered and bruised, he may feel triumphant, or he may think that he just dodged a bullet, but as far as he’s concerned, life just taught him an important lesson when it comes to navigating the world. The origin scene will chronicle a single event. It will be specific. You will need to set the place, the time, the context. Don’t simply chronicle what happens externally; put us in your story’s command center by letting us know what your protagonist is thinking as he reacts, internally, to what happens and to what other people say. Often, what he’s thinking and what he’s saying out loud will be two very different things. That is the point.

And speaking of diving deep, my advice is to write this scene in the first person, because it’s the best way to truly experience the immediacy of what’s happening from your protagonist’s point of view. 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. You can switch back to third person when you start writing the first scene of the novel itself.

WHAT TO DO Now it’s your turn to capture the moment when your protagonist’s worldview shifted, and her misbelief took root in her brain, where it’s been coloring how she’s seen the world from that moment on. Write a full-fledged scene. Don’t be worried if it takes several tries to nail it. Feel free to test several scenarios until you hit on the one that feels right. As you saw with Jennie, chances are there will be moments in your own life that will leap to mind, providing evocative material just waiting to be mined. After all, what “write what you know” really means is, write what you know emotionally.

By establishing the moments in your protagonist’s past that are relevant to the story you’re telling, you’ll have the material from which to build a solid blueprint. The scenes you’ll write will capture moments that have not only actively driven your protagonist’s life in the past but are still behind the wheel. In fact, many of these scenes will appear in snippets and as flashbacks in the novel itself. That’s why it’s crucial to nail them now, and why, even though we haven’t actually started developing your plot, this isn’t “prewriting,” but writing itself. The other added benefit of this exercise is that your ability to write compelling scenes will also begin to soar. Because by focusing on how what’s happening is affecting your protagonist internally—what she’s thinking, how she makes sense of it, and what then spurs her action—you’re mastering one of the most elusive, least-taught facets of storytelling. Ironically, it’s also the most important facet—the one that will actually capture your reader’s brain. Literally. What your reader’s brain craves is to synchronize with your protagonist’s brain as she struggles with a difficult decision, one that will have a clear-cut consequence—that is, a consequence that we can envision and so anticipate.

Here he is, riffing to the students: “So you come up with an idea and it’s like ‘this happens…and then, this happens.’ No, no, no! It should be ‘this happens…and therefore, this happens.’ [or] ‘this happens…but this happens.’ ”2 In other words, stories build based on the causal relationship between what just happened, and what’s about to happen as a result.

It’s a feeling S. J. Watson captures brilliantly in his novel Before I Go to Sleep, about a woman coping with amnesia:

It is the knowledge your protagonist walks onto page one already in full possession of, and that guides her action from the second she appears.

So you won’t inadvertently give your protagonist amnesia, your goal now is to write three in-depth scenes that helped create, perpetuate, and escalate the problem your protagonist will be forced to deal with when your novel starts.

Here’s one more thing that writers lose sight of by ignoring it: the protagonist’s past is a big part of a novel’s force of opposition. Because as we’ll see, it tells you what, specifically, your protagonist is up against—both internally and externally.

chances are years, probably decades, will have passed between your origin scene and when your novel opens. During that time, your protagonist will have made a lot of turning point decisions that were affected by the battle between her desire and her misbelief. Often simply by focusing on what you already know about your story—and by now you know a lot—you’ll find that several possible turning points instantly materialize. As you sift through the possibilities, keep in mind that you’re looking for moments when your protagonist stood at a crossroads in her life and had to make a decision that had escalating ongoing ramifications, rather than random moments that merely exemplify a time when your protagonist acted on her misbelief.

WHAT TO DO Now it’s your turn. Your goal is to zero in on three turning point scenes that will yield the most story-specific info, the most potent grist for the mill, so that you can, indeed, begin your novel in medias res. You may come up with many more than three, some of which you’ll dismiss out of hand, and others that you may decide to explore in addition to the three you’ll pick. That’s fine. Just remember that the goal is to have at least three scenes so you can begin to see the escalating arc of your story. Sketch them out the way Jennie did, being as specific as possible. Remember, the more specific you are, the more the scene comes into focus. Specifics play forward; generalities don’t.

That is why, as your novel begins, your protagonist has most likely spent a good bit of time downplaying, postponing, and often willfully ignoring the urge to change. In other words, he’s rationalizing—sometimes consciously, but more often than not, as far as he’s concerned, he’s simply making strategic sense of the world, and acting accordingly.

WHAT TO DO Do a little free writing about your intended plot the way Jennie did. Then extract from that a list of as many ideas for your novel’s main problem as possible: the ones you already had a notion about, perhaps new ones that are just occurring to you now, even ones that seem far-fetched. Don’t worry about sorting them out; the goal is simply to identify as many as you can. Sure, some of them will ultimately be discarded, but it’s not just the main story problem you’re identifying here; it’s also secondary problems that it will bring to the surface and drive forward. So none of this effort will be wasted.

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.

WHAT TO DO Run your list of potential plot problems through Test 1. Be ruthless; don’t let any problem through unless it clears all three hurdles.

WHAT TO DO Run your remaining plot problems through Test 2, until you’ve winnowed them down to a single, overarching dilemma that touches your story’s third rail.

WHAT TO DO Now it’s your turn to sketch out the ticks that will lead you to your opening scene. Your goal is to find the tick that catapults your protagonist into unavoidable action. You’ll know it when you get there, because you’ll feel a strong tug of forward momentum—a sense that your protagonist must act and must act now. Keep the clock ticking until you get there. Don’t be afraid to try this again and again until you get a tick that has everything it needs—the overarching plot problem, the main ticking clock, the third rail.

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.

Here’s the secret: although your blueprint (not to mention your novel itself) will be made up of individual scenes, in truth those scenes are not individual at all, but part of this escalating cause-and-effect trajectory. Each scene will be triggered by the one that came before it and will trigger the one that follows. That’s why even though you’ll work on each scene and each plot point separately, you must always be keenly aware of the part it plays in the overall trajectory. Otherwise even the most brilliantly executed scene will not only stop your story in its tracks but also be incapable of doing what it must do: make the scene that follows it inevitable.

WHAT TO DO Now it’s time for you to write your opening scene. Don’t worry. It’s not about “getting it right.” Because at this stage, you can’t, so try to relax

the author, need to know what the future holds for your protagonist right now in order to create the road to get her there.

even though your protagonist’s “aha!” moment might indeed occur just as the external problem is solved, that’s not what the scene is about. It’s actually about what the event has taught your protagonist. The moment you want to capture on paper is when your protagonist’s internal struggle ends, as her misbelief finally bites the dust and she sees the world with new eyes—aka her “aha!” moment. Often, it’s what allows her to finally solve the external problem, or make peace with it. And as with most things, there’s more to it than meets the eye.

Getting the Revelation Right

Here’s the secret: The point is not that she makes the change, it’s how she gets there—internally—that counts. And ironically, even when writers do get everything else right, it’s the logic behind the internal change that often goes missing. There are three ways to make sure that doesn’t happen to you.

Let the Protagonist Earn the Revelation

it comes at the very moment the protagonist is locked in that last all-out battle, and it’s what gives him the courage, strength, and wisdom to keep going against all odds. And sometimes the “aha!” moment comes right afterward, as the protagonist is making sense of what just happened, surprised that it leaves him feeling very differently from what he’d expected.

Put the Reader in the Midst of the Event Itself

Let Us Be Inside the Protagonist

What Will Change for Your Protagonist Internally?

at the end of the novel your protagonist will return, either literally or figuratively, to the place where she started, but now she’ll see things very differently. That is, sans her misbelief.

In Jennie’s story, Ruby’s internal realization will be that she had a far deeper connection with Henry than she’d allowed herself to see, and that instead of protecting herself from future pain, she was keeping herself from feeling genuine joy. She will also realize that—for better or worse—she is more connected to the world than she’d thought.

Your goal is twofold: 1. 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. This will keep you from ending up with a long list of events that are nothing more than a bunch of things that happen.

WHAT TO DO As you approach each scene, gather everything you know about your protagonist and their subjective worldview at the moment. What are they most worried about? How will that affect their judgment in this scene? Be sure you’ve thought about each layer, each ticking clock.