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

Is there a real-world, specific, impending consequence that this escalating problem will give my protagonist no choice but to face?

Is there a clear-cut deadline, a ticking clock counting down to that consequence?

nutshell: 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.

So 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.

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.

Your goal as a storyteller isn’t to tell us what your protagonist realizes; it’s to plunk us into the event that causes her to have the realization in the first place. A mistake writers often make is leaping into the scene too late. So they begin just as the protagonist has had the realization, and from there on out she is, indeed, looking at the world through changed eyes. The problem is, we don’t know what happened that finally forced her to wake up and smell the damn coffee, and that’s what we’ve been waiting for.

neither your blueprint nor your novel is made up of a prescribed number of scenes, beats, turns, or plot points. As we know, story structure is the by-product of a story well told, not something that you can—or should—impose from the outside in. Your story will change, grow, shrink, and continually shape-shift as you write forward, finding its own organic architecture. Your goal is simple—build your story by creating a plot that will constantly force your increasingly reluctant protagonist to change. Put simply, the stakes will be ratcheting forever upward, even in those moments when it seems like the storm has already passed.

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.

layers of a novel are built exactly like the layers in recorded music. When you hear a finished song, everything melds into a single, transcendent experience. But that’s not how it was recorded. Back in the studio, each track was created separately, beginning with the drums, the baseline, the foundation, and then each subsequent track was created so that when it was laid in it melded with the others. And the last track? The vocals, the voice, the thing we remember most is, as it turns out, the last track to be added, only after all the tracks beneath it have been expertly mixed into the seamless background that allows that voice to soar.

subplots are, in fact, central to the story itself. That is, provided they don’t take on a life of their own and start madly dancing to their own drummer. This happens more frequently than you might think, even to experienced writers. Subplots can be seductive, because there’s no denying that many of them could tell a very captivating tale on their own.

beneath the surface of your story. Not beneath as in the random assortment of things that seem to collect under the bed all on their own, but beneath as in an integral story layer that, once exposed, sheds light on the surface meaning. It’s not surprising, then, that a novel’s principal subplots tend to spring from two story areas that you’ve already developed and that often overlap: • 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)

Backstory Is the Story

in a novel the butterfly effect—the notion that one itty-bitty change in the past can have a massive effect as it plays forward—couldn’t be more relevant. As you write forward, if you change something, or add something new—and you will—that change will not only ripple into the future, but it will affect the past as well.

only way to change how someone thinks about something, is to first change how they feel about it. You have the power. Now go use it.