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

Author:Lisa Cron [Cron, Lisa]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781607748892
Amazon: 1607748894
Publisher: Ten Speed Press
Published: 2016-08-08T21:00:00+00:00

CREATING AN EXTERNAL

GAUNTLET TO SPUR

YOUR PROTAGONIST’S INTERNAL STRUGGLE

9

THE OPENING: OF YOUR NOVEL AND OF THE STORY GENIUS BLUEPRINTING SYST E M

Never confuse movement with action.

—ERNEST HEMINGWAY

S

o what exactly is a novel blueprint, and how does it help you create a plot that touches on the third rail? I thought you’d never ask. In a 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.

You’ll begin to build your blueprint based on everything you’ve unearthed in the process thus far. You’ve already seen how your protagonist’s past has guided his life up to the tick that will open your novel. Now it’s time to plumb that past, often digging yet deeper into it, the better to nail down the events it will thrust your protagonist into, along with his reaction to them.

If you think harnessing the plot to the third rail will be tricky, here’s a welcome news flash: you’ve already been doing it for quite a while now. Take a look at the progression of backstory scenes you’ve already written. In each scene, what happens externally is driven by, and gets its meaning from, your protagonist’s internal reaction to it. For instance, Jennie’s origin

14 4 scene doesn’t simply recount external events—Mr. Anderson’s death and Beth’s breakdown on the soccer field—it recounts, first and foremost, how those events affect Ruby. The scene is about the inception of her misbelief, the misbelief that will guide the external trajectory of her life: that love is what ultimately destroys us. The same is true of your protagonist. If you’re writing a mystery, this will apply to your bad guy, and perhaps your investigator as well.

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. The blueprint you’re going to construct will make that mistake impossible, and it will make writing each scene in your novel far more intuitive than you ever imagined.

But since each scene is linked to those that precede and follow it in a single seamless, escalating storyline, does that mean you need to lay it out in chronological order on a massive roll of butcher paper stretching across the living room into the bedroom and then under the kitchen table as you scribble forward? Hardly. That’s cumbersome, and so last century (do they even have butcher paper anymore?), and most

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