Plotting and Planning ,
Seven things you should know before drafting your novel
By Megan Collins
Whether you’re a meticulous outliner (guilty!) or someone who sits at their desk each day with no idea what magic they’ll create (jealous!), you can set yourself up for success by determining seven crucial things about your story right at the start.
As a tutor on the Ultimate Novel Writing Programme, I always begin the course by going over these elements with my students. In my view, they’re the framework around which almost every writer’s story should be built…
1. Your character’s world view
During your set-up, you’ll establish your protagonist’s world before everything changes. But even more than what their daily life is like, we need to know their world view, dictated by their flaw or false belief.
By flaw, I don’t mean things like ‘they’re forgetful’. I mean something that taps into the root of who they are and informs the lens through which they see the world.
In my novel Thicker Than Water, there are two protagonists, sisters-in-law Julia and Sienna. Sienna’s flaw is that she’s ‘rabid about injustice’ (Julia’s words). Right and wrong are black and white to her, and she becomes enraged when justice isn’t served. She believes that if people do bad things, then they’re bad people who need to pay the price.
There’s typically a wound from which the flaw originates. Sienna’s wound is that her parents were killed by a drunk driver, who subsequently spent only a year and a half in prison. Sienna sees this as an insultingly miniscule price to pay for the two lives he took, and it’s made her hypersensitive to injustice.
2. The catalyst
Otherwise known as the inciting incident, this is the event that disrupts the status quo, and it should be something uniquely suited to your protagonist’s flaw.
The catalyst of Thicker Than Water is that Jason, Sienna’s brother, gets into a car crash that puts him in a coma, at which point police discover evidence that implicates Jason in the brutal murder of his boss. Now Jason is the prime suspect, unable to defend himself, and this is especially unjust to Sienna because, in her eyes, her brother can do no wrong.
3. What your character wants
This one’s kind of like a math equation: your protagonist’s flaw + the catalyst = what the character wants.
Sienna’s flaw (becoming incensed by injustice of any kind) plus the catalyst (her brother accused of a murder she’s positive he didn’t commit) equals her goal: prove that her brother is innocent.
Every ensuing plot point after the catalyst must make it harder for the character to achieve that goal. In some cases, though, a plot point might make it easier for the protagonist, giving them a false sense of victory — because what they want is never what they actually need…
4. What your character needs
This is something that, in the early stages of your book, your protagonist doesn’t know. In fact, if you told them what they need, they’d tell you you’re crazy.
That’s because their need should be at odds with their want. For example, what Sienna really needs is to accept that justice often has shades of grey: that good people can do bad things, just as bad people sometimes do good things.
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By Megan Collins
About the author
Megan Collins is the author of the psychological thrillers The Winter Sister (2019), Behind the Red Door (2020), and The Family Plot (2021), all published by Atria/Simon & Schuster. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Boston University, and has taught creative writing for many years at both the high school and college level. She is also the managing editor of 3Elements Literary Review.