Five essentials your novel cannot live without
One for the writers
Hello and welcome to Making Crime Pay! I’m Nicki Thornton - I’m an author. I share my creative journey here and what I am learning along the way. I pass on my love of books by sharing what I am reading and review them so you can enjoy them too. I visit schools and other places to encourage a love of reading and help writing be more fun!
My latest novel is The Floating Witch Mystery, about three determined children, an eccentric witch and the world’s best magical detective who will stop at nothing to save everything they love. If you would like to hear me read the opening chapter you can head here.
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Nicki
What are the 5 essential ingredients in your novel?
A novel can be as complex as you like. It can be about as many things as you like.
But I think if you focus on mastering 5 key components of your novel it will help you to really take control of your story - why?
Because these are the 5 secret ingredients to make it more compelling to readers.
Find out here what they are, why they are so important and how to get them working for you.
My belief is that we read stories to help make sense of the world
I start writing my novels with a lot of creative freedom. I start my process by writing a very loose creative draft without worrying about structure. But I think structure is so important that it is the very next step that I think about.
I like to have a strong underlying structure, because I think it helps readers understand what it is really about and that way they feel engaged with the story.
Structure allows a writer to present ideas clearly and logically to a reader. If you can get the structure right, it helps with pacing, allowing for suspense and surprises, the sort of things readers often love.
So after that creative brain dump I call my Draft Zero, I try really hard to boil down my novel to just five essentials.
It sounds like it should be easy, but every time I have to sit down and work out my basic structure.
Of course, a novel might run to tens of thousands of words and be about many things, complex, intertwined and multi-layered. Sometimes I don’t even want to feel that my story can be distilled down to some very basic steps.
Once I’ve understood and have identified what the 5 essentials are I can make them clear. And if I as the author have not made them clear, the reader hasn’t got a great chance of seeing them.
What are the 5 essentials I look for?
A story is basically a journey that starts out with a main character, your protagonist, who has a problem. Something is about to change – something triggers this process of change and that change and how it is dealt with is basically the story. Through the story, they learn how to resolve it, and in the end their world changes, even slightly, because of the journey they have been on.
Before we get to the 5 essentials that should be in every story, can I answer 5 fundamental questions about my story. I have learned that it does make my stories stronger and more compelling.
What has been achieved?
What has been understood?
What has changed?
How was that change brought about?
At what cost?
A story is a chain reaction set in motion by what is known as the inciting incident.
1. The inciting incident
This is your First Essential. Being able to identify your inciting incident. Sometimes this is referred to as the ‘What If’ question: the thing that brings change, usually unexpected change.
So at the opening, the protagonist is in their current world. Everything is in a certain state of stability and that is going to be disrupted. What they are hoping for, is very probably not what is going to actually happen.
What if they hope they are going to reunite an estranged marriage at a Christmas party? What if they discover terrorists are in the building?
What if they think they are very important and should not be having to put up with the worst day of their life? What if they are made to repeat that day until they turn it into the best day of their life?
The strongest stories are about the strongest questions.
Can you identify the inciting incident in your story? Can you identify what needs to change about your character?
The starting point is something happening that sets a chain reaction in progress that will become unstoppable, the current world is shattered, it becomes unstable. A story shows how the situation gets fixed.
But the end should track back to the question posed at the beginning.
Can you see how the situation will change over the course of your story? How will it be resolved?
And each step of your plot is going to be either an obstacle which makes the challenge more difficult, or a helpful step that takes your protagonist through this process of learning, nearer to the satisfactory resolution of their goal.
You can storyboard the key steps to change
Many writers like to storyboard to identify all the key steps on this journey that are going to lead to the end, particularly if you have a complex and lengthy story you want to write.
But before I do this, I think in some detail about the second element I need to understand to make this the best story I can make it.
Because very often the stories readers more engage with are the ones where it’s not so much the character’s situation that changes – as the protagonist themselves.
The reader should feel compelled to be with the protagonist on this journey.
2. Create empathy
This does not mean they have to like them. Anti-heroes are really popular – but readers root for protagonists because they understand why they are behaving a certain way, so it is worth considering your protagonist’s internal life as well as the external action of the story.
Let’s say my story is about an ordinary woman. And what if she’s accused of a murder she didn’t commit. This could be a very exciting story. The resolution might be that she clears her name.
But if a story is about change, then my protagonist is going to change. Maybe she needs this change, even if it is only at a subconscious level.
It could be that she thought she has a great life, is really not wishing for change, really did not need this inciting incident. But what if that change makes her confront a whole series of character flaws?
Characters need internal lessons
As well as the external mystery story, maybe over the course of the story she learns lessons about herself. What she is capable of, what she really wants or how hard she will fight to achieve it.
Maybe if the reader judges how she acted (maybe she’s even guilty), it’s great if the reader is on her side because they will care what happens and want to read on to the end, maybe not want to put the book down.
So always ask yourself what about your protagonist’s world is going to be irreversibly changed by the end of this story? And what about the protagonist herself? What will she really fight for?
And that leads onto the third essential element, the one so far missing from this great set-up that is really going to engage your reader. Who or what is she fighting against:
3. Your antagonist
Stories with successful villains again can really engage the reader. So maybe start with your protagonist and think who they would be up against in their worst nightmare.
Even better, start with your antagonist and think who they would be up against in their worst nightmare.
The fourth essential element is reaching what’s often called the mid-point.
4. The mid point
This is important to structure as it is the point where the chain reaction has become unstoppable, the protagonist understands the situation fully, is faced with fighting a set of obstacles and they know what they have to learn and to do in order to win.
In many psychological thrillers you will find a midpoint twist, where you see everything that’s gone before differently and the goals of the protagonist can change dramatically. Currently these are hugely popular stories and I think part of the reason is the mid-point is where there is no going back.
The protagonist can only press forwards, using everything they have learned, in order to achieve stability back in the world and that happens in the fifth essential element – the resolution – where will the protagonist find themselves, having beaten the problem and restored order in their world?
5. The resolution
What is this world going to look like now as a result of everything they have learned? What have they achieved?
Often examining the ending can help you to understand what has happened exactly, what transformation has happened in your story – to the world and to your characters.
And that’s the time to go back and sharpen again all those five essential elements in your story. Because if you understand the fundamentals of your story, you are in a strong position to make sure that underlying structure is going to give your readers a really immersive, compelling experience.
Let me know your thoughts - do you also agree these are the five essential elements? I’d love to know.
Nicki
#6: readers!