The best fictional stories stay with us.
Good fiction is balanced, intimate, and unified.
1. Balance: Balance creates harmony in the story. There is front story (things that go forward) and there is back-story (things that happened in the past—emotional wounds). The story follows the main character and second characters don’t steal the spotlight.
2. Intimacy: Intimacy gives the sense of “being there.” The reader needs to feel like they can walk around that world and know what they’d see and smell.
3. Unity: Unity is a sense that the story was written at one time, without stopping, starting, or changing, and everything comes together like the final note in a grand finale. The story has cohesion.
Story Arc:
Story arc is always based on adversity that is casual and related. Each character in the story has an agenda. What do they want? Make sure there are visual and sensory elements on all your pages.
The major events at the end of the story are always foreshadowed. Fiction is full of surprises and complication. If there are too many shocks and surprises, the reader will be untrusting. Instead, leave a campaign trail of things to come to leave your reader nervous and uneasy. Most foreshadowing comes through in second or third drafts.
Your story is built around a premise and/or theme. It’s the takeaway message and the heartbeat of the story. Premises and themes give you boundaries in writing your story. When you fully understand them, you make firmer choices and they don’t need to be shouted to be understood. An example of a premise is “don’t fool with mother nature” in Jurassic Park.
The story always begins at the most important moments of change because fiction is a record of threatening changes. The protagonist is the person who pays the biggest price by these changes. In the beginning of the story, there is an inciting incident, which is the threat of change. It comes into a character’s life and pushes them off balance. They have to teeter with that change. At the end, they have to be barely holding on. In YA /middle grade novels, the inciting incident is usually in the first paragraph.
Stories are told in scenes. There is a goal, obstacle, and a resolution. At the start of the scene, the protagonist wants something. When the scene is concluded, the protagonist ends in a different emotional space than when they started.
Character:
Characters are what linger in the mind after the story—their actions, their mistakes, and their messy emotions. Fiction is about interesting people in a lot of trouble and the main characters fascinate us.
In our lives, we like to be safe, but a protagonist is vulnerable.
A character does not necessarily have to be sympathetic and likeable to be memorable. Take risks with your character, break the rules …these are the people we want to read about—people that dare to be nasty!
Determine your characters level of morality. Do they think they’re a good person? What in their past led them to this morality? How far will they go to get what they want? An anti-hero is a character that is not black or white in their morality, but gray.
You also want to know your character’s emotional range. If they were pushed to their limits, pushed against the wall, what would they do? How would they react?
Develop characters through dialogue and action. There are always exceptions to this, but this method works for most stories.
Hierarchy of Traits:
There are three layers to your vulnerable protagonist: The first layer is the dominant personality traits, the second layer are the traits that support the dominant traits, and the third and final layer are traits that counter or contradict the first two layers.
1. Dominant Personality Traits: Choose three to six dominant personality traits that will get your protagonist through the story. These traits are firmly entrenched in them and they stay the same through the story. The character changes in the character arc, but these dominant traits will remain the same. Examples of dominant personality traits are brave, daring, ruthless, reckless, compassionate, resourceful, determined, brilliant, or risk-taking.
2. Second Layer: These traits support the dominant traits. They add depth to the character. This layer is shown as the story unfolds and gives the reader more intimate knowledge of your character. Examples of secondary or supportive traits are faithful, lustful, passionate, stubborn, impatient, tender, and outspoken.
3. Third Layer: These are the counter or contradictory traits of the character. It’s their hidden trait that they like to keep secret and in their pocket. This trait is only demonstrated under duress or under an extreme or highly emotional situation, which can be used to surprise readers.
Character Arc:
The character arc is how the character changes in the story.
An example of a character arc is in the Wizard of Oz. Dorothy starts out lonely and believes nobody cares about her. In Oz, she finds belonging and wants to go back home to Kansas. In the beginning, Dorothy would have put her own welfare first, but in the end, she throws water on the Wicked Witch of the West to save Scarecrow.
The character arc is about emotional plot points. Once your character reaches one, it’s a one-way gate—there is no turning back. The character must move forward. You should test your character arc and give your character moral choices, but that will only work if you already have an understanding of what they would choose in that given situation. These sorts of choices create inner conflict, which all inevitably leads to the climax, which is where the fireworks happen and then resolution.
Character is often about someone’s growing understanding of the world. What are their opinions, values and self-image? What are their flaws? What do they have to overcome?
Types of Characters:
The protagonist pays the biggest price, changes the most, and has the readers’ sympathy or empathy. Empathy is how we come to know the character, so you must have at least one sympathy-provoking character in the opening scene. Someone is hurt, lonely, or murdered for example. Orphans are used a lot in fiction because they have high needs and emotional baggage.
The antagonist forces the protagonist in the way that he or she needs to change. The closer this character comes to the protagonist the more potency the antagonist has. The antagonist could be, for example, the main character’s meddling mother-in-law.
The villain is different from the antagonist because the villain has a clear agenda to cause harm or injury. When writing villains, it’s important to understand the “why.” Why do they want to harm the protagonist? Why do they dislike the protagonist so much to cause injury, etc.
As the author, you need to know your protagonist and antagonist because they both are transforming and changing. They must be round and full characters. Secondary characters do not need as much development and can exist for fun or to show character. Minor characters are usually flat and static.
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