Your Thematic Message (Steps 29, 30, 31)
Your thematic message will explore a particular human quality such as greed, denial, or living in fantasy. The message need not be about something bad, but could be about the value of a positive quality. This value is usually wrapped around a personal issue expressed through your Main Character. In these steps, you’ll explore your Main Character’s personal issues and select one to be the focus of your novel’s message.
Write Your Novel Step By Step
Step 27 – Your Thematic Topic
In this step, you’ll explore how a thematic topic provides the glue to hold your characters, plot and theme together. Then, you’ll identify the best candidates for a thematic topic in the story materials you’ve developed so far and incorporate them into your novel.
Identifying Your Main Character
The Main Character represents the reader’s position in the story, but this is not always the Protagonist. While in a football game the Protagonist may be the quarterback, a story could be told through the eyes of any of the players on the field. The Protagonist is defined as the character who is the prime mover of the effort to achieve the story goal logistically. The Main Character, however, is the character with whom the readers most identify and around whom the passion of the story seems to revolve. It is the Main Character who must grapple with a personal or moral issue and is the center of the story’s message.
In this step, even if you are already completely sure of who your main character is, you’ll examine each character and look at the story through his or her eyes to see if there might be an even stronger viewpoint from which your readers might experience your story first hand.
Write Your Novel Step by Step (24)
Selecting Your Novel’s Cast from their Dossiers
In previous steps you created dossiers for each of your prospective cast members. Now you’ll reference that material in choosing the candidates you want to populate your novel.
Step 22 Your Characters’ Points of View) is now available here.
You know how you see your story, but what does it look to your characters? In this step, you’ll have each of your characters write a paragraph in his or her own unique voice describing how your story looks from their point of view within it.
Step 21 (Auditioning Your Cast) is now available here.
In this step you interview your potential cast members and have each character write a short bio of himself or herself, all of which will become part of their dossier.
In steps to come, you’ll use these dossiers to determine which characters you want to hire for your novel’s cast.
Write Your Novel Step by Step
Step 1 – The Four Stages of Writing a Novel. This is the first in a new series of videos that are a companion piece to the book. In this step, you’ll learn a better method to carry you from concept to completion.
The Expected Characters
In Step 11 you made a list of all the characters explicitly named in your revised synopsis. Now list all the characters that your synopsis doesn’t specifically name, but that would almost be expected in such a story. Include any additional characters you intend to employ but didn’t actually spell out in your synopsis. Again, list them by role and name if one comes to mind.
Example:
Suppose a story is described as the tribulations of a town Marshall trying to fend off a gang of outlaws who bleed the town dry.
The only specifically called for characters are the Marshall and the gang, which you would have listed in Step 10. But, you’d also expect the gang to have a leader and the town to have a mayor. The Marshall might have a deputy. And, if the town is being bled dry, then some businessmen and shopkeepers would be in order as well.
So, you would list these additional implied characters as:
Gang Leader
Mayor
Deputy (John Justice)
Businessmen
Shopkeepers
Don’t list every character you can possibly imagine – we’ll expand our cast in other areas in steps to come. The task here is no more than to list all those characters most strongly implied – the ones that the plot or situation virtually calls for but doesn’t actually name.
Add these new characters below those in you listed in Step 11. Then, in the next step we’ll add some more.
Buy the book, try the software!
This article was drawn from our book, Write Your Novel Step by Step and our StoryWeaver Step-by-Step Story Development Software that guide your from concept to completion of your novel.
The book is available in paperback and for your Kindle
The software is available for Windows & Macintosh
Who’s There?
Congratulations! You’ve completed the first part of your journey toward a completed novel. It was a heck of a lot of work, but it is all about to pay off.
From here on out, we’ll be drawing on material you’ve already created. What’s more, each step from this point forward is far less complicated, requires far less effort and is shorter to boot!
In this step, for example, we’re going to look for characters in the material you’ve already created. You don’t have to invent anything new. In fact, it is important that you don’t!
Read through your revised synopsis from Step 10 while asking yourself “who’s there?” Make a list of all the characters explicitly called for in your story, as it is worded.
To be clear, don’t list any characters you have in mind but didn’t actually spell out in your work – just the ones who actually appear in the text.
You may have given some of these characters names. Others, you may have described simply by their roles in the story, such as Mercenary, John’s Wife, Village Idiot, etc.
If a character does not yet have a role, give them one as a place-
If a character does not yet have a name, don’t hold yourself up trying to think of one now. Well have a whole step devoted to inventing interesting character names down the line.
For now, just list the characters actually spelled out specifically in your synopsis as it stands.
Example:
John –
An Archeologist
Painless Pete –
A Clown
A Freelance Birdwatcher
Do NOT include any characters you have in mind but didn’t actually mention. Do NOT include any characters who may be inferred but aren’t actually identified. All those other characters will be dealt with in the next few steps.
So, get on with it and answer the burning question, “Who’s There?”
Buy the book, try the software!
This article was drawn from our book, Write Your Novel Step by Step and our StoryWeaver Step-by-Step Story Development Software that guide your from concept to completion of your novel.
The book is available in paperback and for your Kindle
The software is available for Windows & Macintosh
Finding the Holes
In Step 5, you created your first comprehensive description of what your story is about – who’s in it, what happens to them, what it all means, and the story world in which it all takes place.
In this step you’ll take a new look at this synopsis to find holes in your story – dramatic elements that are either missing or inconsistent with one another.
For a moment, step out of your role as author, and put yourself in the position of your reader or audience. Read over your story synopsis from Step 5. If something doesn’t make sense, is off kilter, or missing, make a note of it.
List each point in the form of a question, as this tends to help you focus in on exactly what is needed to fix the problem.
When you have finished your novel, your audience will be unforgiving, so be harsh now! Don’t gloss over problems, but don’t try to solve them either. That comes later.
For now, just ask questions about everything that bothers you about your story from an audience perspective, as if you were reading someone else’s description of their story rather than your own.
If push comes to shove and you are just too close to your story to see many problems with it, share your synopsis with friends, family or fellow writers.
Don’t ask them what they think of it – they’ll always pull their punches to be kind. Instead, just tell them to write down any questions they have about your story that weren’t answered in the synopsis – anything they didn’t quite understand or found confusing.
Having them state these issues as questions will get you a far better result than just asking their opinion, for they would really like to know the answers. Friends and family are especially much more likely to be frank if they are just asking questions rather than criticizing.
Using the example below (based on the Snow Sharks example synopsis provided for Step 5) pick your synopsis apart as thoroughly as you can jotting down every question about it that comes to mind.
Example:
Questions About Snow Sharks
From the synopsis:
The government has been developing a new breed of shark that lives in snow rather than water for use as mobile land mines in places such as Siberia or the Arctic.
Questions:
From the synopsis:
A transport plane carrying them crashes in a storm high in the Rocky Mountains.
Questions:
10. If so, do the sharks kill all the survivors?
11. Is there anything in the wreckage that reveals the cargo, its nature and who is behind it?
12. Is the crew able to contact their command center before crashing?
13. Are they able to convey their location?
14. Is there a rescue beacon?
15. Does the plane carry a “black box.”
Using this example as a guide, separate your entire Step 5 synopsis into short sections (as above) and then come up with as many questions as you can (within reason) about each section.
Next, in Step 7, we’ll take each question, one at a time, and generate several potential answers that would satisfy them, thereby expanding and enriching your evolving story, even while you fill its holes and fix its inconsistencies.
This article is based on our StoryWeaver Step-by-Step Story Development Software that guides you through more than 200 interactive Story Cards from concept to completion of your novel or screenplay. Just $29.95 for Windows or Macintosh.
Click here for details, demo download or to purchase.