In a guest post on Jane Friedman’s blog, Susan DeFreitas suggests three questions you should ask yourself before you begin drafting or revising your novel. “It doesn’t matter what higher-level story structure you’re working with, whether it’s as traditional as the Hero’s Journey or as experimental as the story spiral explored by Jane Alison in Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative—there are three levels that your story must hold together on if it’s going to read like a story,” she says.
- Does your protagonist have a real character arc? “Novels that lack a real character arc can be well written, and moving at the level of the scene, and perhaps even have some truly poignant moments,” DeFreitas says. “But they don’t tend to have a strong emotional effect on the reader—and in the end, such stories tend to feel like they’re lacking that certain something that makes a novel satisfying to read.”
- Do the events of your plot have a strong causal relationship? “Any sequence of events in your synopsis that can only be related via the words ‘and then’ rather than the words ‘therefore’ or ‘but’ denote danger zones in your novel: places where the story is bound to drag, and feel slow from your reader’s point of view,” DeFreitas writes. “What is the event that precipitates every other? Which event acts as the tipping point that sets into motion a tightly linked chain of cause and effect?”
- Does your protagonist have a higher-order goal, do their actions make sense, and do their antagonists respond convincingly? “There are many ways that issues with story logic can hide in plain sight in your novel, and getting to the bottom of them is generally just a matter of taking a good, hard look at each of the major turns of the story,” DeFreitas notes. Your plot can easily feel contrived if your characters don’t have good reasons for making choices.
