How to derive a storyline from a beginning?

Context: I was a similar situation a few years ago. I wandered into a museum and by chance found a whole world that was there for me for the taking. I instantly knew that I wanted to write about this world. The only trouble was: I didn't have a story. I had this beautiful world that was teeming with conflicts, but I couldn't immediately harness any of it.

Here's what I ended up doing, over months of frustration, doubts, and useless trial and error efforts:

I started writing, all passionate and confident that such a great world would naturally produce a breath-taking story. The first draft was a disaster. The second didn't make it much better. The novel felt incongruent and lacked an emotional core. I was passionate about the topic, but I couldn't project this passion onto my characters, since I didn't know what exactly it was that I needed to happen.

Then I sat down and thought very hard about this question: What is it that fascinates you most about your story set-up (i.e. your world)? What grabbed your attention and refuses to let go of it? For me, it was a very specific albeit slow societal change that changed the self-perception of my protagonists and made them step out of their comfort zone to change their relationship with the rest of the world.

Based on this, which conflicts are specific to your world? It sounds as if you have developed a great world. What can happen in this world that is unique (or at least not arbitrary) and requires the framework of your specific world? Think of Nazi Germany (or, if you like that better, the wizarding world under Voldemort). Inter-societal trust has vanished. Peoples' lives are reigned by mistrust and paranoia. In a world like this, a story about betrayal can become very specific and explosive very quickly. Just think: Would you care in today's world if somebody told your boss you were a Jew? Likely not. In Nazi Germany, it could have been your death sentence.

In my case, "my" world allowed me to write about self-perception -- what is good, what is evil, what is sick and needs to be cured, and what of all these things am I? --, integration, and exclusion.

So, identify a conflict that is naturally amplified in your world and that sets you on edge. Last step: Put it at the heart of your story. Decide how the conflict will be resolved at the end of the book. (This ties in neatly with Mark Baker's excellent answer.) Then, and only then, you start writing.

posted over 6 years ago

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Filip‭

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People are their own worst enemies. In my case, instant Karma sometimes gets me. There is hardship, people help. But, story endings may be unknown.

If you were writing about my neck of the woods you would know of my ambitions, problems that surround me, what I'm doing about them, how others are coping, with loss, love, kids, and the human condition.

Find what those are for your characters.

In my storyboard I ask: Does a fool ever win? Can I overcome grim forces. Does the hero get the girl? What motivates oppression? Can I feel for my antagonists? Are there reassuring gems found in all the chaos? These are elements I find interesting in my own life, and in other lives around mine. I find irony, poetic justice, human failings, and "order in the universe" compelling plot lines, because they speak truth to me.

You may be able to use these ideas with your characters to develop their stories.

We all have stories to tell. Drawing from our own life and others we know provides a treasure trove to draw from. The challenge lies in constructing believable characters who bear no specific resemblance to your own family and friends, lest they might feel wrongly depicted. Interweaving persistent human traits and enduring cultural themes helps your storyboard resonate with your reader. Making a simple storyboard is the place to start. Add details, trials and tribulations, unintended consequences; complexity is interesting if plausible.

The story may reveal itself with these exercises.

posted over 6 years ago

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Jeff Reagan‭

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You have an inciting incident and a protagonist.

I think something is off about one of them. Your protagonist is under-developed, or your inciting incident is under-developed.

In a typical story, this inciting incident forces upon the protagonist their central dilemma / opportunity, and addressing this dilemma / opportunity is what the story is about. The two of those together should explode, and apparently for you they fizzled.

Here is a straightforward example: If my character's single-engine plane crashes at sea, and she is the sole survivor and swims to a deserted island, she has a dilemma if she wishes to return to society. She has an opportunity if she does not. I don't know what the story is about if she doesn't care either way. For me as a writer I cannot write a story about a protagonist that truly doesn't care what happens to them; I am not that skilled!

Now that is pretty straightforward as an inciting incident. If she wants to be rescued like nearly everybody would, it is Castaway or Robinson Crusoe.

To write a story where this wreck is an opportunity, I need to make it plausible. First, she needs a damn good driving reason and a certain kind of personality to consider living alone on an island indefinitely a viable proposition, and then a plausible reason to do it. I need to make sure those traits and that situation is clear in Act I.

Either way, the inciting incident creates a story based on the personality and situation of the protagonist, and by the end of Act I the inciting incident is a done deal and she is faced with a decision of what to do next.

In The Hunger Games, the inciting incident (a lethal threat to somebody our hero loves) is immediately dealt with, but still plausibly throws our hero into her own particularly lethal and morally fraught fight for survival.

On to your story: A less straightforward inciting incident may feel to the writer momentous and exciting, but if their protagonist, her emotions and her situation are under-developed, then she (the protagonist) has no clear reaction to the incident, or just typical reactions everybody else has. She doesn't stand out, the incident creates for her only the typical dilemma (or opportunity) it presents everybody else, she is not unique in her response and she is interchangeable with other characters. We call that 'cardboard'. The reader needs a reason to understand her as a unique person, and you need to give her traits or a past so she plausibly has a strong desire spring forth from the inciting incident.

In stories where the strong desire is typical --- protect a loved one, return to normality, take vengeance on the guilty --- I would have to give the character some unusual character elements, mental or personality or ability, or isolate them (as in Castaway) so the audience has no choice but to follow them. In many stories the hero is unusually skilled, astute, perceptive or gifted in some way.

My first thought is that, if your discovery writing experiment meanders, then your protagonist is not motivated by the inciting incident to accomplish anything. That is an underdevelopment in Act I of your protagonist, the inciting incident should incite them.

Of course your protagonist might be somebody you like, and you don't want to change them: But then you must change your inciting incident to incite that personality to do something. Either hurt the crap out of the protagonist, or make them choose to risk their life out of love, or give them an opportunity that makes them abandon everything to pursue.

Then your missing story comes to light so you can plot it, because I see roughly three core plots: Your protagonists succeeds, fails, or learns and changes her mind about what constitutes success and failure.

Once she wants something (or someone) so much she devotes her immediate future to nothing but that, you can plot a story. If you can't figure out the story, you need to change something so the inciting incident incites your protagonist and creates a terrible dilemma (or fantastic opportunity).

ADDED: If this still doesn't answer your question, I would look at your inciting incident and consider the ramifications of it, both for some individuals and the world of your protagonist. What is the worst thing this incident does to people? Or to people that continue to live; e.g. if the worst thing is killing them, then consider the emotions of the living that cared about the killed, or survivors with lives ruined or facing hardship or a bleak future. The consequences of your inciting incident must be awful or great for somebody, and you need your protagonist to be one of them.

posted over 6 years ago

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Amadeus‭

3156 reputation 2 1399 613 37

1) Related to Secespitus's answer: Are you familiar with Rory's Story Cubes? they are dice with little icons on the sides rather than pips or numbers. They might be stick figures doing something, an object, an cloud, fire, a book, etc. For kids, you roll the dice and use whatever comes up to make up a story. Pick up a few sets (there are several — places, actions, people — plus geek-related ones) and try experimenting. See if anything jogs loose.

2) There's an entire tumblr dedicated to writing prompts. Browse through it, or pick a few and run your characters through them. Just sketch it out; you don't necessarily need to write the entire short story if you're feeling overwhelmed. But get accustomed to doing things with your characters.

3) The old adage goes "If all else fails, chase your characters up a tree and throw rocks at them."

posted over 6 years ago

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Lauren Ipsum‭

2098 reputation 13 1143 397 1

A story is about one or more characters. These need not be human, and they need not necessarily even be living beings (a story about an AI's struggle for equality could make an interesting sci-fi story as well as an allegory to our world past and present...), but they should be something that the reader can identify with.

Characters inhabit a world. The world need not be large, or elaborate, or even in the least bit different from our own, but you can't just dump characters in a void. (Or, well, a void could also be a world. Likely just not a very interesting one, except insofar as it could present plenty of challenges to the characters.)

Characters want something. That really is the basis for any story. They might want fame, or money, or to get rid of a trinket that is causing them all kinds of trouble, or even just flat out survival, but in the end, they want something.

Generally, characters face difficulties in trying to attain what they desire. Not everyone is set up to become famous, or rich, and even when they are, there's usually hard work involved; and to just throw the trinket in the nearest river is too simple for some reason, maybe because they need to be certain that the trinket is thoroughly destroyed so that nobody else can use it.

You have a cast of characters, and you have a world in which they live, even if those aren't yet fully fleshed out. What you now need is something that your characters desire (to have a story at all), and something to keep them from attaining that goal (to keep the story interesting to the reader).

So get inside your characters' heads. What drives them? Even if that is just to live a calm life at the farm, what do they want above all else? Very often, that will be your story ending, or very near it. Now, put some obstacles in their path toward that goal. They might be the Chosen Ones to carry the God-Given Almighty Trinket from Apoint to Btown. They might be working leisurely around the farm when someone sets their fields ablaze and kills their herd or tortures their family members, and they need to figure out who and why hired the thugs because the authorities don't care or are incompetent. They might be facing a government that doesn't want them to attain their goal for reasons good or bad. They might be facing the forces of nature. Or anything else you can think of that would keep your characters from doing what they most desire right here, right now.

Once you have those two additional things in place (what drives your characters, and what can keep them from succeeding), then you have the core outline of an actual story. The story, then, will typically be how the characters face and overcome those challenges, generally growing in the process; although in some cases, the story can be about how the characters face and are overcome by the challenges.

Chapter one sets the scene. Now figure out how your characters want to change it.

posted over 6 years ago

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Canina‭

485 reputation 10 40 74 49

If you don't have a middle and an end, you don't have a beginning. I don't mean that you have to work out all the details of the middle and the end before you begin, because you can work those out as you go if that is how you work. What I mean is that the beginning sets up the middle and the end so if your don't have a middle and an end in mind, you don't know what the beginning is supposed to set up.

At the heart of every story there is a choice about values. The protagonist will be brought to a point where they have to make a fundamental moral choice. In order to grasp something new, they will have to open their hand and let something old drop. At this moment of crisis they will go one way or the other: drop the old and grasp for the new, or hold onto the old and lose their chance at the new. The choice may end in triumph or tragedy, grief or joy, but there is always the choice.

The function of the beginning to lead the protagonist towards that moment of choice and to prove to the reader that the protagonist truly loves what they have in their hand and truly desires the thing that is just beyond their reach, that they are actively pursuing through the middle of the book. Until you know what that choice is, you don't have a beginning. Once you know what that choice is, you have a beginning and a middle and two choices for the end. (Though, actually, the nature of the end is usually inherent in the nature of the choice.)

The world you have created and the events you have devised may be workable as they are, but to move on, you need to identify the fundamental moral choice that lies at the heart of your story. (In Hunger Games, Katniss must decide if she is willing to kill to win.) And once you have identified that choice, you will need to go back to your opening and make sure that every word and scene is establishing what your character loves and wants so that you can bring them to that moment of choice that will be the heart of your story.

BTW, if the function of the beginning is to establish values, and the function of the middle is to lead the character to the choice of values, the function of the end is to prove, thought the subsequent action, that the choice has been made.

Clarification

It becomes clear from the comments that I have not succeeded in getting my point across to all readers. Some took my answer as a refutation of discovery writing, as a statement that you have to work out the entire plot in detail before you being. Nothing could be further from my intent.

Jonathan Karl cites Stephen King's analogy of storytelling to unearthing a fossil in which King describes plotting as a jackhammer that will likely destroy what you are trying to unearth. This idea that the storyteller is discovering rather than inventing their story is very common in what storytellers write about their craft. To me it makes sense given the commonly accepted notion that stories are something very fundamental to the human psyche. (Personally, I go one step further, believing that stories are fundamental to language itself.)

But if a story is a fossil you are uncovering, it follows that the first thing that you find sticking out of the ground that looks like a bone may or may not be part of a whole story. It might just be an incident or a vignette. You may have to dig a little to figure out if you have found a dinosaur or a dead stick.

When I say that if you don't have a middle and an end, you don't have a beginning, I mean that until you unearth enough of the fossil you don't know if you have a dinosaur or a dead stick. What you think may be a beginning may turn out to just be an incident or a vignette. Beginnings, by nature, begin something, and if there is no middle and no end, then what you have is not a beginning.

The question is, how do you tell, once you have dug up what you think might be a beginning, if it is actually a beginning or not? King talks about starting a story by putting characters in a predicament. Does the incident you have uncovered put your characters in a predicament? If it does, then your characters will naturally try to get out of their predicament and you can write the story (as King describes) by watching them try. Alternatively, if you are a plotter, you can work out a way for them to get out of the predicament and then write it down. Whichever method you use, though, there has to be a predicament, and if there is no predicament, there is no story and thus your incident is just and incident and not a beginning.

What is the nature of a predicament that is capable of driving a story? My contention is that all story predicaments are at their heart moral. They are a choice between values. A problem that can be solved by mere mechanical ingenuity is not a sufficient predicament to drive a story. There has to be a moral element, a choice between values, a sacrifice required to gain a greater good.

If your beginning has not established that moral predicament, or at very least established a set of values in which an eventual predicament can clearly be seen, then it is not a beginning.

Inherent in the discovery writing process is that sometimes the thing you think you are discovering will turn out not to be a story. If you are a discovery writer, you have to learn to recognize when this happens and move on to try to discover a story somewhere else.

If you are a plotter, on the other hand, you have to realize that a plot is more than a sequence of incidents. It is a device for bringing a moral predicament to a head, to a moment of decision. If you are going to plan, this is what you have to plan for.

posted over 6 years ago

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Mark Baker‭

4371 reputation 12 1104 744 58

What you need is inspiration - try throwing a coin

The problem is that you only have the start - but not the end. Without knowing where you want to go it will be hard to flesh out the middle part where most things happen.

One option would be to get a feeling for what your idea for the story is like and then go and read stuff that feels similar. For example: if you currently feel like the best comparison would be the Hunger Games then go and read the Hunger Games and try to listen to what your heart says at certain points.

Do you like where the story is headed? If so: why? And if not: why not?

This is basically an old trick for when you can't make up your mind about a decision. Should I buy this new car? for example. You take a coin and assign Yes to Heads and No to Tails. Then you throw the coin and see what comes up.

But: you don't blindly follow chance. The moment you see the result you will feel something. Maybe it feels good - that means your subconcious wanted you to choose this all along and now you've got confirmation, so this is what you really wanted all along and you should go ahead and do it. Maybe it feels wrong - then your subconcious wants something else. And now you know what your subconcious does not want.

In any case you will now know what you want, no matter which side came up.

You can do this with your book, too. If reading stories you've read before is not what you like you can try the following:

• Sketch your current plot, characters, ... in a couple of paragraphs as your "Chapter 1 Outline"
• Sketch one idea that springs to mind - something you remembered from stories you've read for example. Something that feels obvious, or even unoriginal. Or maybe something that feels so original, you are not sure if it won't alienate people. It doesn't matter. This is your "Chapter 2 Outline - Number 1"
• Sketch another chapter 2. Something different. Maybe the exact opposite of your first idea. Or maybe something slightly different that you came up with while writing the first draft. Again, this doesn't need to be "great" or anything - it's just important to have an idea. This is your "Chapter 2 Outline - Number 2"
• Throw a coin and see whether you like the result.
• If you have more ideas take a dice instead.
• Continue until you are at an end.

You will probably rewrite most of the stuff anyway at some point while fleshing out your chapters, but this way you have an idea and a fast method to continue when you get stuck. And whenever you don't feel like something is right, put it aside, but keep it, and continue from a point that does feel right.

posted over 6 years ago

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Secespitus‭

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