Plan Your Novel Like A Pro: And Have Fun Doing It!: Barany School of Fiction, #4

PLAN YOUR NOVEL LIKE A PRO

And Have Fun Doing It!

BETH BARANY

EZRA BARANY

Plan Your Novel Like A Pro: And Have Fun Doing It!

c. 2018 Beth Barany and Ezra Barany

Writer’s Fun Zone Publishing

771 Kingston Ave., #108

Piedmont, CA 94611

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

ISBN 978-1-944841-21-8 1st Edition Print

ISBN 978-1-944841-22-5 1st Edition E-Book

Updated edition 2024

Barany School of Fiction series

More Barany School of Fiction resources at BaranySchoolofFiction.com

For bulk orders, contact orders@writersfunzonepublishing.com.

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Contents

Introduction & Essential Tips

Introduction

1. Essential Character Tips for Fiction Writers

Tip #1: What Does Your Main Character Want? Their Goals

Tip #2: Why Does Your Character Want What They Want? Their Motivation

Tip #3: What Stands in Your Character’s Way: Conflict

To Recap

Go Deeper

For Further Reading

2. Essential Plot Tips for Fiction Writers

Tip #1: The Most Important Part of Your Story—The End

Tip #2: The Second Most Important Part of Your Story: The Beginning

Tip #3: No deus ex machina

Tip #4: Your Story’s Dénouement

Tip #5: Explode That Bomb

To Recap

Bonus Tip: Write crap.

Week One: Elevator Pitch, What-If Pitch & Short Synopsis

3. Elevator Pitch

ELEVATOR PITCH

Genre: Start here

Five Parts of an Elevator Pitch (or Story Summary)

4. The What-If Pitch by Ezra Barany

How to Craft Your What-If Pitch

5. Your Story Synopsis

Your Story’s Theme

STORY SYNOPSIS IN 7 STEPS

Week Two: Get to Know Your Main Characters

6. Interview Your Characters

Interview Your Characters

INTERVIEW QUESTIONS

7. Uncover Your Characters’ Core Beliefs And Identity And How They Change

BELIEFS

IDENTITY

ABOUT THE EXERCISE

DEEP DIVE EXERCISE FOR YOU AND YOUR CHARACTER

Your Character

8. Your Characters' Secrets

9. Draft Your Character’s Emotional Core With The Empathy Formula

How To Get Your Readers To Connect With Your Characters By Ezra Barany

Emotional Core

EMOTIONAL STAKES

10. The Character Relationship Map

11. Focusing on What to Write

Your Sweet Spot

BRING IT ALL TOGETHER

SUMMARY

Week Three: Story Plot Points & World Building

12. Uncover Your Character's Worst Fears to Discover Your Story Conflicts

Uncover Your Character's Worst Fears to Discover Your Story Conflicts

13. World Building: Questions to Brainstorm

Overwhelmed with World Building? Let's Break it Down

Research is Fun...

How to Start Your World Building

A Note on Fantasy versus Science Fiction and Making Up Stuff

Questions to Ask While World Building

A Special Note About Time Travel

14. Your Story’s Structure

ROMANCE

THRILLER

MYSTERY

THE TWIST

15. The Question Toolbox

THE 5 Ws + HOW

Week Four: Scene-By-Scene Outline And Plotting

16. High-Concept Pitch

High-Concept Pitch by Ezra Barany

17. Design Your Plot with the Problem-Solution Tool

18. Five Essential Stages Of A Scene (And Of Story!)

19. Scene Setup: Storyboarding

Storyboarding Elements

20. Scene-by-Scene Outline

Start

Next Steps: Write Your Novel

Resources for Further Reading & Study

Acknowledgments

Also by Beth Barany

About the Authors

This book is for all writers who want to bring their stories out into the world.

Introduction & Essential Tips

Introduction

Writing a novel isn’t easy. If it were, everyone would be doing it. —Anonymous

It’s your dream to be a novelist, to touch readers’ hearts and minds, to excite and wow them, to transport them. And to build a career with your books.

But you don’t know where to begin. Starting is hard. Things like creating an outline, scenes, or conflict may be confusing or strange or no fun at all. Perhaps crafting compelling three-dimensional characters stumps you.

Or maybe you’ve been stuck in the middle of writing your first novel (or fifth) for way too long.

That’s hard.

We know. As working novelists, we’ve been there many, many times.

But there is hope.

Who This Book is For

This book is for you if you want to work on your novel while managing the rest of your life. We know you have other activities and people you are committed to. Your life doesn’t stop just because you want to create art. You may feel like your daily life is an obstacle, but it can enhance your storytelling.

This book is also for you if you have tried writing without any guidelines but didn’t get very far. It can be hard to write when you don’t know what you’re writing about, how to develop a story, or why your writing means so much to you.

You may have tried planning your novel by following rules set out by other writing teachers and found that they didn’t work for you. Some writing instructors insist that their way is the only way, the best way, but in fact, there is no best way. There is only the way that gets you writing and that is different for every writer.

Plan Your Novel Like A Pro is designed to help you discover your very own creative process for planning your novel. The only way you’ll uncover what works for you is to experiment with different tools. Try everything, discard what doesn’t work for you, and keep what does. We offer plenty of strategies and tools in this book. Above all, this book is for you if you’re looking for a way to listen to yourself, whether that’s listening to the whispers of your gut, your heart, your intuition, or some other creative part of you.

Plan Your Novel Like A Pro focuses on genre fiction, genres such as romance, mystery, thrillers, science fiction, and fantasy. We focus on these types of stories since they are the kind both of us (Beth and Ezra) write and know the most about, but we imagine that writers of other kinds of stories will find helpful exercises and advice among these pages.

The Creative Process

Creating art can be hard and frustrating. It may require you to stretch in ways you never have before. We all start in a place of not knowing. Yet, we humans have been creating art for more than 100,000 years, the age of the oldest art found. (Painted on cave walls in Spain. See citation in the Resources section.)

There is hope.

The friction between the desire to create and the challenge of creating assists our art making and is often what allows us to create our best work.

Start with breathing and noticing what you are feeling, whatever those feelings are. It can be healing to allow yourself to notice and feel whatever it is. Feelings are not good or bad, but rivers of energy that flow through our bodies. We can harness those feelings for our storytelling, but only if we feel them first.

Next, take a breath, or several, and appreciate all the work you’ve done to get to this place. Appreciate your passion, your focus, and your love of story, and whatever else excites you about writing a novel.

Likewise, appreciate the pain, frustration, disappointment,