How to Write a Brilliant Novel: The Easy Step-By-Step Method of Crafting a Powerful Story (Go! Write Something Brilliant) (9 page)

Lord Ranulf is shocked by his feelings for his new servant. After being mauled and disfigured by a wolf at age sixteen, no one as beautiful as Annabel could want him. Didn’t his dead wife prove that? When a murder in his village hangs a cloud of suspicion over Lord Ranulf, his silence will protect Annabel, but may cost him his life.

Step One – Annabel – Afraid of men, abused, wounded, devout, indentured.

Step Two – She dreams of being a nun and reading the Bible, but she isn’t free.

Step Three – Lord Ranulf -- Disfigured and widowed. He is in love with his servant girl. He could have her if he wanted her, but true love demands that he grant her dreams.

Step Four – In order to protect her, Ranulf must take the blame for a murder he didn’t commit.

Step Five – Will he, for the sake of love, lose his life, as well as his heart?

Step Six – hide, fallen, buy, sacrifice. These words give the feeling of indentured servanthood and nunneries.

All indentured servant Annabel St. Francis* wants to do is become a nun. After all, that will not only allow her to her hide herself away, reading the Holy Writ, but she’ll
never again be hurt by a man like the lecherous bailiff. Widower Lord Ranulf can’t believe he’s fallen for his servant—especially since he knows she can never love someone as disfigured as he. When tragedy strikes in his village and the locals accuse him of
murder, his silence may buy Annabel the freedom she longs for. Just how much
should he sacrifice in the name of
love?

(*I took liberties with her last name.)Not knowing the author’s intent—if they fall in love or not—I chose to craft this premise as one-sided romance. If you wanted to make it more traditional, the last line could be:

And
when
Annabel
discovers
his
plan
to
free
her,
will
her
heart
finally
find
a
voice?
(Or something
to
suggest
she’s
in
love
with
him
too.)

So, break your idea down into six clean steps and craft your premise. If that feels too hard for you, then go onto the Inciting Incident, and come back to hone your premise after you’ve figured out where the book starts. You’re still just discovering, so all of this is still a gray area, easy to shift around until it becomes what you envision.

See if you can write a loose paragraph about your story, whatever comes to mind.

(Think about your character, the Black Moment, the Epiphany, and what’s at stake.)

Now, step by step, pull out your premise:

• Step One: Character identity
  
• Step Two: Goals
  
• Step Three: Conflict
  
• Step Four: Stakes
  
• Step Five: Story Question
  
• Step Six: Powerful words
  

Now
recast your premise
with the powerful words you’ve chosen. Write it on an index card and post it over your computer. Memorize it. When someone asks what your novel is about, tell them!

Where do you start? Well, there your poor hero is . . . at home, chopping wood, lighting the home fires, and suddenly . . .
what
? What happens?

This is the Inciting Incident in your book! That moment when everything changes for your hero! The start of his journey.

The Inciting Incident is the event, moment of truth, issue, problem, quandary—whatever— that sends your hero (or heroine) on the story journey and often sets up the overall Story Question that the protagonist seeks to answer.

What
are
some
popular Inciting
Incidents?

Air Force One
– Easy, huh? When the bad guys take over the plane. Or maybe not. How about when the security detail is killed? Go further back. It’s when their Russian leader is captured and sentenced to die. For our hero, played by Harrison Ford, the Inciting Incident is when the bad guys take over Air Force One. And that’s where the action really begins Everything before that is Normal World or Life.

Remember your Lindy Hop?

How about
The Fellowship of the Ring
? Is it when Frodo runs away with the ring? Nope. It’s when Bilbo puts it on and vanishes at his birthday party—and alerts the Nasgould to his presence.

How about
Return to Me
? Is it when Grace gets her new heart? Maybe for her, but Bob’s Inciting Incident is when he meets her in the restaurant. Everything before that is backstory. So, for your characters you need to ask: What will jumpstart their journey?

I love the magic of a good Inciting Incident—that moment when everything goes haywire— or at least hints at going haywire—in our hero’s journey. Sometimes it’s an earthquake of epic proportions. Other times, it’s just a 2.5 on the Richter scale.But regardless of the strength of the event, the Inciting Incident delivery demands an exquisite balance of
delicacy
and
resonance.

Delicacy
in the Inciting Incident doesn’t mean a light touch.It means treading lightly through backstory, digging up only that which is most pertinent. It’s so easy for an author to want to load in all the significant life events of the hero that have led up to this moment. Why, when he sees the red car parked in front of his mother’s house, he realizes that his father has returned from years on the run. Or why, when our hero wakes up after being beaten up and left in an alley, he knows he wasn’t just mugged. Yes, we as the reader need to know why these details matter, but light touches are the key when inserting back story.

I’m going to give you an example in just a moment from one of my books, but let’s talk about Resonance for a moment.

Resonance
is
meaning
. We want to know how this event fits into the Story Quesstion, as well as the past. We also want to understand what the next step is for the character. However, we need to keep it free from melodrama. The reader wants to see the event, yet they don’t know the character well enough for heavy interpretation.

So, how do we balance Delicacy and Resonance in our Inciting Incident? Answer: By keeping the backstory from stalling the –action—and keeping the action at the forefront.

Here’s a scene from my book
Escape to Morning
. It’s a romantic suspense, so I wanted to start right in the action. But I try to give you enough information to know that Will isn’t who he seems. We don’t need to know all of Will’s past—just that he’s trying to save his friend’s life, that he was momentarily thrown by news from his past, and perhaps also that there’s more at stake than just a reporter getting beat up in the woods.

Reporter Will Masterson didn’t have time to be right. Time to prove that the men who’d hijacked him and hauled him into the forest to express their displeasure at his recent op-ed piece weren’t actually disgruntled rednecks, but rather international terrorists. Because, the lie that had just saved Will Masterson’s hide, the lie perpetuated by the boys toting 0.22s and wearing work boots was the only thing standing between undercover Homeland Security agent Simon Rouss and his brutal murder.

Which would only be the first in a hundred, maybe thousand murders by the terrorist cell hiding in the northern Minnesota woods.

Please, God, be on my side today.
Will raced down the two-lane rutted forest service road, cursing his stupidity, wincing at a few new souvenir bruises. Blood dribbled from his nose, into his mouth. He should have known his sympathetic commentaries in the Moose Bend Journal toward the recent immigrants flooding over the Canadian border would have drawn blood with the locals. Blood that would hopefully protect Simon as he embedded deeper in the terrorist cell in the hills.

If only Will hadn’t been ambushed by the double-edged sword sitting in his P.O. Box. A letter from Bonnie. He’d opened it, and the words knifed him through the chest.

Bonnie Strong and Paul Moore invite you to a celebration of life and love in our Lord Jesus
Christ.

He should have dropped the invitation to his floorboard and crushed it under his foot. Instead, he’d let his grief, his failures, rush over him and blind him to the three hillbillies laying in wait like a nest of South Dakotan rattlers.

A year of undercover work, of slinking around this hick town in northern Minnesota, praying for a way to destroy the Hayat cell, and it all had to come to a head the same day his mistakes rose from the past to haunt him.

Sorry Lew.

Tell Bonnie and the girls I love them.
Lew’s words, hovering in the back of Will’s mind could still turn his throat raw. And, if Simon bought it, Will would be sending yet another letter home to the wife and loved ones.

Soldiers like Lew and Simon, like himself, had no business getting married.

Will’s breath razored inside his lungs. A branch clipped him and ruts bit into his thin loafers as he ran, sweat lining his spine. Overhead, the sky mirrored his despair in the pallor of gray, the clouds heavy with tears. How long had he been unconscious after they’d thrown him off the four-wheeler?

Better question – how much did they guess about his alliance with Simon? Obviously, the good ol’ boys who snatched him as he’d sat in his truck, waiting for his contact and regretting his choices, knew Will’s habits. Simon’s habits. They’d found them, despite the fact that he and Simon had picked the backwoods gravel pit for its remoteness. But please, please, let them believe Will’s lies . . . which would mean maybe Simon’s cover hadn’t been blown.

Maybe there wouldn’t be another unnamed star embedded in the wall of honor at Langley.

Hopefully you see the setting, along with the emotion of panic, as well as regret in the backstory. From here, the story takes off into action, and we don’t return to Lew’s story (and how it fits into Will’s motivation) until a few more chapters. However, we do know that Lew was a soldier, and that Will had to send his letter home, which makes Will sympathetic, as well as motivated to make sure it doesn’t happen again. And, hopefully it has raised questions (e.g., who is Lew, what does the invitation from Bonnie have to do with the story, and what is Will’s mission?) In the middle of the Inciting Incident, the last thing we want is a long, drawn-out history lesson. However, without some Resonance, we don’t understand the motivation.

Think of backstory like a speed bump. It hiccups the reader’s forward motion. As you’re writing your scene, ask yourself, on every line;Have I bogged down the action? Here’s a trick I try: After I’ve written the scene, I go through and ask myself if the reader need to know this. Can I take this line out? Can I say this more succinctly, with active verbs, in deeper POV that moves the story? And if I have to use backstory, I try to keep it to two lines at a time.

Okay, great, I have Delicacy and Resonance,but again,
how
do I start the story?

Okay, okay . . . the answer?
Start with a Big BANG!

Let’s see, over the past hour I’ve loaded the dishwasher, checked my e-mail, fed the dog, checked my e-mail, browned hamburger, checked my e-mail, made rice, searched for chocolate (none!), again checked e-mail . . . .

But see, I’m working.
Really
. What I’m doing is searching for my hero’s Inciting Incident. I know what has to happen later on in the scene, what I hope to accomplish, but I need something powerful, something to really pinpoint how he’s feeling at this very moment, to give the reader a glimpse into his world, and offer enough of a motivation to undergird his next step.

What I need is a BANG!! to get his (and my) attention.

How do you determine how and when to start your story? Do you start it on a calm day, set the scene, and then hit him with a BANG? Or, do you start him in mid-run, as he’s being chased down the street? Or, should you start
after
the Inciting Incident, when he’s trying to figure out what to do? And, do you start with something physical, or something emotional? Bad newsor bad event?

Here are the determinations that go into choosing my Inciting Incidents, and starting with a BANG!: Believability, Action, Need, Genre.

Believability
– Do you need to build sympathy for your character before the Inciting Incident will have an impact on the reader? How understandable will your Inciting Incident be without background?

I recently saw the intriguing movie
, Jumper
. Because of the bizarre phenomenon that happens to the main character (his ability to jump through space), the viewer is given background to the story before he actually jumps, so we understand exactly what his skill is. Also, sympathy for the character is built before the actual Inciting Incident occurs so we understand why, when he jumps, he behaves so badly. These two elements—backstory and sympathy—are essential to our understanding of the hero.

Even longer is the wait for the Inciting Incident in Jodie Foster’s vigilante movie,
The Brave One
. We need to care about her and her fiancé before the Inciting Incident has its intended impact, and result (to cause a normal person to become a vigilante).

However, the Inciting Incident in
Fools Gold
takes place immediately: the main character’s boat sinks while he’s searching for treasure. We don’t have to know his character to feel sympathy for a guy whose boat sinks.

How believable and universal your Inciting Incident is determines how much character sympathy you need to build before it impacts your reader.

Action
– Generally, the higher the action, the closer it should be to the beginning of the book. If you have high action, but it takes a while for the story to build to it, then you are wasting precious pages. In my book
In Sheep’s Clothing
, the actual Inciting Incident didn’t start until chapter two! Yes, I know! So I solved that by clipping out that scene and putting it into the prologue, and then starting the story twenty-four hours earlier in chapter one.