Today, we’re continuing our Preptober series by designing a conflict and a story arc. I write fantasy, but every story is the same, no matter the set dressing. Protagonist A needs something desperately, and Antagonist B stands in their way.
What does the protagonist want? Everyone wants something. The story is in the way they fulfill that need, or what happens when they don’t. Doubt, uncertainty, people facing the unknown as they struggle to succeed in their quest … these nouns are what makes the story interesting.
This is where we have to sit and think a bit. Are we writing a murder mystery? A space-opera? A thriller? The story of a girl dealing with bulimia?
Let’s do something different and write a historical fiction.
My Uncle Don fought in WWII in the Ardennes and was wounded, coming home with a steel plate in his head. He was an unfailingly kind man who never discussed his wartime experiences. Here in the US, that battle is referred to as the Battle of the Bulge.
- Our proposed novel’s genre is historical fiction because it explores a fictional Allied soldier’s experiences. It isn’t a biography.
However, any historical fiction novel is a form of fantasy. This is because we must imagine how our soldier acted and reacted to the events, and the friends he made and lost along the way. Those events now exist only in a few places, such as military archives, old newspaper accounts, and the memories of a generation that is now in their nineties.
We will make a list of things we want to include in our worldbuilding. Filthy living conditions will provide the backdrop to the impending confrontation. Life on the frontline was brutal, and we need to use the environment to emphasize our characters’ experience of combat as it was in 1944-45.
We want to have a complete story arc, so what length should our manuscript top out at? We will plan for a mid-length novel of 75,000 words. We get out the calculator and divide our word count by 4.
- The first quarter will be 18,175 words, the two middle quarters will be 37,500 words, and the final run-up to the climactic ending will be 18,175 words.
The first quarter opens our story and introduces the moment of no return, even if our characters still believe they can salvage things.
The following two quarters are the middle of the narrative, exploring the obstacles that our soldier faces. The final quarter winds our soldier’s story up.
- HINT: If you are writing a historical novel, your plot will follow the historical calendar of actual events. For our sample, the Battle of the Bulge was fought between 16 December 1944 and 25 January 1946. Reams of documentation still exist detailing that terrible month.
- 2nd HINT:our soldier will either be with the US 30th Infantry Division at the Battle for St. Vith (Americans) or the Meuse River bridges (British 29th Armoured Brigade of 11th Armoured Division).
Remember, the historical events are NOT movable or changeable if you want to remain in the historical fiction genre. Once you change the timeline or alter events in any way, you have ventured into alternate history and are writing speculative fiction.
I confess, spec-fic is my kind of book. But accuracy counts for readers of historical fiction.
Readers are smart. Military buffs will know that a soldier can’t be at both St. Vith and the Meuse River, unless he was in the US Army Air Force.
So, our four quarters can be divided this way if our soldier is American:
- Attack in the south
- Allied counteroffensive
- German counterattack
- Allies prevail
We will write the scenes that connect those events, and that is where we take a deep dive into history. We can invent characters and use our imagination to flesh out their lives within as accurate a WWII context as possible.
To complete our story arc, we will
- Take each incident and write the scenes that our soldier experiences.
- We might also write scenes showing the commanders planning the offensives and switch to show the enemy’s plans.
No matter what genre of book you plan to write, all you need is a skeleton of the plot, just a series of events for you to connect. You will write the scenes between these events, connecting them to form a story with an arc to it.
As we write, our soldier’s thoughts and interactions will illuminate and color the scenes. His encounters, how he saw the enemy. Were they people like him or were they faceless? All his emotions will emerge as you write his story.
But maybe you aren’t writing a historical fiction. Some things are universal.
No matter what genre we are writing in, we start with a worthy problem, a test that will propel the protagonist to the middle of the book.
This event is the inciting incident and could be the hook. We discover a problem and set our heroine on the trail of the answer. In finding that answer, she is thrown into the action.
Drop the protagonist into the action as soon as possible, even if the conflict is interpersonal. It could be a minor hiccup that spirals out of control with each attempt to resolve it.
- This is the place where the characters are set on the path to their destiny.
Some plots are action and adventure. Other books explore a relationship that changes a character’s life in one direction or another. Others, like our war story, explore surviving extreme hardship.
The inciting incident is the moment when the protagonists first realize they’re utterly blocked from achieving their desired goal. Note this event on your outline early in the first quarter. Then the trouble escalates, so make a note of the moment our protagonist realizes their situation is much worse than they initially thought.
At this point, our people have little information regarding the magnitude of their problem. One thing that I do is make notes that help limit my tendency toward heavy-handed foreshadowing. Most of what I write in the first draft will be severely cut back by the time I’m done with the final revisions.
Subplots will emerge once I begin writing. I note them on the outline as soon as I can, but sometimes I do forget.
The last weeks of Preptober are upon us and this is a good time to visit the brick-and-mortar bookstore and look at the books currently being offered in the genre you are writing in. Then you’ll know what you need to achieve in your work if you want to sell that story.
The inciting incident is followed by a series of plot points, places where complications are introduced into the narrative.
The opening setting for this story is a small town in an exceedingly rural part of Thurston County. One must travel at least ten miles in any direction to find another city. After sundown, you must drive on narrow, winding, pitch-black country roads. I, the protagonist in my story, suffer from severe night blindness, which meant we had to return home before sundown, putting a real crimp in our social life.
Major surgeries happened for the other two, and I was many miles away to the south, getting our house on the market. But our sons and daughters are entering middle age, and our older grandchildren are adults. Despite our worries, our granddaughters proved they were mature and more than capable of handling their lives.
The protagonists are settling into the new neighborhood. One of the niftiest things about their community is the Starbucks—and yes, I did say Starbucks. The owners of the 
I find that writing is easy here. Creativity comes in bursts, and I feel good about my writing. We have pared our possessions down to the point that they don’t possess us—something you don’t realize is a problem until you are faced with serious downsizing.
I will have to spend a day or two thinking about the story as a whole and writing an outline as a framework to guide the story. The plot points I originally planned to occur at each of the four quarters of the story will be met, but how?
The midpoint of the story arc is often where the protagonists lose their faith or have a crisis of conscience. Something terrible happens, and they must learn to live with it.
So, starting at the end, I look at my characters’ location when the story finishes. Then I ask myself what they were doing just before the final encounter.
assion for the dirty habit of writing every day. They are joining the ranks of the old pros, the people who “do NaNo” every year whether they expect to be published or not.
In my mind, novels are like Gothic Cathedrals–arcs of stone supporting other arches until you have a structure that can withstand the centuries. Each scene is a tiny arc that supports and strengthens the construct that is our plot.
For me, the first draft is always rough, more like a series of events and conversations than a novel. In the second draft, I stitch it all together and fill in the plot holes.
Plot points are driven by the characters who have critical knowledge. The fact that some characters are working with limited information creates tension.
Lesser dramas might only touch us on a peripheral level, yet they can affect our sense of security and challenge our values.
The camera zooms out and now we see the idyllic serenity of a clear sunny morning on Spirit Lake and Harry doing his morning chores.
We writers must make our words count. We must show our characters in their comfort zone in the moments leading up to the disaster. Not too much of a lead in, but just enough to show what will soon be lost.
Now we’re going to design the conflict by creating a skeleton, a series of guideposts to write to. I write fantasy, but every story is the same, no matter the set dressing: Protagonist A needs something desperately, and Antagonist B stands in their way.
Where does our soldier’s story begin? We open the story by introducing our characters, showing them in their everyday world, and then we kick into gear with the occurrence of the “inciting incident,” which is the first plot point. That might be their arrival at their first camp in the Ardennes region.
One thing that I do is make notes that help limit my tendency toward heavy-handed foreshadowing. I try to keep it brief, but what will be enough of a hint, and where should it go?
In some circles, 40,000 words is a novel, but in fantasy, it is less than half a book.
A detailed history of everyone’s background isn’t required. As a reader, all we need is a brief mention of historical information in conversation and delivered only when the protagonist needs to know it.
The first incident has a domino effect. More events occur, pushing the protagonist out of his comfortable life and into danger. Fear of death, fear of loss, fear of financial disaster, fear of losing a loved one—terror is subjective and deeply personal.
However, the reader has an edge—they will be offered clues from the antagonists’ side, which the characters don’t know. The antagonist’s actions will affect the plot in the future. Even if the antagonist isn’t an overt enemy at the outset, the readers’ knowledge creates a sense of unease, a subliminal worry that things will go wrong.
By creating small arcs in the form of scenes, we offer the reader the chance to experience the rise and fall of tension, the life-breath of the novel.
Code words are the author’s first draft 
Thought (Introspection):
That is true of every aspect of a scene—it must reveal something we didn’t know and push the story forward toward something we can’t quite see.
Life in the Realm of Fantasy 