Create a Little Chaos and have the first of your problems be the introduction. For instance, in the story above, what could this introduction be? We see one of our characters take a shower, and we learn he's stressed. Perhaps we could have a character reading a book on "The Best Way to Avoid Getting Depressed" and we learn that she's stressed. In the opening scene, we can ask yourself what is the problem that this character needs help with? We have created our first problem. Now, choose to introduce a new conflict that gives our characters something to fight against. Our little girl reading a self-help book on fighting anxiety has an opposite problem. Maybe her boyfriend cheated on her or she's stressed because she's not getting enough sleep. Whatever it is, let the introduction be where our main character gets in conflict with something, even if it's just the introduction. This is where your main character will receive the shock in the first few lines of your story. Make this shock enough to leave your character in the new situation, but not too much that we can no longer relate to her. In our example, our main character could start off the story with the shock of getting caught by her mom with a boy. This shock may cause our main character to realize the implications of her situation. Now, we have established a conflict that we can solve in our story. It may feel a little cliche, but the conflict in our story is now how to get her boyfriend back. Now, we're going to go back and ask a few questions about our conflict. What is the main objective for this character? Our main objective is to get our boyfriend back, and what could be more important than that? What could be more urgent than that? If your main objective is not to get her boyfriend back, you need to reevaluate your story. If her boyfriend comes back and doesn't work out, then we won't have a main character with a conflict anymore, just a woman looking for a boyfriend. There is a difference between main character and protagonist. The main character is the catalyst for the story, the one we move around the story with, but the protagonist is the character the story is about. How will this character get this boyfriend back? This is how a main character can be an active protagonist. A main character wants to get her boyfriend back, but she doesn't have the ability or resources to get him back. She will need to look for someone to help her out. What is at stake if this boyfriend doesn't get back? This is where we can connect the reader to what's going on. It would be pretty stupid for our main character to try to get her boyfriend back just to save face, and for us to feel like it was pointless. We're not saying we need to make it so she wants her boyfriend back just to meet the three act rule. In our example, her mother will not be happy if she doesn't get her boyfriend back. Is there an outside resource for this story? Or a resource that this main character has that could help her get her boyfriend back? Our example story is about this little girl who has just discovered her boyfriend is cheating on her and how she deals with it. Her mother is the biggest resource that this girl has. As this daughter deals with her boyfriend cheating on her, this mother may do things to protect her daughter. This could be how this girl gets her boyfriend back. In your own story, this could also be another character in the book or a resource such as the Internet or other people. This resource can be another character in the story, but it needs to help our character solve the main objective of the story. Now that we have our story established, we need to ask ourselves if we can solve it. If we can solve it, what does this new ending look like? We're going to go back and ask our questions about the end of the story. Now that we know what the solution is for our story, can we solve it? Is it plausible in the way that we have our character solve it? In our example, we could have the girl cheat with her boyfriend, but this may not give her the satisfaction that she is looking for. This will prevent this girl from solving the main problem in her life, and we'll have to reevaluate what our story is about. Now that we know what the end looks like for our story, we can create our conflict. It may be tempting to write the conflict out first, because it feels like we've finished this step already. However, we need to go back and ask the questions. These questions should come up naturally once you read over your story. If not, then read it over again. We'll also have to ask a few questions about this conflict. Who is in conflict in this scene? What problem needs to be solved? The conflict in this scene is that our main character wants to get her boyfriend back, but he doesn't want to be with her. How does this problem get resolved? The problem of getting her boyfriend back may never be solved. Our main character can get her boyfriend back or not, but this does not resolve the question of why he cheated on her in the first place. How does this character solve the problem in this scene? Our main character has to find a way to get her boyfriend back. When does our character solve this problem? When our main character learns to trust again, maybe something about her boyfriends behavior will make her see she can't trust him again, she may decide that she doesn't need him in her life anymore. This is an action point for the main character in our story. By answering these questions for your story, we can see how the final conflict of your story is going to come up. You don't have to create a story from this point on. Instead, you should continue to plan out your plot, but know that the best solutions for your conflict come from a well thought out outline. That concludes our discussion on the planning process. As you can see, there is a lot of room for flexibility in your process. The more ideas you think up, the easier it is to choose your path to tell the story. I don't know about you, but I'm very excited to start telling my story. Maybe I'll start a new blog and post my progress, but in the meantime I'm going to start planning out my scenes and character. Let me know how the planning process works for you. I'm looking forward to your ideas for planning your story. You can share your story by leaving a comment below. We'd love to hear about your stories and your process for plotting them out. Tuesday, August 1, 2017 I hope you guys are enjoying this challenge. If not, maybe you need to take a break from it. Here's what I'm currently working on. I'm writing this blog post over at The Story Lab Blog. I'm talking about the "Trap of Setting Goals." The trap I want to talk about is setting these goals so high that you can never accomplish them. For instance, maybe you've started a diet and you want to lose ten pounds in two weeks. Maybe you start out well and accomplish your goal by eating nothing but healthy and exercising a lot, and you lose a few pounds in that time. Two weeks go by and you're still a pound from your original goal. It makes sense that you set your goals low, but try thinking of setting your goals lower. Just like you've been, set your goal lower. I'd like to hear your thoughts on this topic. How did you start your story? Was your goal high or low? What goals do you set for your own story? Is there something about this topic that I should have looked at differently? I'm in the final scene of my rough draft, and it's been an interesting process. Since the very beginning of the story, there have been two major villains: "The Bad Guys" and "The Big Bad Guys." They had completely different plans for our main character, and they were going to execute those plans before the end of the story. The final showdown ended up happening very differently from what they thought it was going to be. They never had any idea that this was going to happen, and I wanted to know what would happen next after this showdown. I don't know where my story is going to end up yet. It looks like there will be at least another four big plot points after this one, and I want to see what happens after each of these. I'm very excited