writing the heart of your story Read Online Free Page A

commercials, right? When the commercial comes on, we get up and go into the kitchen to find something to eat. When a reader encounters a bunch of backstory and tedious explanation, they skim over it until they get back to the “real” story.
    Most of the books I read and edit don’t “get going” until page twenty or thirty. All that up-front explaining, narrative, setting up the scene, etc., was all great back in Dickens’s time (A Tale of Two Cities, for example), but we don’t do that anymore. TV, movies, and video games have changed the modern reader’s tastes. Readers today want cinematic writing. Sol Stein in his book Stein on Writing says, “Twentieth-century readers, transformed by film and TV, are used to seeing stories. The reading experience for a twentieth-century reader is increasingly visual. The story is happening in front of his eyes.” This is, of course, even more true in the twenty-first century.
     
    A Better Way
     
    So how do you avoid the dreaded info dump and backstory? Think about the emotion, feeling, or sensation you want to evoke in your reader. You want to put them in a mood right away. You want to be specific to generate that mood, which means bringing in all the senses and showing your character in the middle of a situation, right off the bat.
    And that’s the next essential element: establishing immediately (did I say immediately?) the drives, desires, needs, fears, frustrations of your protagonist. Not only do you need to show her in conflict, in the midst of a situation that showcases all those things, you also need to reveal her heart, hint at her spiritual need, show her vulnerability, and what obstacles are standing in her way. In the first scene? Oh yes. Yes. We’ll look at all of this. And in later chapters I’ll clue you in on the three most crucial things you must know about your character and must hint at in the first scene.
     
     
Think about . . . going through your first scene and taking out all the backstory. If needed, come up with only one or two lines that tell a little important information you think the reader must know and use those in dialog, if possible. Then read your scene over and see how much better it is. Pull out some of your favorite novels and with a yellow highlighter mark all the backstory in the first scene. If there is any, note how much and in what way it is presented. Learn something neat? Write it down in your notebook.
     
     

Chapter 4: Plot Goals—Seeing Is Believing
     
    “A goal is a dream with a deadline.”
    ~author Napoleon Hill
     
    The most essential of essentials in your first scene is setting up your visible plot goal. Did I say visible? Yep. Why? Because if you ask writers what their protagonist’s plot goal is, you will often get answers like “she finds love in the end” or “he finally sees his dream realized.” Those kinds of answers are not easy to visualize. They’re not specific. If I were to write that in a movie script, it would make no sense. Think about how this scene would look on the big screen.
    What does “she finds love in the end” translate to visually? Do you see your heroine getting on a plane after quitting her high-glamour New York City job and flying to the jungles of Central America, where her swarthy, ecstatic fiancé is pacing on the torn-up runway awaiting her arrival as a downpour of rain pelts him? You can picture this, right? And so, as you think about your entire book, the ending of the story (which you may not have thought about yet), and most importantly the opening scene, you need to be able to formulate a visible picture of a visible goal. Granted, the details may change. Your heroine may end up getting off the plane in Paris instead of Guatemala City, but you need a visible goal for your protagonist to work toward, and it must be hinted at in the first scene, preferably the first page or two.
     
    Why Should I Keep Reading?
     
    Sounds crazy? Well, I speak truth! I have been to numerous