Not Sure About Story Coaching?
No problem. Grab a writer pal and coach each other. We’ll tell you how.
With a little know how, you and your best writing buddy can coach each other.
Dawn and Nancy take one-on-one calls with writers and help them through all kinds of story issues.
Nothing but a vague story idea? We help you hammer it into the structure you’ll need to get writing.
A couple characters and a setup but nothing else? We can help flesh out conflicts and tension to make sure your story is solid.
Stuck somewhere in the middle and not sure why? This is where we really shine - and here’s a hint… it’s usually about the conflict.
How do we do this?
True, we have years of experience, and that definitely helps (plus, we’ve both written quite a lot ourselves… Nancy still publishes a few books a year as Delancey Stewart…) But even without that experience, you and your writing friends can learn to coach each other. Here are the basics to focus on:
The story setup. Knowing how you’re going to kick things off is crucial.
Here are a couple timeworn tips:
Do NOT start with waking up, a description of weather, a character being late, or two people literally bumping into each other. Please.
DO start with some kind of movement or action. Dialogue is great. But keep it between just a couple people and slip in hints so readers know where we are, when we are, and who we are talking with.
Do NOT begin with backstory or long description. Don’t start deeply in your character’s head or with someone thinking about something that happened.
DO start with movement in mind. You want readers to follow you from the first line to the next, the first page to the next, and through your chapters. They’ll do this ONLY if you keep a few things to yourself, and create action and movement and questions that must be answered.
2. Characters.
This seems obvious - you need to know who the story is about. But when writers come to us, they often know all the things they think they need about their characters - appearance, age, job, backstory.
And those things are the start, sure. But here are the things that are often missing, and which will help drive the story:
What is each character trying to achieve? This is an external goal. What are they DOING in the story? (She wants that big promotion at work and is putting in extra hours. He is trying to get enough money together to pay of his parents’ house. He’s going to quit his job and found that pickle ball league in town. She’s finally going to launch her tasteful taxidermy business.)
Who is important in their lives? Parents, siblings, best friends? We can invent people as we go along, definitely. But it helps to know who will be your character’s confidante, who is their go-to friend when they’ve got a problem. They can definitely have more than one - word of warning, though - limit the cast that is introduced up front. Dropping us into a party with ALL the best friends can be very confusing for readers trying to know your world.
What do they believe about themselves? And if this is a romance, what do they believe about love? In a romance, this will connect to their wound. The wound is something that happened to them in the context of a romantic relationship (either experienced or witnessed) that has led to a misbelief about love. These are usually things like - “all men cheat.” “women always leave.” “No one every chooses me.” These false beliefs stem from fear that was borne from a bad experience, and they will inform the actions your characters take.
These things will start to give you an idea who your characters are down deep and why they do the things they do. This will be very useful as you start to push them around and build the world around them. Knowing these things can help you build scenes, too, as they try to get what they want, talk to their people about what they’re doing, etc. And all of these things relate to the next critical piece: Conflict.
3. Conflict. There is almost always an internal conflict and an external conflict driving your story forward.
If you are writing a romance, there may be four conflicts happening all at once.
A really important key to conflict: This does not mean strife or disagreement. Conflict isn’t an argument. In a story, conflict is the thing that is keeping a character from getting what they want or from pursuing what they want. It is an obstacle, real or imagined.
External conflicts are things that are clearly in the way of the goals your character has set. So for our examples above - there could be another person vying for that same promotion, or maybe your character’s boss has it out for her? Maybe he almost has all the money saved to help his parents when his deadbeat brother rolls back into town and needs it for bail. Or maybe someone steals it. Or perhaps he is tempted to give it to the beautiful woman he just met who was about to start a taxidermy shop but fell on some kind of hard times. These are external conflicts - things happening out in the world that are keeping your characters from what they are trying to do.
Internal conflicts are a little different. These will usually relate back to those wounds we established above. Internal conflicts also keep characters from getting what they need, but because humans don’t always understand themselves completely, they’re a bit muddier. Generally, characters think they know what they need. That is, they know what they WANT emotionally, but in many cases, what they want and what they actually need are different things. And internal conflict can play into this.
For example, say the guy trying to pay off his parents’ house believes that this is what good children do for the parents who raised them through tough times. Maybe he watched his own parents scrimp and sacrifice to do the same thing. But maybe there’s something he doesn’t know. Maybe his parents were doing this for different reasons than the ones he has assumed, and all his parents want in the world is for him to make his own way. He BELIEVES he needs to pay off their house. But what he really needs is to have a serious honest conversation with his parents about a childhood he misinterpreted.
And maybe the girl trying to get the promotion is in love with the coworker who is also vying for the promotion. She thinks that she needs to show him up at every turn, and believes that men take advantage of women who show anything besides fearless strength (remember, something in her past told her this was true). But what she really needs is to let down her guard and let this guy see the real her.
External conflicts keep characters from getting what they want.
Internal conflicts keep characters from getting what they need.
The story arc each character will go through must reveal the misbelief at the heart of the internal conflict and put the characters into a spot where they have to CHOOSE. Either they stay where they are, happy (but not really) in their misbelief and stuck. OR they do something very uncomfortable, and get what they need in the end. (Hint: If this is a romance, they do the latter.)
4. The climax.
This is less critical, especially if you are a discovery writer or a pantser… but it can be helpful to outline the action that will make up the big turning points in the story. What is the high point of your action? This is where everything is great, characters believe they are getting exactly what they want, and everyone is looking at the world through rose-colored lenses.
But remember, the climax (at about 50% of the book) is a false high.
5. The dark moment.
Like the above, you can figure this out later. But it’s great to know what kind of devastating depths your characters are heading for. What happens that reveals that the climax was not the end? What terrible outcome occurs that makes your characters believe all is lost, that they’ll never get what they want after all. With romance, this is often where they DO get what they WANT, but they realize it isn’t what they NEED.
6. The final battle / storming the tower / grand gesture.
Depending on what kind of story you’re writing, there is going to be a big climactic finale scene. This is what your readers have been holding out for. Where good faces evil, where competitors face off, where all those things we didn’t say finally come out. And if this is a romance, it’s time for the scene where one character holds the boombox over his or her head. (And if you’re too young to get that reference, well… I’m not sorry.)
Knowing how you’ll fix things - who will say sorry and how - isn’t critical. But you need to have some idea of where you’ll end up when it’s done.
So that’s it! Go grab a friend and work through these key items. You’ll find that you will have most of what you need to build and write from there.
And if that doesn’t do it? Dawn and Nancy are here for you!
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