Day 12: The Setup of Your Novel

Hey there, Igniter! Monica Leonelle from theworldneedsyourbook.com. Today is day 12 of the challenge, and today we are talking about the setup or the first 25% of your novel.

We are on day 12, which is the setup, and so in this section we're gonna be talking about part 1 of your novel. It's sometimes called Act 1. It's sometimes called the setup. But it's basically the first 0 to 25% of your story, or it could be the first 0 to 10% of your story. So if you are not familiar with the setup, we talked about this in a quick and dirty plot, but basically it's that first section of your story. And so I encourage you to do the, It's day 11, a quick and dirty plot, because that kind of gives you some background on the entire story. So you're going to look at the story from a very high-level view in that and get the tentpole moments or like kind of the mile markers of your story figured out. So now we're doing a deeper dive into that first section of your story. So this section is going to include, um, the inciting incident and the decision. So we talked about that in Day 11 as well. All right, so you're gonna do the setup based on each character. So as you know, we talked about in a number of lessons at this point, um, the, the character, uh, that you The characters that you need to do this for is going to be your protagonist, possibly your antagonist if your antagonist is a person. Maybe it's not a person, could be an antagonistic force. And then you can also do it for any point of view characters you have. So a great example would be like a romance novel. In a romance novel, you typically have a heroine. So a lot of times the story is told from the female perspective, but there are also a lot of books out there that do— that go back and forth. So female and the male, female, the male. And of course there are lots of different romance books, so sometimes it's male, male, sometimes it's female, female. So, you know, the gender is not important, but basically you have two people and the antagonistic force is really that they don't believe that they can be together. So it's just a series of false beliefs that each of these two characters have that they cannot be in a relationship together. And the book goes through and chips away at those false beliefs. And so the fatal flaw for both characters of those books typically they don't believe in love anymore, or they don't believe in love for themselves. So sometimes the character has, you know, some wounding around a past relationship, or sometimes the character just believes something about that person, that other person, that they, you know, that it will never work. So there are lots of, lots of variations of that. All right, so in a romance novel, you would do the two main characters. You'd want to kind of know what the setup was for each of them. In other books, like maybe a fantasy or sci-fi, you typically have one protagonist and then you have a villain a lot of the time. Sometimes the villain is, um, a system. So in The Hunger Games, for example, uh, the villain is really— it's not even really like the game makers, it's really the system at first. And so eventually that villain. Like, once the system starts to crumble or show its cracks, eventually you come up with— you come across the physical representation of that villain, which is President Snow. But in the first book of The Hunger Games, President Snow is not really— he's not really there. He's not a very present character in the story. So, you know, you may want to do something around that. Like, you may want to look at the system as a whole as a character. So you can do a lot of different things for this. So protagonist, the antagonist, or maybe even the antagonistic force, uh, any point of view characters— those are the ones that I recommend. And so what you're going to figure out for each character, you're going to figure out what is the ordinary world, what is the extraordinary within the ordinary, what is the inciting incident or inciting incidents, what is option A, what is option B, and what is the decision. So I've talked about this regarding Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games. So I will— I'll do a couple examples of this because I know this is You know, this could be new material for some people. So for Katniss Everdeen, her ordinary world first chapter, very first thing that we learned is she is a hunter. She is out of bounds of District 12, and she is hunting with her best friend Gale. And she— they are hunting in order to provide more food to their family because they do not want their their family to starve. That's the ordinary world. And so we learn there's a lot of world building done just in those few first sections. So then there's the extraordinary within the ordinary. So this is not just a typical, you know, Saturday morning of hunting. There's actually a reaping ceremony later that day. And so the extraordinary within the ordinary is the reaping ceremony. And so this is you know, um, she has to like wear a dress. Everybody has to go. It's like a mandatory attendance. It's this very dark thing that everybody has to deal with, even if you're, you know, she's, she's in the running to be one of these tributes, uh, and her younger sister is also in the running to be a tribute, and Gale is in the running to be a tribute. And so So there's a lot of, a lot of, you know, stress around that for her. That's the extraordinary within the ordinary. The inciting incidents. So the first inciting incident is that Katniss has done everything she can to protect her younger sister from having to go to the Games. And her younger sister's name gets drawn as one of the tributes. So that's kind of inciting incident number 1. The second inciting incident is that Katniss, kind of in a shocking moment, decides that she will volunteer for tribute in her sister's place. So those are both, you know, important inciting incidents. Katniss's decision in this book— option A is she can just go to the Hunger Games and you know, die basically. Like, she can just consider herself dead, um, go to the Hunger Games and die, you know, stick to her personal values, uh, which, which are, you know, fairly obvious, um, which is that she doesn't want to have to kill other people in order to survive. So she doesn't— the only way to win the Games is if she kills the other 23 contestants. And, and they, you know, those, those people kill each other, so she wouldn't have to like personally kill all of them. But she is probably gonna have to kill some of them in order to win the game. So that's option A. She could just go, she could let herself be killed, um, she could, you know, she could not fight. Um, option B is she can go and she can decide that she's gonna try to win the games. And so even, even knowing that there are lots of bad things, like challenging things she would have to do in order to win the Games, so she can go and she can fight and really give up her humanity in many ways, or give up a portion of who she is, a portion of her humanity, in order to survive. And so she does make a decision by the end of that section, which is the that she's gonna go to the Games and she's gonna try to win them and she's gonna try to come home to her family. So another series is Twilight. So, and I know a lot of people don't think Twilight is a good book, but it is a great book structurally, so I love using it as an example. So for the main character, Bella Swan, her ordinary world is that she is living with her dad. She just moved, moved to where her dad is. She's living with him. She's going to school. It's boring. Like, like, it's a fairly, like, boring life. And she has kind of exiled herself. She's sacrificing so that her mom can be happy. The Extraordinary Within the Ordinary. She meets this guy who ends up being a vampire, but he is just looking at her with this massive loathing. It's like, um, yeah, it's just, it's just this very like scary incident for her. And then, um, the inciting incident, um, he, he like hates her. Like, he, he very clearly hates her, and she doesn't know why. It's been very random for her. And he, he has a number of incidents where he demonstrates that he hates her and then he disappears. And she is extremely confused by what he's doing while also quite attracted to him. And so her option A— so eventually Eventually he starts to talk to her. So he kind of like, he, for a while he is ignoring her, and then he kind of gives up on that, and he eventually starts to talk to her. And so her option A is she can explore that with him. Her option B is she can run away. And then her decision is really that she moves forward in getting to know him. So if you look in the book, you will, you know, that first 25% is, um, it lays this out really, really well. So it's, it's very, very good at following the structure as well. And so you'll want to do this for your series. You'll want to have this ordinary world and then like what's special about this day. And so the reason this part of it is really useful to clue in the reader as to like where the story is going. And so you want to put this in like very early on in the story. And then the inciting incidents are kind of like— they're essentially like more extraordinary within the ordinary. So you already have like, this is an unusual day, like out of the ordinary for the character, but then like these inciting incidents come and, um, there's usually like a couple of them and it's just like one after the— one after another, um, just to clue the reader in to like something's not right here. This option A, option B decision, it's extremely powerful. And what you want to do is you want to have these two options be, um, they both have their pros and cons. So for Bella Swan, for example, from the Twilight series, you know, option A is like she survives, like she, like she, you know, she, she doesn't, she doesn't get involved with this really strange character. You know, the downside of that is that she's curious about him, and she's attracted to him. So option B is that she does get involved. And she knows that there's something pretty, pretty concerning about him. And so then she ends up making that decision. And I didn't really explain this with that, that particular example, but so one of the really big inciting incidents in that section— so one is like she meets him and he clearly like hates her, like he has this intense rage for her and she can feel that from him. But then, you know, the thing that kind of sets things— like forces them together essentially and forces her into this decision— is that he saves her life from this truck that's coming at her. And she knows, like she's been kind of watching him, so she knows that he's some sort of supernatural creature because of that. And so she tries to confront him it doesn't really work. And so she has to kind of decide, like, is she gonna keep engaging with this, or is she gonna, like, you know, report, report him? Or— so, so there's kind of a number of inciting incidents that lead up to this decision and kind of force her into this decision. So for this section, sometimes it's easier to come up with that decision that the character has to make and work your way backwards to the front of your novel. Because, you know, these inciting incidents, they're really meant to— they're really meant to, like, force the character into this decision. And I think that's something that a lot of writers, especially, especially if you haven't done a ton with story structure, if you haven't written a lot of novels, a lot of writers don't fully get this part where you are using those inciting incidents to force that character into basically a rock and a hard place. And so if you're not doing that, that can kind of— it doesn't really set the character on a quest. So it's, it's really important. So you can do this for 5 characters, and then there is a section for additional notes at the end if you have more characters, or if you just have some additional notes to write.

Thank you so much for watching and listening to Day 12 of the challenge. Make sure you check out Day 13 of the challenge because the two go hand in hand. If you have any questions about today, please leave a question in the comments section. I would love to help you or answer your question, share a resource, support you however you need during the challenge. Additionally, if you haven't signed up for the challenge yet, make sure you do that. There's a lot of additional resources on the website, and there's also a lot of stuff that gets sent out via email, so you don't want to miss out. There's definitely more to receive, so you only get that when you sign up for the challenge. There are links in the description if you have interest in that. Thank you so much for watching and listening. I hope this has been helpful to you. Have a wonderful day.