Monica Leonelle walks through creating a treatment for your novel using the Ultimate Novel Plotter tool. A treatment is like a movie outline: it captures setting, characters, and tone across three sections (Novel Overview, Characters, World Building). She shows how to map when each element appears in a four-part story structure.
Chapters
Hey there, Igniter! Monica Leonelle from theworldneedsyourbook.com, and today is Day 25 of the challenge. We are in the home stretch, and we are talking about the treatment. Today is Day 25. We're doing the treatment, which in, you know, for a movie or a television show, this would really be some of the details of the setting and the characters and that sort of thing. So We're going to give your story an aesthetic today, and that just means we're gonna, you know, we're gonna give it its personality, I guess, like what sets it apart from other novels, what it looks like, or what, what you want your reader to visualize. And so this section is going to be a little bit more freestyle, as are the next coming days, because at this point we're not really coming up with a lot of new stuff. We're actually just organizing what we've already come up with. So that's great for you if you are trying to catch up on the challenge, because you can just take the time to make those decisions now if you haven't already. So, um, we're using the Ultimate Novel Plotter tool, and I had talked about it on day 11, a quick and dirty plot. And so this is— we're actually going to go deep into this tool for the next um, 6 days. So, uh, we're revisiting everything for the last time. As I said, you can answer questions that you didn't answer in previous days, or you can discover those answers as you write your story. So there may be days that you skipped or days that you didn't quite have all the answers and you were like, okay, I'll come back to it. So this is a chance to come back to it. And if you still don't have the answer, again, it's okay. You're going to then just find the answer as you're writing, or if you don't find it then, you're going to find the answer as you're editing. So you, like, eventually you're going to have to get the answer to the, you know, most of these questions, but you still have time in your process to do that. So we're also, um, these pages have a lot of blank space on them, and so that's so that you can do whatever feels good to you. So it may be easy to write stuff out in lists, it may be easy, easy to just answer the questions, um, in kind of like a journaling prompt style, or maybe you want to draw or mind map or whatever makes sense for you. So as you start this, just make sure you have all of the previous day's pages so that you can look back and sort start to organize those days. So the first thing is going to be all about your novel and the biggest questions to answer. What is your novel about? And so you're going to look at your concept, your theme, your worldviews, anything else that helps you get a handle on what your book is about. And you can mind map it out. You can do any of your own visual styling to how you organize that data. But you have 2 pages to do that. And then you have all about your characters. So who are the key characters in your novel? What are their transformation journeys? What are their key group affiliations? How do they change throughout the book? What are the key relationships that they have? So allies, mentors, love interests— how did those change throughout the book? What are the key thematic elements that are associated with those characters? And then when are those introduced in the book? And so these are— there's a lot of questions here. And if you have the book Novel Writing Prep, there's actually even more questions on there. I didn't put all the questions here because it was just too long, so you can go reference that if you'd like, if you want to go deeper on this. But, you know, for the time being, just do the best that you can to map this out for your main characters. And there's another set of pages, so you have 4 pages in the worksheets to do this. And then the last section is all about your world. So where and when does the story take place? What are the key locations? What are the key aspects of the world? How and when are those pieces introduced in the book? And so when I talk about where is this introduced in the book, I encourage you to choose between the setup, the response, the attack, or the resolution. So breaking your book up into those four parts into that four-part structure is going to be really helpful to you. So there's two pages for this. Now, for many of you, you're gonna need way more pages than this, but we're kind of just trying to hit the middle of the road for the world building piece because it's not relevant or as relevant to every type of story. So do the best you can and just jot down whatever notes you have for this section. Thank you so much for watching and listening. If you have any questions, make sure you leave a comment below. I am happy to answer all of your questions and happy to share any resources I can with you, happy to support you on your outlining process in any way that I can. If you'd like to join the challenge, it is truly not too late, even though we're, you know, we're definitely in the last week of the challenge. But feel free to sign up. There are links below in the description. Uh, definitely happy to have you, and there's always time to catch up on this. It doesn't take that long, actually. So, um, definitely feel free to sign up if it's calling to you. I hope this has been helpful to you. Have a wonderful day.
