Novel Writing Workshop

Lesson 1.2
The Crisis

Every story need a beginning. It needs a crisis that will start to ball rolling. Without it your reader would never get past the first section.

Many amateur novels do not have a crisis. They just kind of float along with no real point, just recounting events in a person's life. This is a publisher's worst nightmare because those kinds of books rarely sell (there are a few exceptions).

However before you can create that perfect crisis that will make the story start with a bang, you need to define your lead character.

Why pick your lead before your crisis? Because who your lead is will define whether or not your crisis really is a crisis. For example, your lead looses $500. To an aging multimillionaire this means nothing, however to a young student it's an incredibly devestating loss.

I am also asking you to choose only ONE lead character. Your novel should be about one person's quest to attain a goal. This should be one person who the readers can connect with emotionally and become invested in. If you have more than one leads, your reader has to divide their attention and won't become connected as closely.



For now we are going to key things about your lead: their gender and age.

To pick the gender of your character, think back to the genre you picked in lesson 1. In most novels of that genre, what gender is the lead? For most romance novels, your lead would most likely be female. While western genres, are most often told about male leads. If there isn't a predominance, then you are open to choose whatever you feel more comfortable with.

The reason it's good to stick with the conventional gender for your genre is that is what readers expect. Not to mention that some genres lend themselves more to a certain gender, not to be sexist or anything.

Moving on to the age of your lead. You do not have to very specific on the age at this point. I do not need a year number, but you should decide if your lead is a child, a teenage, young adult, middle age, a senior citizen. We need to know what life stage they are at mainly.

In general, your audience will determine your lead's age. Most adult audiences want to read about adults, however there have been many successful novels for adults with children leads. It's your choice, but be wary about making any extreme divertions from the conventions of your genre.

You should now be able to state is a plain simple sentence who your lead is generally.

Add this to your Statement Page:
"The lead of my novel is a ..."



Now that you have a rough lead character, let's start brainstorming to find that crisis. We are going to make a "Suppose List" (you will want to create a subpage for this activity).

What you are going to do is just fill in the sentence: "Suppose..." These are going to be your crisis ideas.

These are excellent sources for your ideas:
- Your own life
- Relatives
- Friends
- Co-workers
- Television
- Movies
- Books
- Newspapers
- Magazines
- The Internet
- Travel
- Dreams
- Eavesdropping
- People watching

Come up with as many of these as you can. This make take you a few days. When you are ready move on to Lesson 3.



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