Novel Basics: Card # 1

Novel Basics

About those cards . . .

I put the numbers, names, questions and images on the blank sides of cards and save the lined sides for my answers and specific notes. But you do whatever works for you.

I also enjoy color, so I used a variety of colors of cards and different colors of pens, too. And no, there is absolutely no system or coding to the colors of the cards I used. The very idea of doing that makes my brain seize up. So if you prefer to put everything down in black and white on 3” x 5” cards that are blank on both sides, make it so.

When I teach the class in a physical classroom, I tell the students not to sweat the small stuff like making sure the bottom points of the heart meet on Card # 1 because typically we only have 90 minutes. But since the online version goes more slowly, knock yourself out on the arty stuff if you like.

Card # 1: The Heart Card

The Heart Card asks the question,

“Who wants what?”

At the heart of every novel–every story really, no matter the form it takes, novel, short story, play, movie or television script, or epic narrative poem for that matter–lies the question, “Who wants what?”

As like as not, what you write down on Card # 1, with only a vague notion of what your novel will be, won’t be very specific. You probably don’t have a name for the who, for instance. Your answer might be something not much more than the following:

Boy wants girl.

Girl wants boy.

Boy wants boy.

Girl wants girl.

Even more broadly, someone wants to find true love.

More specifically, a returning veteran named Jay Gatsby wants to find Daisy, the girl he left behind, and make her his own.

Let’s move on to other genres besides love stories . . .

In murder mysteries the detective wants to find the killer to keep her from doing it again and/or to bring her to justice.

Someone wants to escape something, his hometown for instance, or her abusive mother for another.

Someone wants to find something, the Holy Grail, a magical ring, or the owner of a lost dog.

Someone wants to get rich.

Katniss Everdeen wants to save her little sister Prim from the Hunger Games.

Minty Wilcox, the protagonist of January Jinx, the first novel in my Calendar Mystery series, wants to find a job as a typist/stenographer in Kansas City in 1899.

Princess Ella, aka Cinderella, wants to escape the walls that confine her in Walls, the first book in my Cinderella, P. I. series.

Often in fiction, as in life, a want becomes a need. Someone needs to find a job to stay alive. The Chosen One needs to save Middle Earth, the world, or the galaxy before he and everyone he knows perish.

Regardless, to start a novel you need to know what someone wants or needs to accomplish by the last page of the narrative. Or at the very least you need to have a general idea of who wants want in your novel. To put it in literary terms, a story needs a protagonist with whom the reader can willingly identify and who has a worthwhile goal.

I put that in bold because it’s important, but I’m not going into it right now. We’ll talk about that when we get to Card # 3.

Card # 3? What happened to Card # 2?

I’m so glad you asked.

P. S. Feel free to share what you put on your cards in the comment section. Ask questions, too.

P. S. S. If the online version of the Novel Basics goes too slowly for you, you can buy the print version of the book on Amazon and the eBook for only $2.99 at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B07K2LXFRP