In my second series of writing tips on “Advanced Noveling” I’m looking at tricks and techniques designed to help you as a writer get more in touch with what it is you’re writing. Other parts can be found below in the category ‘Writing Tips’

This is quite an easy exercise to visualise and explain, so I doubt this is going to be the longest article in the world. However, if done right you should zoom from having zero novel notes to more than you can shake a large stick at in a very short space of time indeed.

If you remember last time you made note of a key scene in a novel you were thinking of writing, the key point in the novel which all other scenes move up to or down from. The pinnacle of Mt. Your Novel. You may have done this once, you may have done it enough not to have to think of novel ideas for the restof your life. That’s your choice. Now what’s also your choice is that you need to take this scene (or pick your favourite) and we’re going to work with that scene.

If you reacquaint yourself with the ideas of “thesis” and “antithesis” from the last article if you recall I mentioned that this scene was supposed to be the moment of “synthesis” in your novel. So at some point, I’m guessing, you will want to tell your audience what “thesis” and “antithesis” are. And these moments would best be described by. You guessed it, two more scenes.

Essentially, what was a single scene must now form a triumvirate of dramatic high points two describing ends of the scale and the last describing the eventual conflict between those points.

I’m remaining vague on this because I have no idea what your scenes entail, who’s in them, where they take place etc. Therein lies the final stage of this exercise.

I want you to burrow. Picture your scenes in your head. Your brain will have provided, without you even thinking about it too much, locations for those scenes, props that may be involved, characters who are present. If you move the camera of your mental scene to the sides and out the room (or into the next field, or over to the next spaceship or whatever) you’ll find other characters, more props, a world waiting to be described. Now is the time to take notes. Make yourself a brief field guide to the world of your novel. A quick entry on each thing you encounter will do. You will need these field notes for the next exercise.

That’s where things may start to get tricky.

This set of tips is going to steer well clear of twee little devices telling you how many words it will prompt to gush forth once you’ve done all of my exercises. This one does come with an exercise though.

I’m presuming, even should you have not read my earlier “Writing Tips” series, that you have no problem banging down a bit of prose, somewhere in the region of sailing up to 30,000ish would be comfortable. If not then click “Writing Tips” in the side bar and I’ll see you here later (start at the bottom).

Today’s exercise is based around the principle that when you sit down to do any exercise in storytelling from writing a novel to bashing out a screenplay it all comes down to one moment. Basically you are writing your story because somewhere in your head you have this killer scene, it is moving, dramatic, exciting, poignant, pregnant with meaning. That’s the moment, that’s the whole point of the exercise.

This does rather make it sound like all the other scenes in your prospective novel are rubbish in comparison. This is not the case.

Swift digression through Philosophy Alley here. Plato talked about dialogues as a way to get ideas across. One party represented the point of the dialogue the “thesis”. The other opposed the thesis and became the “antithesis” through the dialogue a beast came into being that was a combination of these two, the “synthesis”.

Why do I mention this?

Drama is central to all stories and drama is based within conflict and conflict always boils down to a choice between two perspectives that are at odds. If you like a thesis and an antithesis. If your thesis is “good” and your antithesis is “evil” then your synthesis is likely to end up being “no… good!”. Yawn. But what if your thesis is that destiny is real and free will is just an illusion, well your antithesis is then that destiny is the illusion and we are masters of our own fate and the synthesis… well, that’s for you to decide.

Being a storyteller is about being a human being. Telling a ripping yarn about the good guy socking the villain in the face and rescuing the princess is all very well as comfort food but somewhere along the line people want to entertain some thoughts about that old chestnut “the human condition”.

When I say your story will always come down to a single scene I mean there will be a moment that talks about the thesis and antithesis and suddenly your proposed synthesis will become apparent to the reader. That’s what, for want of a better term, we shall call the “money shot”.

All the other scenes leading up to that scene and all the scenes leading away from it should seek to explore your thesis and antithesis. They should lend depth, light, shade, colour, flavour, texture to that one all important moment. The story serves that moment but your story should be a buffet not a bag of crisps.

So what’s the exercise?

In whatever medium you choose jot down an idea for a story. You may not hit “the scene” right away but have a good go at guessing what this scene might be. Write down some notes about what it might involve. Then separate out the conflict in that scene. What is the thesis? What’s the antithesis? Make some notes about that. Then, finally, jot down what your key scene says about the conflict, what kind of synthesis are you tending towards. You may not fully know, newsflash, storytelling is a process for the storyteller of dealing with the very issues that fascinate them in the first place.

Whatever you jot down now that’s enough material for a novel right there.

Next time we’ll be taking these results and moving on to quickly sketch out the kinds of things that will be in the story you just made up. Maybe you want to jot a few down and take your favourite forward. Until next time. Happy writing!

I was thinking about my use of the term “advanced noveling” and I think it actually tells me a bit more about my supposed or unsupposed status as someone in a position to give anyone advice about anything. Someone (Mark Twain?) once remarked that no one but a fool ever wrote for a reason other than he was being paid to do so. I think the same thing applies to polar exploration and mountain climbing, and while we’re at it painting, building models of Notre Dame out of matchsticks and, from what I’ve seen, playing Eve Online.

The point is hobbies are foolish. It’s like having a second career that pays you no money, is a lot of trouble and gains you nothing particularly tangible. I have written, to date, eight novels, four of these novels will never see the light of day. One of the ones that won’t I lost in a computer memory dump crash thingie and wrote again switching from first to third person and then still decided it wasn’t all that and eventually abandoned it entirely. So you could even make an argument I’d written nine novels.

I’ve written a lot of novels, anyway.

But that’s not enough to be handing out advice on certain things. How does one get an agent? Don’t know, never got one. How does one sell a book? Don’t know, only sold about 3 copies of any book I ever published. How do I get a shot at the best seller lists? Haven’t a clue, but I think it has something to do with mediocre to decent talent and egregious luck.

It does however qualify me to answer questions about how to get the damn thing done. If you are going to worry about fame and fortune when you’ve got the thing printed and housed in an old shoebox (or PDFed and in a backup folder) then I can help you hammer some of the kinks out of that thing. At least enough to keep moving. Advanced noveling is going to be about when you have content production skills but you’re having problems making stuff hang together. It’s about my statements on “Proud-Level 2″ I want to help you get there. Having just got there myself I think I am now in a position to help others take those steps.

All aboard then. Let’s get trucking.

Also known as story telling.

Story telling is one of the few areas of human endeavour I can think of where looking at the duff examples can actually heighten our appreciation of the form.

It’s surely no accident that all the early cultures on earth told the same story with the same archetypes in the same or similar shapes. It is further no accident that there are archetypal settings, characters, icons and situations. Joseph Campbell found something very important but I get the sense from The Hero With A Thousand Faces that he didn’t really even understand how important it was, that monomyth.

Not that I’m making any great claims for my own abilities to tell you why stories are important. All I know is that there isn’t a human being alive who doesn’t have their own self-image which is really no more nor less than the story of their own being. Stories are the great tapestry of causality. A tapestry because a tapestry has patterns woven within it and the patterns are important to people because they help things to make sense.

Don’t we all feel one hell of a lot better when things just make sense? Not only that, but we can feel a range of emotions from unease to betrayal when things stop making sense.

I like video games with narratives. Love them. Some people like shoot ‘em ups, some like sports simulators, some like platform games. I like any game which has an underlying narrative. I absolutely can’t get away from them.

It’s a deceptive quality however, that thing that dictates what a narrative actually is. Until the advent of narrative video games it was a lesson that largely could not be learned. I recently did a cull of my collection and was struck by just how many games seem to have a good narrative milieu and direction but actually are missing vital components. The really important part about it is that it was not possible ever before to experience the story with no story in such a polished form.

What really brought it home to me was playing a duo of games that sought to cash in on the popularity of brainy horror titles such as Silent Hill; The Suffering and its sequel Ties That Bind. Both are prison melodramas in which the main character Torque discovers dark and violent power inside himself that is directed towards acts of virtue by the voice of his dead wife and vice by the voice of a phantomic medical doctor whose image and manner suggests a 30s modernist decadence.

The games attempt to place the player in a position of moral dilemma about what to do but this is never more than an illusory veil to disguise two different “endings” be “good” throughout and receive one ending, “bad” throughout and receive the other.

The problem lies in that we don’t know torque at all, he’s not a character he’s a cipher. In some games this isn’t a problem, in Tomb Raider Lara Croft was never more than a cursor used to solve 3 dimensional puzzles. In a game that bases some of its atmospherics and appeal on a supposed morality it leaves you feeling somewhat empty. I often found myself peforming “good” or “bad” acts by the arbitrary yardstick of which looked more fun. Essentially as Torque had no soul the game became soulless. When the subject matter was the character’s soul this seemed like a pretty silly way to structure the game.

By contrast the main character in the excellent Canis Canem Edit, Jimmy, did have several things going for him that Torque did not. Canis Canem Edit (Bully in the US) is a typical boarding school drama (except somewhat a hybrid between UK and US examples of the genre). It talks about all the usual things, social status, the contrast between the worlds of adults and children and methods of social control. Jimmy himself is ever given the voice of the heroic rebel. He stands up against any form of social injustice whether from his peers, the teachers or the wider world. The addition of a Mental Asylum location into the games map allows commentary on the methods of control society likes to impose on the rebellious or the dangerous intellectual.

Jimmy’s actual lines in the game support this reading of him but the whole game is tuned to reflect it. The scoring mechanisms, the locations, the mission structure and the overarching plot are neatly nested to allow the commentary of school as a microcosm of society to continue. All the characters seem to be defined by how they fall short of or exceed societal values in whatever way and the lines between all the different social groups are integral parts of the game mechanics.

Hence Canis Canem Edit (Dog Eat Dog by the way) has a story by virtue of the fact that all of its elements conspire to tell one. The Suffering tries but fails because many of its mechanics are are merely pedestrian.

But is that all a story is? A collection of archetypes that seeks to communicate a single message or moral? From the point of view of video game mechanics this would very much appear to be the case.

In the aestheitcs of the novel the written word can aspire to things a video game can’t but it can fall short in more or less the same ways. The benefits of separation in media, I suppose.

The really interesting thing about the video game example is in a line of similarity it draws between all narrative.

The fact of the matter is from the moment we are born until the moment we die we live enveloped in a prison of flesh and bone that separates the world into two distinct parts. Internal consciousness and external consciousness. How we interact with the world is dictated by decisions made internally and how they are enacted externally. As the old saw goes “The Road to Hell is paved with good intentions” sometimes people’s internal beliefs and the external expression of those beliefs are mismatched.

People in stories are rarely so encumbered, unless it is deliberately so by the author to make some sort of point. Heros, particularly, always translate their inner attitude into an external action of utmost appropriateness. Of course this is often because the world the story teller has created has been as tailored as the character. Stories seek to represent a literally mythic state of wholeness. Everything in a story fits together like a jigsaw puzzle and all to encapsulate the author’s agenda or sub agenda.

Maybe, the important thing about this process of reviewing circumstances where people and their worlds are so congruent is to help us find our own heroism, our own congruence. When we discover who we are maybe we also should be thinking about where we need to be to be who we are.

After all I’m sure I would have been as bored by Jimmy in the world of The Suffering as I would by Torque in the setting of Canis Canem Edit.

Another one to add to the short stack of invaluable writing tips comes by way of Stephen King’s entertaining “On Writing”.

This is actually a two parter. The first part goes like this:

Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.

King breaks this down for us. Essentially what his old boss was saying was that the first time you set a story down, when you write it, you are telling that story to yourself. You should finish it in that way, with the door closed. When you come to edit, however, you are making the story ready for an audience. So you need to pay particular mind to what in the story needs explaining and in what order. So you need to have your door wide open for criticism etc.

The second part is firmly attached to this business of editing. To edit, the wise old boss told Mr. King you need to look at the story and cut away everything that isn’t the story.

These two pieces of advice have stuck with me for years and will stick with me for years to come.

UKers enjoy the bank holiday weekend. Everyone else. Just enjoy!

It’s so rare that I come across a tip on writing that is concise enough to share in a single post and comes from a third party. There are books I would recommend but it is rare that someone puts their finger right on the button. Strunk & White hit the nail on the head with “Omit needless words” which would still be my number one piece of writing advice ever especially as it pretty much sums up what any writer could do to improve any manuscript in purely systematic way.

But we’re not here for that today, oh no.

From author Linnea Sinclair by way of Agent Kristin’s Pub Rants we get the 411 on the difference between “conflict” and “complication”.

To quickly precis for those too lazy to click a link the two concepts are often confused to the detriment of the fiction. For example, if renowned explorer Omaha Smith wishes to escape from a crumbling temple and finds a tiger barring the path to the exit that’s a complication. The tiger just happened to be hanging out and found some explorer shaped meat. Nothing personal. If, on the other hand, having despatched the tiger Omaha finds his arch rival Jerome Paunceau waiting outside with a coterie of armed goons to steal Omaha’s important archaeological finds that’s conflict. Jerome and Omaha have issues, which require settling, and a history. Jerome could even shorthand this by saying: “Once again Meester Smith we see that there is nothing you can own that I cannot take from you.” Or some such.

And this is a simple and crucial difference in the writing of fiction I’ve hitherto been unable to put my finger on. I have many times read a piece of fiction… or watched a movie or TV programme where everything could have been sorted out if only people had just sat down and had a good old chat. No one hated anyone, no one wished ill on anyone, no one was even really upset at anyone else, all the “conflict” was generated by mishearings, misunderstandings, poor communication.

That’s not a drama it’s just an irritating set up.

And other people get it too. I’ve lost count of the number of reviews I’ve read which concluded that something was lame because all the characters had to do was talk to one another.

So thank you Ms. Sinclair (via Agent Kristin) for adding this to the small heap of truly useful and thoroughly worthwhile story writing tips.

This article is the last in the current continuing series designed primarily to help aspiring authors get their word count up in response to those struggling during NaNoWriMo 2006. The articles outline a planning technique for any given novel which once completed aim to make it hard to stop writing the next necessary piece of information for the audience. The technique is based on structuring concepts and information and, as this is a blog, are to be read from the bottom up. They will later be collated into a single volume.

What we’ve spent the last three tips doing is fleshing out our basic story concept into a plan where we’ve covered most details. It should be pointed out at this stage that nothing is set in stone. If you depart from your own plan then that’s okay. It’s your plan to depart from. All I would say is that if you wander too far from your planned structure you are in danger of having to do a fair bit of new preparation work to avoid getting lost.

Even so, some deviation is unavoidable. When you’re in the process of writing a novel you realise the story as told is actually a different thing to the story as planned. Sometimes you will find the plan doesn’t even really make logical sense. So as long as you’re sticking reasonably close to the scaffold you should be okay.

When finishing my most recent novel I started to understand something about beginnings, middles and ends. If you think of the beginning as lasting until some central event in your novel and the end as concluding after you’ve moved away from that central event then the story is like a narrative rope (or, er, washing line) linking the three parts. Writing from beginning to middle is easier than middle to end because stories often revolve around the build up to a central moment and that moment was where you began the idea. By the time you reach the middle all of the beginning already exists. In fact you’re almost exclusively working with known quantities. Getting from the middle to the end is much much much harder because the end doesn’t exist yet. Essentially you’re trying to attach your string to a pole you haven’t even put in the ground yet.

It’s in those circumstances that your plan becomes your best friend. Stick to the plan, grit your teeth, fumble through it. You have no choice. From middle to end is going to be hard work no matter what. You will have to fix it in the edit. Sorry.

You can skirt round the issue a little by making a story that is mostly leading towards a big finish and has no significant story point in the middle, like a quest story. My novel Figure of the Sorcechanic does this very thing as the central conflict between the protagonist and the antagonist is deferred until the very end. The more central your key event is the harder the end will become. Stories which start with a key event and almost exclusively deal with fall out (with no other central point) are hard indeed.

The point of all this is, your plan is your only friend at these times. If you haven’t got a solid plan you haven’t got anything. And you should anticipate long delays as you try to pierce the intangible creative fog of “what happens next” on several occasions.

If you’re writing on no deadline this is okay, especially if you don’t get frustrated, or so bored you’re going to give up and leave half a manuscript mouldering in the bottom of your sock drawer (or digital equivalent). But if you’re trying to plug through because you long for the sense of achievement and you are sick of giving up, or, more tangibly if you have a deadline like NaNoWriMo, then you cannot afford the luxury of a month spent pondering the protagonist’s next move in a number of intense hot bath mind mapping sessions.

Basically. Get a plan. Stick to it.

In our Hero of Harroo project we already came up with a sketched out plan. It is into this that we will add the flesh of the world and specific references to villains. From the creation of this final plan you’re in a position to start writing.

Just to recap, here’s the original hero’s journey plan:

1. Everyday World/The Call to Adventure - Hero(Arturo), Call Character(Grandpa)
2. Refusal of the Call - Hero
3. Meeting with the Elder/Supernatural Aid - The Elder (Grandpa? Grandma? Grandpa’s Friend?)
4. The Crossing of the First Threshold/Defeating the First Guardian - Guardian (One of Stansted’s forces)
5. The Belly of the Whale/The Other World - The World of Harroo
6. The Road of Trials - Trials (Stansted’s forces)
7. The Meeting with the Goddess - A Goddess (An actual Goddess? A love interest? An artifact?)
8. Atonement with the Father/Opponent/Other - The Father/Opponent/Other (Darkling Stansted)
9. Apotheosis - Hero
10. The Ultimate Boon - Hero
11. Master of the Two Worlds - Hero
12. Freedom to Live - Hero

We’re now going to send this plan through a three phase redevelopment. The first phase we’re going to turn each step along the way into its own “section” with a subheading and slightly more fleshed out precis. Then we’re going to add to this fleshed out version of the list how many key story elements are included in each stage. Finally, we’re going to assign one or more of these story elements to a chapter each (I’ll explain how we do this when we get there).

Now I’m not being prescriptive here. This is a quick and dirty way to generate a workload by the chapter where each chapter has just as many points as a single chapter, or section, should, i.e. one. Feel free to do with your information units what you will. All this will do is give you a guide as to what information you need to get across to the reader and when you need to aproach it.

So let’s go Phase One:

1. Everyday World/The Call to Adventure

Arturo Gatwick attends the funeral of his dead Grandpa. Grandpa leaves Arturo a bunch of things in his will and Arturo eventually receives a number of keys for grandpa’s house from the executor of grandpa’s estate. Arturo finds his Grandpa’s cellar, a doorway to Harroo and a letter from grandpa telling Arturo about his magical ancestry.

2. Refusal of the Call

Arturo attempts to forget all about this. He is a modern 21st century guy and has no time to be running around in some half-baked Lord of the Rings world.

3. Meeting with the Elder/Supernatural Aid

The Elder Mellifluous’s old familiar a five foot long, fat lizard called Fenwick, comes to fetch Arturo from his home.

4. The Crossing of the First Threshold/Defeating the First Guardian - Guardian (One of Stansted’s forces)

Arturo returns to the mirror with Fenwick. He emerges from the ruins of Mel’s laboratory and the two are instantly set upon by gigantic spiny spiders made of reflecting mirrors. Arturo is no match for these creatures but Fenwick manages to help them escape.

5. The Belly of the Whale/The Other World - The World of Harroo

Fenwick and Arturo travel on foot from Mel’s laboratory towards a nearby city. During this time Fenwick explains the world of Harroo to Arturo.

6. The Road of Trials - Trials

On their way to the city Arturo and Fenwick have been avoiding Darkling Stansteds armoured troops, each armed with vicious twin magical tonfas. On one occasion Arturo has to be saved by the daughter of the last great magician who wasn’t Mel. She joins the party. They visit the city where Arturo uses some of his natural magical ability to elude the guard captain of Darkling’s forces and the party escape into the wilderness. In the wilderness they encounter a vast swamp of grey mind suckers who try to drain the pary’s will to live. They go through the caves to avoid the chief guard of Darkling’s army and are nearly devoured by albino cave dwellers. When they escape these they are very near to Darkling’s palace. Eluding the guards they proceed inside.

7. The Meeting with the Goddess - A Goddess (An actual Goddess? A love interest? An artifact?)

See daughter above.

8. Atonement with the Father/Opponent/Other - The Father/Opponent/Other (Darkling Stansted)

Darkling attempts to turn Arturo to the darkside. Arturo resists.

9. Apotheosis - Hero

Arturo wins the battle with his powers of illusion tricking Darkling into believing Arturo is a summoner like his grnadpa when all Darkling is focusing on are shadows from his own mind.

10. The Ultimate Boon - Hero

Darkling’s castle is seized. Darkling dead or at least rendered ineffective. Arturo is invited to re-establish the ways of enlightened sorcery in Harroo. He reclaims the gathered intelligence of a countless generations of sorcerors.

11. Master of the Two Worlds - Hero

Arturo, instead, leaves the kingdom in the capable hands of Fenwick and returns to live most of his life in mundane obscurity.

12. Freedom to Live - Hero

Arturo returns occasionally to Harroo to meet with his new friends. And let his new wife catch up with some of her old ones.

Phase Two:

1. Everyday World/The Call to Adventure

Arturo Gatwick attends the funeral of his dead Grandpa. Grandpa leaves Arturo a bunch of things in his will and Arturo eventually receives a number of keys for grandpa’s house from the executor of grandpa’s estate. Arturo finds his Grandpa’s cellar, a doorway to Harroo and a letter from grandpa telling Arturo about his magical ancestry.

Introduce Arturo Gatwick
Introduce Mellifluous Gatwick
Mellifluous Gatwick dies
Arturo inherits all of Mel’s posessions
Arturo receives keys
Arturo goes to Grandpa’s house
Arturo unlocks the cellar
Arturo finds letter
Arturo finds mirror
Arturo visits Harroo for first time alone

2. Refusal of the Call

Arturo attempts to forget all about this. He is a modern 21st century guy and has no time to be running around in some half-baked Lord of the Rings world.

Arturo returns to real world
Arturo covers up mirror
Arturo leaves house
Arturo returns to work
Arturo decides to attempt to put his experiences behind him

3. Meeting with the Elder/Supernatural Aid

The Elder Mellifluous’s old familiar a five foot long, fat lizard called Fenwick, comes to fetch Arturo from his home.

Introduce Fenwick
Arturo goes home
Arturo and Fenwick meet
Fenwick persuades Arturo to come to Harroo

4. The Crossing of the First Threshold/Defeating the First Guardian - Guardian (One of Stansted’s forces)

Arturo returns to the mirror with Fenwick. He emerges from the ruins of Mel’s laboratory and the two are instantly set upon by gigantic spiny spiders made of reflecting mirrors. Arturo is no match for these creatures but Fenwick manages to help them escape.

Arturo and Fenwick return to Mel’s Basement
Arturo and Fenwick cross to Harroo
Arturo explore’s Mel’s lab
Arturo and Fenwick are attacked
Introduce the Spiny Spiders
Fenwick defeats the Spiders
Arturo and Fenwick escape

5. The Belly of the Whale/The Other World - The World of Harroo

Fenwick and Arturo travel on foot from Mel’s laboratory towards a nearby city. During this time Fenwick explains the world of Harroo to Arturo.

Introduce Harroo
Fenwick and Arturo travel

6. The Road of Trials - Trials

On their way to the city Arturo and Fenwick have been avoiding Darkling Stansteds armoured troops, each armed with vicious twin magical tonfas. On one occasion Arturo has to be saved by Seline, the daughter of the last great magician who wasn’t Mel. She joins the party. They visit the city where Arturo uses some of his natural magical ability to elude Marrowfat, the guard captain of Darkling’s forces, and the party escape into the wilderness. In the wilderness they encounter a vast swamp of grey mind suckers who try to drain the pary’s will to live. They go through the caves to avoid Marrowfat and are nearly devoured by albino cave dwellers. When they escape these they are very near to Darkling’s palace. Eluding the guards they proceed inside.

Introduce Darkling Stansted
Introduce Stansted’s troops
Stansted’s troops establish character and danger
Introduce Seline
Introduce the city
Introduce Marrowfat
Introduce the swamp
Introduce the mind suckers
Introduce the caves
Introduce the dwellers
Introduce Darkling’s Palace
Arturo and party sneak into Darkling’s Palace

7. The Meeting with the Goddess - A Goddess (An actual Goddess? A love interest? An artifact?)

See Seline above.

8. Atonement with the Father/Opponent/Other - The Father/Opponent/Other (Darkling Stansted)

Darkling attempts to turn Arturo to the darkside. Arturo resists.

Enter Darkling
Darkling attempts to corrupt Arturo
Arturo resists
Darkling leaves Arturo to Marrowfat
Marrowfat is defeated
Arturo pursues Darkling

9. Apotheosis - Hero

Arturo wins the battle with his powers of illusion tricking Darkling into believing Arturo is a summoner like his grnadpa when all Darkling is focusing on are shadows from his own mind.

Arturo and Darkling Battle
Arturo Wins

10. The Ultimate Boon - Hero

Darkling’s castle is seized. Darkling dead or at least rendered ineffective. Arturo is invited to re-establish the ways of enlightened sorcery in Harroo. He reclaims the gathered intelligence of a countless generations of sorcerors.

Arturo liberates Harroo

11. Master of the Two Worlds - Hero

Arturo, instead, leaves the kingdom in the capable hands of Fenwick and returns to live most of his life in mundane obscurity.

Arturo gives the rule of Harroo to Fenwick

12. Freedom to Live - Hero

Arturo returns occasionally to Harroo to meet with his new friends. And let his new wife catch up with some of her old ones.

Arturo Returns to the real world with Seline

Phase Three:

Okay, before going on to phase three take all your incidents and put them into a single list. This is what we’re now working with. You either want to leave incidents by themselves or group them together into single chapters. If the amount you will have to explain to the reader in the incident you’re looking at is very large then it might be better to give it its own chapter. If you can combine incidents then do. Don’t leave yourself with too much to explain in a single chapter.

Here’s the Harroo phase three:

Chapter One
Introduce Arturo Gatwick

Chapter Two
Introduce Mellifluous Gatwick
Mellifluous Gatwick dies

Chapter Three
Arturo inherits all of Mel’s possessions
Arturo receives keys

Chapter Four
Arturo goes to Grandpa’s house
Arturo unlocks the cellar
Arturo finds letter
Arturo finds mirror

Chapter Five
Arturo visits Harroo for first time alone
Arturo returns to real world
Arturo covers up mirror
Arturo leaves house

Chapter Six
Arturo returns to work
Arturo decides to attempt to put his experiences behind him

Chapter Seven
Introduce Fenwick
Arturo goes home
Arturo and Fenwick meet

Chapter Eight
Fenwick persuades Arturo to come to Harroo

Chapter Nine
Arturo and Fenwick return to Mel’s Basement
Arturo and Fenwick cross to Harroo
Arturo explore’s Mel’s lab
Arturo and Fenwick are attacked

Chapter Ten
Introduce the Spiny Spiders
Fenwick defeats the Spiders
Arturo and Fenwick escape

Chapter Eleven
Introduce Harroo
Fenwick and Arturo travel
Introduce Darkling Stansted
Introduce Stansted’s troops
Stansted’s troops establish character and danger

Chapter Twelve
Introduce Seline
Introduce the city
Introduce Marrowfat

Chapter Thirteen
Introduce the swamp
Introduce the mind suckers

Chapter Fourteen
Introduce the caves
Introduce the dwellers

Chapter Fifteen
Introduce Darkling’s Palace
Arturo and party sneak into Darkling’s Palace

Chapter Sixteen
Enter Darkling
Darkling attempts to corrupt Arturo
Arturo resists
Darkling leaves Arturo to Marrowfat
Marrowfat is defeated

Chapter Seventeen
Arturo pursues Darkling
Arturo and Darkling Battle
Arturo Wins

Chapter Eighteen
Arturo liberates Harroo
Arturo gives the rule of Harroo to Fenwick
Arturo Returns to the real world with Seline

That must be the end of the process.

Why? I hear you ask. Is there no more preparation that can be done?

Well, yes there is, but it involves taking steps backwards, not forward.

If you remember back through the mists of time our encounter with the Annoying Five Year Old then if you feel less than confident about any of the information delivery tasks above you can let A5YO loose on the task.

To help define Seline, Marrowfat and others look at our work on character.

Remember, nothing is set in stone.

This concludes the series of articles in which I set down the actual techniques to aid in the preparation of your novel. Writing tips will continue with a dual approach. Firstly I am to commence writing my second book set in the Greater Dominion soon: Canals of Mercantor. I will use my own techniques to plot this out and will leave the planning documents as tips here on the site.

As Canals of Mercantor is likely to be a piece of generic YA fantasy I have asked my mother whose blog may be found here. To see if any of my techniques prove useful for structuring the novel she is trying to write. This novel is likely to be far less generic, her commentary will help to form further writing tips.

For now though, happy writing!

This article is one of a continuing series designed primarily to help aspiring authors get their word count up in response to those struggling during NaNoWriMo 2006. The articles outline a planning technique for any given novel which once completed aim to make it hard to stop writing the next necessary piece of information for the audience. The technique is based on structuring concepts and information and, as this is a blog, are to be read from the bottom up. They will later be collated into a single volume.

It’s a well worn trope of the acting world that it’s more fun to be cast as the villain than the hero. On the surface this is because of the supposed liberty evildoers enjoy and, in fact, this is about the only enjoyment one can really derive from playing the bad guy.

Once I played the villain in a piece where the villainy was a weakness of character and his supposed liberty the product of political red tape. Playing that villain was no fun. It did teach me something about villains. They’re pretty easy to write but hard to write well. Anyone can slap a waxed moustache on someone and get them to cackle away evilly and so on and so forth. This can be great fun and gets you writing away nicely for a while. Then comes the why.

Depending on your genre the matter of why a villain is being villainous is either tricky or downright byzantine in its logic. Its not just that a villain is the opponent of the protagonist, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re going to be “evil” all the time. If you need them to be evil then you need them to have reasons to be so.

Let’s take the evil Darkling Stansted as an example. It’s all very well slapping him with that moniker and expecting him to be badly behaved. Maybe, in general terms he is. He, after all, mobilised an army to take over the magical kingdom of Harroo over half a century ago. His army overturned the ruling order and estabished a new dictatorship.

What then?

Well, fantasy authors often like to fall back on fear of prophecies. At the drop of a prediction the villains in fantasy become utterly ruthless and tyrannical. Often leading to the thought that if it weren’t for the prophecy maybe they’d have been a bit less uptight.

Insanity is another old favourite. If someone’s a nutter then it’s obvious that they’ll do any kind of evil in the cause of serving their own mania.

These ideas are what happens when an author suddenly realises that their villains are doing things for no sensibly good reason. Action thrillers with a political angle love the fact that information is such a valuable currency because they can have villains bumping people off because they “know too much”.

The fact is that you are going to have to find reasons for the villain to do what they need to do. If you can’t it is probably best not to have them do whatever it is you were planning.

If you are going to design a villain then they are probably going to exhibit one classic villain behaviour or another. But the assignation of these behaviours should not be arbitrary. You want to set up your villain to be in opposition to your protagonist. We’ve already gone into our protagonist in some detail so chalking up an opposition is a matter of details.

To briefly recap, Arturo Gatwick is a man of letters, an advertising executive who yearns for the fantastic but is forever crippled by his realisation that his family was mundane and never amounted to anything. When he discovers that his own grandpa was once a pretty big deal in a magical kingdom he is further hampered by questions relating to why grandpa didn’t make the grade and lost out to his evil counterpart. Will it be a case of like grandpa like Arty? Has two generations of Gatwick mundanity stripped out the old magic skills?

These are the concerns that we are dealing with in the book and if our villain is any kind of villain he will play upon those weaknesses. He will comment upon them.

Let’s get exercising. You can do this with your own hero and I will do it with Arturo. You need to write down the hero’s name and below that three (at least) central questions that our hero’s journey will address:

Arturo Gatwick:
1:Is Arturo really up to the task of becoming a magician like his grandpa or has he been steeped in mundanity too long?
2: Does it really matter if Arturo is capable of magic, he’s from the line of defeated magicians that Darkling expelled from Harroo, isn’t he genetically predisposed to get his butt kicked?
3: Even if he is neither too mundane nor too related to grandpa isn’t Darkling Stansted just too plain strong to be beaten by a first timer?

Next you want to pick out key concepts that these three or more questions represent. So in this case we can go:

Q1: mundanity, inexperience, novelty
Q2: family inheritance, self doubt, the past
Q3: strength, fear of darkness, fear of conflict

Now we have nine things that an opponent of Arturo could use to play on Arturo’s own doubts and fears. Of course Darkling’s going to use the lot but if you recall Darkling has an army of evil doers at his beck and call. The evil army are, by association, extensions of Darkling himself. Maybe we can make our message plainer by inventing an army that also reflects these concerns.

To do this we need to make our list of concerns go vertical:

mundanity
inexperience
novelty
family inheritance
self doubt
the past
strength
fear of darkness
fear of conflict

And under each word (or next to it, feel free, go wild!) we need to say what kind of villainous monster could invoke the concept in a negative way, thus:

Mundanity

A popular colour for mundanity is grey, so a grey thing, also mundanity is supposed to be boring and bored people sigh and fidget. They’re also quite lethargic. Couldn’t boredom seep out of them like a cloud of gas or a miasma? And if they catch you, once you’ve been paralysed by boredom they could eat you with giant mouths and vicious teeth. They don’t sound particularly intelligent, maybe they’re a naturally occurring creature used as biological warfare.

Inexperience

Well, any kind of creature could show up someone’s inexperience at dealing with them. It is important to make sure Arturo only escapes by the skin of his teeth a few times. If we want to drive the point home maybe we could have a named villain talk about Arturo’s inexperience and the expectation that he will not last long.

Novelty

Novelty is a kind of shiny, pretty, vacuous word. It talks about things being exciting and new, but novelty wears off. Maybe Darkling tries to bring Arturo over to the dark side with some kind of glamorous shapeshifting evil. Arturo must get past the novelty value to become a real magician.

Family inheritance

Well, we already have a need for a named villain, so Darkling and this right-hand imp could well discuss any reputed genetic disadvantage Arturo may have. Maybe all the villainous creatures capable of rational conversation could taunt Arturo’s ignominious family name. (Incidentally there’s not really an imp, I use the term in a general way).

Self doubt

I want to go super metaphorical here, I had originally thought of doppelgangers and stuff but we already have shape shifters so I thought we might get a bit abstract. I was thinking of creatures that are big spiny spider-like things made of distorting mirrors. Arturo looks into them and is sure he can’t win.

The past

The past is enough for a set of villains all by itself, but I think here we’re specifically looking at events from the past that grandfather Gatwick failed to overcome. Maybe, in particular Darkling’s right hand imp. It’s possible this character used to be a prisoner of the Gatwick family, thus accounting for his bitterness.

Strength

Every evil army needs its grunt troops. I’m thinking in this case we could be talking normal soldiers equipped with magical weapons provided by Darkling Stansted. This means they’re not so dumb as to be unable to converse and provide many conversational and interrogational possibilities.

Fear of darkness

An albino creature that can see in the dark, silent, rubbery, warm, implacable. We seem to have a fairly high-intelligence evil army here. Maybe we’re talking a gollum like creature here, even the grunts get spooked by the troglodyte killers. In a spin we could make them fairly cultured. Lot of time for philosophising in the dark, you know.

Fear of conflict

Essentially I think most of the villains in Harroo will have barks that are just slightly worse than their bites. This isn’t any illusion strategy, nothing so high minded. It’s just Arturo is constantly underestimating his own abilities.

And of course, the epitome of all of these features is Darkling Stansted himself. A cultured, cold, shapeshifting evil magician who implacably ranges his armies against the returning hero. Just as the hero underestimates himself Darkling underestimates his foe to a similar degree. In the end it is complacence that should set the stage for the final battle but Darkling himself should be no pushover.

You can look at a story two ways. It is the glorious triumph of the hero or the appalling tragedy of the villain. A fully rounded villain should have attractive qualities and a rational reason for acting in the way they do. In the end, though, they will lose the fight and die. So why? It has to be inevitable for some reason. The villain must, like a tragic hero, possess a fatal flaw, a straw to break the camel’s back.

Overconfidence is fine for allowing the hero to gain a face to face with their nemesis, although tedious speeches along the lines of “you did very well to get past the dark waters of s’plurg and the bestiary of my palace gardens…” are not advised. When it comes to the final fight though both combatants should know what’s at stake. Everything. Overconfidence no longer pays the price.

If we’re going to give Darkling something that’s going to tip the balance in favour of Arturo it has to be something only Arturo can bring to the party. Otherwise someone else might have done it before now. The easiest way around most of this is to make the Gatwick line capable of something no other magical lineage is capable of… so what went wrong for grandpa becomes the only question.

The obvious answer would be that Mel Gatwick was brought up in the magical tradition whereas Art has always had to do without. Maybe Mel just couldn’t think of a tactic that didn’t rely on magic battling. So if Darkling feeds off the magic of his own opponents to defeat them maybe Mel was a summoner. He summoned beasts to do his bidding but Darkling turned the beasts against him. (Maybe that’s how all these grey boredom monsters, albino cave dwellers and distorting mirror spiders came to Harroo in the first place.) However, if Art uses a relatively minor number of illusion spells to make it look like he’s summoning beasts when really they’re mirages maybe Darkling will fall for the illusion instead of turning that relatively minor power against Art. Then Art’s free to walk up to Darkling and pop him a good one in the nose.

Yeah, that kind of works. It works for satisfying story reasons as opposed to arbitrary tactical ones.

And that’s what you have to do. Turn your hero upside down, invert him, find the yang to go with the ying. In the end the conflict maybe resolved as the hero assimilates the yang into himself and the villain becomes redundant.

In the final planning tip we’re going to make a final basic plot plan for the Hero of Harroo (working title). After that writing tips will remain general while I collate the first tips into something resembling a coherent whole.

Happy writing.

This article is one of a continuing series designed primarily to help aspiring authors get their word count up in response to those struggling during NaNoWriMo 2006. The articles outline a planning technique for any given novel which once completed aim to make it hard to stop writing the next necessary piece of information for the audience. The technique is based on structuring concepts and information and, as this is a blog, are to be read from the bottom up. They will later be collated into a single volume.

You would be forgiven for thinking (at least, until the end of this paragraph) that the business of world building is best left to the writers of SF about aliens or fantasy about unicorns. The only difference between these two processes and the rest of fictional world creation is in a degree of subtlety.

Obviously, when we set out to create the magical Kingdom of Harroo we are building an entire world from scratch. The only difference in our creation is that we have far more latitude in the creation of a world that forms some kind of commentary or thematic backdrop to the events of the story. In real life our world is an objective thing and any meaning we ascribe to it is coloured by our own sense of self. In fiction the author is wholly responsible for filtering the experience of the characters through a world that is intended to support their story and adventures.

So, we find ourselves once again in a position where we have to examine our protagonist. Who is Arturo Gatwick? Well, he’s a man who’s going to be a bit nervous about the prospect of entering a magical kingdom, in spite of the fact that his grandpa was born in one. Essentially his nature is that he will probably feel some unconscious pull towards the magical kingdom even though outwardly he may resist.

A deeper part of the story deals with the resolution of past defeat and a final inheritance of birthright. That’s where we’ll start thinking about Darkling Stansted. Stansted will have to take on the persona of the interloper, the invader and so the world of Harroo will bear the marks of occupation. On the other hand if we were to remove Darkling from Harroo we will have to imagine it’s the type of place Arturo Gatwick would like to live. So that’s the world we are building and what we will describe.

Casting our minds back all the way to when we defined Arturo as a character we said that he was a businessman with a preference for mental activity and a man whose career had lead him into marketing. This gives us two possible approaches to the business of creating Harroo. They revolve around the question of whether or not Arturo likes his job.

To a certain extent the answer to this question is going to come down “yes” or “no” but I would add the words “on the whole” before them just to clear up any confusion. This is because although marketing may or may not be the career for him that doesn’t mean that if he likes it he will always be happy and smiley and that if he doesn’t he will always be grumpy and moany.

To give an example of an archetypal character who likes the job on the whole but may not necessarily be cheerful and happy about the situation is that old standby: the put upon law enforcement officer. If we look at one of the classic depictions of this character, Die Hard’s John McClane, we can see that despite being quite a spiky character in his personal manner McClane never entertains the idea of giving up law enforcement over the course of three movies. In fact the worst thing that can happen to this character is that he is forced to turn in his badge and his gun.

Arturo could very well be the reverse, and in fact this would make him an archetype too; the businessman with a lingering feeling of dissatisfaction. This helps us out enormously because if Arturo is, on the surface, happy with his life but on a deeper level not quite sure that a life designing promotional materials for products and services is the royal road to fulfillment then it explains why he’d want to go fighting evil magicians in dark kingdoms anyway.

It also gives us clues to how to handle those first few moments in the story where Arturo turns away from a mundane existence and towards a life of adventure and mystery.

So although we’re ultimately wanting to know what Harroo (which is a kingdom in the world of Primaris, don’t forget) is going to be like what it should be like is reflected in our protagonist.

The fact that Arturo may well be concerned that a small life carrying out clerical tasks is not ultimately rewarding in all the ways it could be tells us Harroo should offer him an alternative. Harroo unblemished would have the potential to be a place of cosmic importance and deep spirituality.

Leading on from here we have a hook word, a difficult concept, one that it would be relatively easy to write a book about (several in fact). Spirituality. There are many aspects to this, belief in the supernatural, mysticism, spirit, religion, the soul, the afterlife and so on and so forth. It’s probably not wise to assume that Harroo contains the answer to life, the universe and everything but it could provide a spiritually nurturing environment.

Let’s also return to cosmic importance. One thing we’ve already learned about Harroo is that you can get from Earth to Harroo by magical means (in this case a mirror). What if you could also get from Harroo (and indeed the other places in Primaris) to many other worlds. A cornucopia of societies and strange alternative worlds. Primaris was a name I dreamed up because it vaguely invokes the concept of “the first”. Well there we have it. Primaris is, very literally, the centre of the inhabited universe. This is why its citizens are so concerned with spiritual matters and why dwelling there opens up one’s eyes to a variety of human experience which is one of the bedrock substances of personal spirituality.

If your head’s spinning at this moment, well, good. All we did was give a character a job and give a magical kingdom a funny name and all of a sudden we’re going deep. If you happen to be a writer of fantasy or SF you may, at this point, be feeling bewildered at the responsibilities placed upon you as creator of a whole world.

To give this all time to sink in let’s take a step back.

If you’re not planning an SF or Fantasy book then you can now snigger quietly to yourself. You do not have the burden of defining a world from scratch in which your protagonist will suffer. The world we live in has many “off the shelf” environments that will perform a variety of different tasks adequately. You’d be wrong for supposing that you don’t have to do anything at all. And if you think that your choice of environment for the story will have no bearing on how the story plays out you’d be so wrong you’d start working against your own aims.

Every choice an author makes about their story comes with a number of advantages and an attendant number of responsibilities. Every story has some sort of theatre of operations. This can be as narrow as “a prison”, “a street” , “a train in motion” or as broad as “London”, “South East England” or “France, Tokyo, Sydney and San Francisco”. In all of these definitions we give ourselves, as writers, specific targets and specific ammunition to employ in telling the story.

For example, we could at this time completely redefine the story of Arturo Gatwick as a story taking place in the everyday world by revealing that Mellifluous Gatwick had started a cult, or rather a collective of people, he was not a magician he was just a charismatic leader. The collective was dedicated to a simple life working the land and exploring a broad based spiritual life. Kind of like a sort of ultra-liberal Amish. Arturo could find the location of the collective and an account of how Darkling Stansted had usurped Mellifluous and made the regime of the collective more oppressive. Arturo then travels to the location of the collective in order to explore his own personal history.

The story remains essentially the same but the issues surrounding birthright and spirituality become even more apparent when viewed through the more mundane story. Also in a fantasy allegory it is pretty easy to see Darkling Stansted as an evil being who must be overcome. In a mundane story we might want to make Arturo’s interference in the collective more of a double edged sword.

Regardless we have identified a theatre of operations in the mundane story of the land the collective owns. This means the concerns of every day people, or whole cities or nations are not necessarily represented but may be reflected upon in the story’s progress. Obviously if we wanted to write a story about the impact of a major catastrophe on a large city the story of Arturo Gatwick doesn’t fit the bill.

In our mythic story of Primaris and Arturo the struggle at the heart of the story is a relatively clear one between Arturo and himself. He wants to break out of a mundane and meaningless existence and take up his birthright in a land of mythic wonder and cosmic importance. Darkling Stansted is all that stands in his way. In the mundane version of the story the issue of Arturo’s belief that a spiritual existence is more rewarding might stand a little more questioning. Darkling Stansted is not just an evil usurper, real people rarely are, he has his own history. Maybe Mellifluous Gatwick was not altogether honest in his report of events. The story suddenly becomes beset by degrees of subtlety and grey areas which are necessary to lend verisimilitude to the setting and characters.

Of course there is no rule that says a dramatic novel or thriller ostensibly set in everyday reality should be layered and convincing, by the same token there is no reason why a mythic fantasy cannot have depth and subtlety. How far you employ techniques for making something “epic myth” versus “domestic potboiler” are up to you.

Once you have made the major decisions about your world you can then go in to fill in the detail. This is an appropriate time for one of those spider diagram sessions we keep getting told are such a good idea. Let’s split the process of general sketching through to specific shadings into an exercise:

1) Get a paper and draw a circle in the middle make it quite small but big enough to write three or four words in block capitals inside it.

2) Draw a bigger circle round the outside, don’t fill up the paper totally, you might want to separate off a column on an A4 sheet to make the area with the circles in it a square. Leave enough space round the edge to jot between 20 and 50 words in blocks around the outside.

3) Pick a spot outside both circles and draw an X there. This is where the Hero begins his journey, you may label your X “START” or “HERO START’S HERE” or whatever.

4) Outside both circles is an area called WORLD ONE, this is the world as the hero sees it every day.

5) Inbetween the outer and inner circle is an area called WORLD TWO this is the world the hero is going to travel into.

6) The inside of the inner circle is the seat of FINAL CONFLICT.

7) The Hero has to journey from his start in World One through World Two to the place where the Final Conflict takes place. He may then have to undertake an escape from that place to his home. He may or may not make it back to World One as a result of this conflict. For futher details you may want to refer back to all the stuff we talked about on the monomyth.

At this stage you may have a very clear idea about what the hero is going to have to go through in order to get to his resolution. If you have none though you could carry out this subprocess to get you there:

1) Write the character’s name on the top of a sheet of paper turned portrait.

2) Divide the sheet into two columns

3) Head one column “Start” head the other “Finish”

4) List at least four things about the hero as known at the start of the story which are going to change by the end of the story.

5) List how they have changed at the end of the story.

The less things there are in this list the shorter your story is going to end up being. Don’t worry, though, none of these documents is set in stone. They’re there to get you started, not to legally bind you to anything.

Once you know, however you manage to do so, what the Hero’s journey is going to be like then you can draw it onto the double circled map you made before. Highlight all the points where the hero has an encounter along his path. If you made the table of character changes comment on how the chracter change is aided by each of these encounters. For example before crossing from World One to World Two it is traditional that the hero faces a threshold guardian.

To keep it leftfield we will apply this concept to the mundane version of the Gatwick story. Arturo travels out to the back of beyond where the Collective farms the old Gatwick estate, now renamed Darkling Meadows. When the villagers of nearby Meffbury find out Arturo intends to enter Darkling Meadows they are hostile towards him and encourage him to leave right away. Not only that Darkling Meadows itself is surrounded by a high wall topped with razor wire.

The hostility of the villagers and the barrier to progress present a very clear threshold and personify Darkling Stansted’s rejection of outsiders through the fear and hostitlity invoked in the villagers. Arturo may be an “anything for a quiet life” guy normally, but this incident could spur him on to taking on confrontations whenever he can’t avoid them.

Once you have negotiated your hero, with suitable commentary, into the Final Conflict just get him out of there again. You may not even have described his opposition in any great detail during the process but you needn’t worry about that. In thinking about these things you should have a greater idea of what sort of world you are about to send your hero into and that’s as much as you need.

If you really have generated a buzz for world creation this is the point for spider diagrams. Remember, what you are mining for in this session is implications of a central premise. We’ve taken the issue of birthright and given it a spiritual spin. What kinds of story can be explored in the tension between borthright and spirituality? All of the ideas you come up with could crop up in your story. They should all go into a process of making the story world what it is.

What will solidify things further is when you start to describe the forces which oppose your hero and that will be the subject of the next Tip. Happy World Building!

This article is one of a continuing series designed primarily to help aspiring authors get their word count up in response to those struggling during NaNoWriMo 2006. The articles outline a planning technique for any given novel which once completed aim to make it hard to stop writing the next necessary piece of information for the audience. The technique is based on structuring concepts and information and, as this is a blog, are to be read from the bottom up. They will later be collated into a single volume.

Never underestimate the power of mulling over your work in progress. All that is important is that if you are niggling away at a problem in the fiction you don’t ever think of it as something insurmountable. Basically if you have a problem that is stopping you progressing you shouldn’t ever try to headbutt it from one direction hoping that it will give up. It might but it will probably be a lot more painful than the other available option.

You should first of all get down to the simplest form of the problem. You may be stuck with the opening of chapter six but you have to go back to your plan and work out what it is about the opening of chapter six that is causing you a problem. Is it that you’re lost with your viewpoint character? Is it that you need to describe something you’re not confident in describing? Is it that an event is supposed to occur and you’re unsure how to handle the lead in? Is it that you imagine you’re going to get to a certain point and then run out of things to say?

Once you know what the actual issue is you have something to attack. So attack it. If it doesn’t yield start attacking it from a different direction. For example if it is that you are having a problem with your viewpoint character then consider every possible solution to this from changing the viewpoint chacracter to taking that character out of the novel to changing essentials about that character such as their sex, religion, race etc.

Even if you don’t end up going with whatever it is cracks the problem the problem will be cracked and that’s all that matters.