Finding Your Story's Core Vision

Up to my eyeteeth in a pair of projects that come with a pair of seriously-daunting deadlines, I'm asking myself some hard questions about how to streamline my process without sacrificing quality. How to trust to my story instincts and cut the mental noise (self-doubt!) until I come to my own core vision for the book.

To get to the story's heart, I've decided, I must first define the following:

1. What kind of reading experience do I want my audience to have with this story? Some books are thoughtful and complex, playing with the very structure of the novel and retraining the reader about narrative expectations. Other stories carry one along more simply, allowing the reader to join one of the endless permutations of the well-loved and ageless hero's journey. There's not a right or wrong about one way or the other, but they're far different writing tasks.

2. What emotional experiences do I want to be central? Is it campy horror (who doesn't love a good zombie romp?), heartrending pathos, an understated-but-no-less-moving romance, or a hair-raising suspense?

3. In just a few words, what central emotional challenge must the protagonist face? Is he an aging math professor learning that his inflexible theorems can't be applied to human relationships? Is she a free-spirited innocent who must learn that trust can come back to bite the one who gives of it too freely? Notice that we're talking here about internal conflicts. Sometimes these don't become clear until the draft is well underway or even complete.

4. Should this story leave the reader with questions (i.e. What is the right choice, really, in some particularly-knotty situation? Is our society correct, with its emphasis on X at the expense of y?) or answers and affirmations? (In a mystery, justice eventually prevails and the central story question had darned well better be answered. In a romance, character integrity wins the day, and after their long struggle toward love, the protagonists are rewarded with an enduring connection. Since both justice and interpersonal connection are highly valued by our culture, I consider this sort of a feel-good affirmation of the readers' core values.) Both types of stories can be fabulous, and you can even mix to a certain extent, but in the end, you need to know what you are writing.

5. For whom am I writing this story? There's a huge difference between writing a book meant for young adult fans of post-apocolyptic gorefests and middle-aged women in the book-club set, for example, and in my opinion you had better know your audience, along with their tastes, needs, and expectations, quite intimately if you're gunning to sell to them. All this, it should go without saying, requires tons of reading to sharpen your awareness of your market!)

Once you've figured out your core vision for the story and its characters, it becomes far easier to shape the emerging or completed draft, and it helps me a great deal with deciding which suggestions from beta-readers are helpful and which don't work with this particular. Put simply, emphasize whatever underscores the beating heart of this story, and lose whatever conflicts.

As helpful a guide as it may be, however, your core vision - or what you think of as central - can't be utterly inflexible. Sometimes, you'll find your focus incompatible with the market you're targeting. Your agent or your acquiring editor (the one agreeing to pay for this masterpiece!) will have other ideas that, once you've gotten over being horrified and really thought them over, resonate with you. Though there are times to stick to your guns, the wise writer will realize that negotiation is part of this business, and that in the end, the readers' needs must come before your own.