“Write down everything that happens in the story, then in your second draft make it look like you knew what you were doing all along.”

-Neil Gaiman

Every Sunday of this glorious National Novel Writing Month 2022, I’ll be doing a mini-deep-dive into a particular element of story structure that might be giving you trouble at this moment. This week, you started a novel! Congratulations! In honor of that, let’s talk about how to start a novel. More specifically, let’s talk about act one.

The first act of your novel is, unsurprisingly, all about setup. My personal process where the first act is concerned is to make a huge mess, have a massive amount of fun, and tell myself this is Act 3 Colleen’s problem. Act 3 Colleen will later be extremely mad at me for some of the decision I’m making, but it’s a first draft, so she’ll be allowed to just ignore whatever problems Act 1 Colleen creates that she doesn’t like or can’t use later on. Everybody wins!

But for those of you who don’t favor simply hurling as many plot points as you can think of at the page and resigning yourself to combing through the mess later with all the enthusiasm of someone scraping brains off the wall after the police are done with a crime scene, there is an alternative. You could sit down and make sure you have all of these things that need to happen in a first act:

• All the major characters have been introduced
• The conflict and stakes are well established, and have usually been demonstrated at least once through some kind of consequences
• Whatever forces are opposing the main character (i.e. the antagonist) are at least somewhat well understood
• At the end of the first act, the main character is forced to make a big decision of some kind, or react to a major event, related to the main conflict. Usually this has consequences that fuel more conflict and character growth through the rest of the book.

That last point is important because later in the story, your character will again be faced with a decision related to the primary conflict, and they’re going to react differently. That’s how character development works. You show it happening by putting a character up against the same obstacle repeatedly, and showing them making a different choice. So right now, you’ve got to give them a decision to make that they wouldn’t realistically make later in the story. You’re laying the groundwork.

Now, it really doesn’t matter what order you piece all of this together in, or if you missed something, or whatever. You’re writing a first draft – it’s not supposed to be perfect. And even if it was, who am I to tell you how to fit all this in? It’s not my novel. The point is, by the time your story noticeably turns a corner and enters the midsection, your readers should understand who the characters are, what’s after them, and why everyone’s making such a big deal about it.

As you wade into act two, focus on the consequences your characters are facing for the way they behaved in act one. What ripple effects did their screw-ups have? Why did the way they acted matter?

That should be enough to push you into the second act for now. Come back next week to hear more about what to do with the middle of your novel – one of the biggest sticking points people hit during Nanowrimo.

Happy week two, and happy writing!