Week Three

This document contains four different approaches Approaches:

which you can use to clarify your vision for the
story, and to gather ideas out of which you can Tension & Conflict - pg. 1
build your outline. Character Arcs - pg. 3
The first two topics are interdependent, so I would Rule of Cool - pg. 4
recommend that you skim through those sections
completely before diving in.

Tension & Conflict

Tension is the anticipation of a strong emotion or feeling. It might be a desirable
emotion, or one that your character would prefer to avoid. In a romance novel, tension
comes from desire, fueled by the anticipation of pleasure when the romantic leads get
together. In a horror movie, tension comes from fear, fueled by the anticipation of pain
if and when the main character is hurt or killed by the monster.
So, in order to create tension in your a story, you have to give your character
something to anticipate, and that anticipated thing has to have some emotional weight.
Then you can move your character closer to the anticipated result to create rising
action, increasing the tension, or move them away from it to create falling action, and
ease the tension.
In order to keep a reader, (and yourself,) invested in the story throughout, it will help
to have one or more overarching tensions for volume 1, one or more things for your
protagonists to anticipate, for them to either try to achieve, or try to avoid.
Here are some questions to help you find those tensions.
• When you imagine the ending of volume 1, do you see triumph? Or do you see
tragedy? Why do Aslan and Xira care about the outcome?
• If Alsan has one major goal for the entirety of volume 1, what is it? What emotion
drives him to pursue it? What emotion would he feel if he succeeded? Or if he failed?
• Who or what will Aslan and Xira be up against? When they make progress, what
will force them back again? When things seem to be going alright, what makes them
get worse than ever before?

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Once you’ve answered those questions, you can fill out this diagram for an easy way to
keep track of your main tension.

Current Situation Anticipated Situation

Plot

How are things now? How do we hope / fear

things will end up?

Driving Emotion Anticipated Emotion

Plot

What feeling makes your What emotion or feeling

character want to take does your character want
action? to reach, or to avoid?

Note: It can be handy to map out more than one tension. Try creating one that
anticipates a bad outcome, and one that anticipates a good one. Then, no matter
whether your protagonist wins or loses, tension increases.

Once you know your main tension, these questions might help you turn it into
specifics for an outline.
• How will you create anticipation for the climax of volume 1? What can you show
the reader to make them understand what Aslan and Xira are fighting for? How will
you make them care?
• What are the steps along the path toward the resolution of the main tension? What
are the obstacles that will need to be overcome to reach a desired outcome, the steps
toward success? Or what are the progressively worse disasters leading to total failure?
These can be used as “beats” to structure your outline.
• How could your main tension spin off into smaller, scene-sized tensions? Could it
provide the stakes for a fight? A chase scene? A negotiation? A rescue?
• What strategies and tools will be necessary on the path to resolving the main
tension? How can you make your characters use their wits, their tenacity, their charm?
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Character Arcs
Like tensions, character arcs give a story a sense of progression. They keep things
moving in a specific, meaningful direction. Like tensions, they should have some
emotional weight to them. To keep things simple, the reader generally either wants the
character to change in a positive way, or wants them to resist a negative change.
Character arcs are usually tied pretty tightly to a story’s main tension. Here are some
ways in which that might happen:
• The emotion that drives the character’s actions starts out unacknowledged, so they
pursue their needs in a destructive way. Their arc is about understanding their own
motivations and coming to terms with their feelings. (Zuko from AtlA has a little bit
of this. He thinks he’s motivated by “honor,” but his arc is about learning what honor
really means.)
• The main tension is about defeating an external foe, but in order to do so, the
character needs to sort out their internal issues and become the kind of person who’s
capable of heroism. (In this case, the emotion that drives the tension can be unrelated
from those that drive the character arc,
• The main tension is the character arc. The character has an internal conflict, with
two emotional drives that push them in contradictory directions. The arc is about one
of those drives overwhelming the other, and the internal conflict being resolved.

Here are some questions to help clarify character arcs and turn them into specifics
for outlining:
• Is your character’s arc focused on changing something about themselves? Is it focused
on understanding something about themselves?
• Does your character have a dynamic arc, about changing? Or do they have a static
arc, about resisting change?
• What could your character do at the beginning of the story that would demonstrate
how they need to change? What could they do at the end that would demonstrate that
they have changed?
• What will make it difficult for your character to either change or resist change?
What are the external obstacles? What are the internal obstacles?
• How do you want the reader to feel about the character’s arc?
• How does the character’s arc connect to the main tension?
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Rule of Cool
The previous two approaches focus on the large-scale, overarching structures that
provide meaning to the story as a whole. They define the shape of an outline in its
entirety. This last approach does the opposite, focusing instead on small-scale ideas
that could fit within your outline, filling in some of the specifics.

I’d advise you to create a list of interesting ideas that you want to include in volume 1.
Then you can draw on that list as you compose your outline.

Here are some questions to help you collect those specific ideas:
• What elements of the worldbuilding do you think are the most interesting? What
would need to happen in the plot in order for you to have an excuse to include them?
• Are there any parts of the setting that you want to give an especially clear
description of? Places that are especially beautiful, or horrible, or strange? Why might
the characters visit those places?
• Are there any philosophical concepts that you particularly want to explore, even if
they’re not connected to the main themes? Which characters might hold those ideas,
and how and when could they express them?
• What were the concepts that drew you into this story in the first place? What were
the ideas that captured your attention? How can you make sure that they find their
place on the page?

Here are some questions to help you incorporate them into an outline:
• Can you incorporate any of the ideas you’ve recorded so far into a character arc?
Could any of them push a character to change? Or would they make change more
difficult, or push it in a negative direction?
• Could any of the ideas you’ve recorded provide tension on the scale of a scene or
chapter? Do they present physical, social, or emotional risks? Could any of them be an
obstacle between a character and their goal?
• Are there any ideas in this list that are bound to a certain location, or a certain
point in time? If so, you can bundle ideas that share a place or time, and use those
bundles as the basis for a chapter or section of the story.