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How Do I Make the Setup not Boring?
I’ve been looking at Blake Snyder’s beat sheet and I’m encountering a pacing issue with my plot. I feel like it’s going too fast and too slow at the same time. The novel starts out fast in the “Prologue” which is six years prior to when the main story starts. There’s a lot of action and an introduction to the world. It’s about a cataclysmic event that changes everything, but as the main character experienced it. Now that I’m on to the main story, I feel like my set up of it is much slower in comparison. I know where I want to go next (the call to action is the King requesting the MC’s presence in the capital because she belongs to a group of people that might be able to solve his problem). but it’s getting there that I’m struggling with. How do I set up the world as it is now and what her life is like without it being boring? Especially since the main antagonist (the cataclysmic event) has already been introduced and won’t appear again for a while. If I go straight into the call to action, is that too fast? How long should I set up her current life before I introduce the change? It almost feels like I’m doing two setups and two inciting incidents. Is that a problem?
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1 Reply
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Makayla, you could start with the call to action, but first it might make sense to ask yourself what conflicts exist in the character’s everyday world that show us who she is and how she’s been crippled by and is coping with the damage caused to her by that cataclysmic event (which I’m assuming is also her backstory trauma)?
Some questions you could ask yourself as you’re brainstorming:
How is she dysfunctional and struggling to keep her life together?
What is she pretending she’s okay with that’s really making her unhappy?
What dreams has she given up because of that cataclysmic event, and what less-than-perfect situations is she putting up with because the cataclysmic event makes her feel powerless or unworthy or otherwise unable to go after what she really wants?
How is she punishing herself for not having coming out of the cataclysmic event in the way that she thinks she should have (did she lose someone? fail to stop someone from doing something awful? give up one of her principles? do something terrible that she regrets? etc)? And how is her self-flagellation not only messing up her life, but making the people who care about her unhappy too?
What relationships has she lost or sacrificed because of the emotional damage she took during the cataclysmic event?
How has she lost faith in herself, in her world, in other people, or in some deity she believes exists because of what happened in the cataclysmic event?
If the event was really cataclysmic for her, she should be trapped in the aftermath of it in some way. And however she’s trapped, that’s a source of conflict in her everyday world that lets you show who she is and what her flaw/wound is during the setup phase.
You could also look to the character arc you’ve set up for her — how are you planning to have her change during the story? And how did the cataclysmic event damage her in a way that’s been holding her back from making that change? If you know what her character arc is and how it ties to her backstory, that can also be a great source of conflict for the setup phase.
For example, if the backstory made her decide that the best way to live is to take care of number one, and the change you want her to make is to learn to care about other people, then you can look for ways that being selfish/protecting herself at the expense of others is creating conflicts with others in her everyday life.
Best wishes,
Bonnie
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