What I'm about to tell you will sound insane. I ask you to put your sanity aside and join me on a wild ride. Of math. Yes, math. I know. I hate it too. But I love a certain type of math that helps me not think about math when I'm writing a novel. And hell, who knows, maybe I'm a closet mathematician who decided to become a novelist just to spite the mathematician. I better stop. This is starting to turn into a story.

What I'm about to tell you is very simple. It's so simple, you will probably hate me. Join the club. I hate myself too. For not seeing this earlier. For not knowing. A very simple truth.

Any novel can be broken down to pieces that start from a word and end with the novel itself. Right. You heard this before. But wait. There is more. Any novel can be written easily according to how those pieces function IF YOU STICK WITH THEIR FUNCTION.

I had to scream it in your face. In mine, too. In fact, I have Post-it sticky notes above my laptop as I'm typing this, screaming at me to adhere to the elements of the novel AND NOT STRAY. What I'm about to outline for you below is a simple list that starts small and gets big, with every line of it constituting a novel element and the rules by which said element must be written. This is a result of me dunking my head back into books on writing, plotting, and all that jazz. Most recently and notably, The Story Grid by Shawn Coyne WHICH YOU ALL MUST READ (no, I'm not getting paid for telling you this, but you can send me chocolate for turning you on it). Let's put our arguments of the deep soul searching that writing is as opposed to rules of writing and experiment with this wild idea.

WORD
1. Active
  - None of your passive "she was stabbed with a knife," rather active "the knife stabbed her" or some such.
2. Precise
  - None of "she ran quickly," rather "she sprinted."
3. Noun
  - This is your bread, it's all about nouns.
4. Verb
  - And this is your butter, making the bread move. No adjective or adverbs, or as little as you can swing it.
SENTENCE
1. Must turn
  - The sentence is the breathing fabric of your novel, every sentence must contain conflict. It must start one way and end another way. It must TURN. The emotional charge must be the opposite, like love/hate. "She kissed him, her face twisted with hatred," I don't know, something like that, you get it. The degree of the turn of course depends on the impact you want it to have.
  - There are two types of turns: character action and revelation. You must vary these, so your reader won't get bored.
2. Must carry theme
  - You'd be surprised how much you can say with sticking to metaphors that describe your theme. You must try to inject your theme in your most important sentences. And if not, than at least allude to it. Always keep it within a glimpse of the reader. For example, in TUBE I try to make most sentences about penetration.
3. Must be short
  - You can get away with long sentences, but only if they are surrounded by short ones. Then they will really shine. The contemporary reader has no patience for long sentences. I'm a reader, and I agree with this statement.
BEAT
1. Must turn
  - Yeah, you got it. It's the same principle as in the sentence. Every beat must begin with one emotional charge and end with the opposite one. Or as much as makes sense to your story. By the way, a beat is smaller than a scene. It's a beat of conflict, or a moment of change. "You're an idiot!" "You're an idiot yourself!" There, that was a beat. A very short one, just to illustrate. Don't worry, an explanation is below.
2. Must have Call, Complications, Crisis, Climax, Close.
  - These are the 5 Cs, as I call them. Shawn calls them in his book Inciting Incident, Complications, Crisis, Climax, and Resolution. It was too much for me to remember, so I use Call from the Hero's Journey for Inciting Incident, and Close for Resolution simply because it starts with a C. Let me explain them.
  1. CALL: Two characters get onstage.
  2. COMPLICATIONS: Two characters are in conflict. There are three types:
    1. Inner conflict: the character battles with an inner demon, an emotion.
    2. Personal conflict: the character battles with another character.
    3. Extra-personal conflict: the character battles with society/nature at large.
  3. CRISIS: Two characters wonder, "What to do?"
  4. CLIMAX: Two characters make a choice and act on it.
  5. CLOSE: Two characters' reactions to what they just did.
SCENE
1. Must start as late as possible
  - I'm sure you've heard this before. Cut to the chase. We don't need the lengthy descriptions of how the alley looked. We need to get our hearts pumping, reading about your hero sprinting down that alley, the monster's hot breath an arm's length away.
2. Must turn
  - What did you think? Of course it must. The scene is the most important element of your novel. A novel is just a string of scenes, and if you write every scene with a turn that has a huge impact, you will write a novel that has a huge impact. Period. Every scene that doesn't turn must either be rewritten or cut.
  - There are 4 ways a scene can turn (paraphrased from The Story Grid book):
    1. From good to bad.
    2. From bad to good.
    3. From good to better.
    4. From bad to worse.
3. Must have the 5 Cs
  1. CALL: Something happens that upsets the hero.
  2. COMPLICATIONS: Shit is starting to get progressively worse. You can have multiple complications. That's what's in Hero's Journey is called Tests, Allies, and Enemies. In other plot structures it's called Pinch 1, when the villain is pinching the hero to keep moving forward.
  3. CRISIS: This is the bottom of depression of your hero. No matter what choice he or she makes, it's bad. Both choices are bad. (Usually there are only two).
  4. CLIMAX: Your hero has decided and is acting upon the choice! Yeah, baby!
  5. CLOSE: And after that monster was slaughtered, there is the body to dispose of. Dammit. Yes, this part is about what happens after the big climax, and it's very important, to have your reader catch their breath, and it can also act as a CALL for the next scene, that begins right after, so the scenes are nested like links in a chain.
4. Must have 1 decision: 1 exposition + 1 character + 1 action
  1. In every scene you write your hero must make a decision, which is driven by exposition and/or by something happening, some action. It doesn't always have to be the hero. It could be a secondary character, but the one whose decision is important enough to put onstage. In other words, the moment of the secondary's character subplot is moving the main plot forward and therefore must be visible. If there is no decision, it's not a scene. Rewrite it or cut it.
5. Must have 1 location and 1 time
  - Basically, as soon as you switch locations, or time, you have entered a new scene. It's a good idea to make scenes into whole chapters because of this, but you don't have to. Just divide them with a line of empty space.
6. Must be 1,000 to 5,000 words long
  - This is not set in stone, just as a guideline. I have plenty of scenes that are about 500 words. Some scenes can be just one line. It all depends on your story. But longer than 5,000 words won't hold your reader's attention. Edit it down.
  - Make sure you vary the lengh of your scenes. Map out your novel and look at the word count of your scenes. If you have 10 of them at 2000 words each, one after another, your reader will sense the repetition, get bored, and set the book aside.
7. Must end as early as possible
  - Same concept as with the beginning of the scene. Trim the fat.
8. Must have a transition to the next scene
  - Either leave white space between scenes, like mentioned above, or find a way to transition from one scene to another. My favorite way is to do a quick description of the surroundings, which I stole from Steinbeck (yes, injecting the surroundings with the theme too).
9. Must cause the next scene
  - This is a simple plotting truth. Every scene must cause the next scene. If it doesn't, you don't have a plot, you simply have a collection of scenes.
10. MUST CARRY THEME
  1. This is in all caps just to remind you. Every element of your novel, starting with the sentence, must carry your theme. But a scene must ALWAYS do it. In essence, you can write an entire novel out of repeating the same scene. See my post about 60 scenes.
SEQUENCE
1. Must turn
  - You thought next comes chapter? Nope. Next comes a string of scenes that thematically holds together as one unit but is shorter than an act. I will type out all the musts here quickly, without explanations, as I have already given them above.
2. Must have the 5 Cs
  - CALL
  - COMPLICATIONS
  - CRISIS
  - CLIMAX
  - CLOSE
3. Must carry theme
4. Must have genre-dictated scenes
  - This is a new one, as I haven't covered it above. What Shawn Coyne describes in his book, and what my writing mentor told me as well, is this: in every genre there are particular scenes and conventions that must be present in the novel or it won't work. For example, for a thriller it's red herrings, a MacGuffin, a dead body, a clock, a false ending, etc. For romance there must be a scene of the first kiss. And so on. I'm not an expert here, so you go do your research. And, of course, once you learn the rules and stick by them, you'll learn how to break them too.
ACT
1. Must turn
  - I had to repeat it. You understand why. In other words, turn means payoff. Whatever you have set up in the beginning of the act must be payed off at the end of the act. There are three acts in every novel, though some writers like to call them four acts, which is still three acts with the second act broken in two. They are each a particular length. ACT 1, The Hook, is 25% of your novel, ACT 2, The Build, is 50% (see, that's why it's easy to break it in half), ACT 3, The Payoff, is 25%.
2. Must have the 5 Cs
  - Yes, same stuff again. CALL, COMPLICATIONS, CRISIS, CLIMAX, CLOSE. In conventional terms, or what I've seen people use often, COMPLICATIONS really are Plot Point 1 and Pinch 1 (or whatever they are called), and CLIMAX is Pinch 2 and then Plot Point 2. So see? It's all the same structure, just named differently, and in some cases going into more detail, in others less.
3. Must carry theme
NOVEL
1. Must turn
2. Must have 3 Acts
3. Must have the 5 Cs
4. Must carry theme

THIS IS IT.

Lesson over, girls and boys. I hope it was helpful to you. All this math. I know it was tremendously helpful to me to make this list. At one point I will transfer it into my Scrivener plotting template and share it with you. Probably after I finish TUBE. At the moment I'm still gathering information and might add some more stuff. But this is what I got so far, and I can tell you.

IT UNBLOCKED ME.

Not that I was blocked before. But I was spouting shit on paper without thinking, later dragging my feet through that mess, tearing out my hair. Now every morning I sit down and start writing the first sentence knowing exactly what I need to write and why. For example, I have written so far 7 scenes out of 48 total for TUBE. And every scene opens with a new character, to vary them. So because the first scene opened with TUBE, I knew the second one needed to open with someone else. So it was Natasha. The third scene opens with Yuri, the fourth with Olesya, the fifth with the train carriage, the sixth with Alla Borisovna, the seventh with a bottle of vodka (yes). Tomorrow I'm writing the eighth scene and I'm opening it with Dima. For now I have the opening sentence, "Dima turned the key in the lock and kicked the door open." I know that the ending sentence must be the opposite of this (TURN), so maybe it will be him locking the door. I don't know. I also stick to nouns and verbs. To make it turn, I use the word "kick." Why would he kick it? Unlocking the door is a calm action, kicking it is either angry or excited. So I have turned the sentence. Now I know that the next one I must turn too. And it must be caused by the previous sentence. And so on.

Suddenly writing became a pleasure of solving a puzzle. I'm no longer afraid. I'm excited like a kid with a new toy, solving it as I go.

If you apply the above to your writing and it works, let me know! Also, read The Story Grid. It will change your life. It changed mine. Onward.