A story problem is a simple way to envision your character’s plot arc. Choose your main problem, break it down into smaller challenges, and allow the main solution to appear as the character tries to deal with these tasks.

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Determining the main story problem can also help you solve a real-life conundrum, craft a customer journey, or study an existing text.

Breaking Down the Story Problem

You can begin with the main problem and break it down into its components, or begin with the main solution and break it down into its components. Or you can work in practically any order you find helpful!

1. Decide on the main problem. This is the root of the difficulty your character is facing.
2. Break the main problem down into symptoms, or smaller tasks or challenges. These are the manifestations of the main problem. The character will usually try to tackle these until they are able to see past them to the root cause of these symptoms. If you’re following The One Page Novel method, this will be the Shift.
3. List the feelings evoked by each of these symptoms. These feelings will help you draw the reader in to an understanding of how the character is trapped by their individual symptoms.
4. Consider the measures taken by the character or by other characters to deal with the symptoms. These reactions will often entail try/fail cycles (part of the Quest).
5. Determine the main solution to the main problem. This is the key, final piece that the character needs to overcome their main story problem. Usually it will involve unlocking an inner resource that they hadn’t realised they possessed (the Power).
6. Optionally, you can use the Advantages & Disadvantages sections to brainstorm ideas to help or hinder the character in dealing with their symptoms.

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An Example

Main Problem: Cinderella is powerless.
Symptoms:
1. Her step-mother and sisters treat her like a servant.
2. Her only friends are mice.
3. She can’t afford a dress to wear to the ball.
Feelings:
1. Injustice, disappointment, being unloved & unappreciated
2. Comfort, homeliness, dissatisfaction
3. Poverty, lack, disappointment, longing
Measures:
1. She tries to treat them with kindness, despite their bad behaviour.
2. She tries to be content with their company.
3. She tries to make her own dress.
Main Solution: Demonstrating kindness & inner strength.

Of course, there are many other interpretations to this fairytale. You might say that the main problem is her father’s lack of provision for his daughter, or her step-mother’s inability to care for her, and you could argue that the main solution is something else too; perhaps the intervention of her fairy godmother, or her marriage to the prince.

Thinking through these possibilities can help you pinpoint exactly what the main problem and main solution are, deep down, past all of the surface symptoms.

Stack up several “main” problems to make the character’s life even more difficult, or promote symptoms to main problems for more complexity.

Writing Worksheet Wednesday

This worksheet begins a new year! There are now over 150 worksheets in the archive, and new worksheets are posted every Wednesday.

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If you could do just one exercise a day in order to improve your writing skills, what would it be?

That was the question I wanted to answer for our final journal worksheet this year. After all, practice and improvement are the reason we keep writing journals, right?

The most exciting answer for me was to work with raw materials: words – to explore the relationships between similar or disparate words, to learn new terms, to experiment with definitions and to discover how they behave in a sentence. I don’t believe I could ever get tired of that!

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Your answer may vary. Perhaps you would prefer to:

1. Write about your best day.
2. Fill a blank page.
3. Do some freewriting.
4. Draw parallels.
5. Or imitate your favourite author.

But if you’re interested in exploring words, here is how you might use this worksheet…

Daily Writing Exercise

1. Pick a theme. This can be any word or idea you want to “unpack”.
2. Write 4 words in the ladder that relate to this theme. Challenge yourself to learn new words or new meanings for old words.
3. Use the words in a sentence (or two) in such a way that you show…
   1. One or more denotations of the words.
   2. One or more connotations of the words.
   3. How the words help to define each other by their difference or similarity.
   4. How the words relate to each other within a certain context.
   5. A new meaning, or form of a word.
4. Practice by writing an improved sentence when you return to the exercise the next day. Write another sentence to further elucidate the words, or have fun by…
   1. Changing the point of view,
   2. Turning the sentence into its negative,
   3. Or transposing it in time or space.

An example

1. THEME: Quince
2. WORDS: Yellow, pome, chimera, floccose.
3. SENTENCE 1: The fruit of the chimera – a cross between a mythical apple, the many-pomed Hydra, and her own fancy – were Naples yellow, floccose like suede, and to the touch they felt like the head of a small animal warmed by the sun.
4. SENTENCE 2: Every spring, as my petals fell away, I began to puff up my sun-coloured pomes, each a little head with its own ideas, its own chimerical notions of life formed under a floccose dome far from the earth.

More fun ideas!

1. Don’t mention the theme word in the sentences. Rely on your descriptive skills to help the reader figure it out. If you want to test this on your(future)self, trim away the strip where you’ve written the themes and tuck it in the back of your journal to check your answers.
2. Use the rungs of the ladder and the theme sections to explore hierarchies or orders. For example, I could put my quince words in order of how important they are to the theme, or in the order in which they’re noticed by an observer. This can help uncover inherent beliefs, prior knowledge and assumptions.
3. Use it to practice T.S. Eliot’s theory of the objective-correlative by choosing an emotion for the theme and finding “a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion.”
4. Fit the sentence into the world of your current work-in-progress. You might make it a thought or utterance, or the description of a setting.
5. Find a sentence or passage in a book you’re reading, pick out the words pertaining to a particular theme, and write your own sentence using these words.

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I hope you find these exercises helpful. Don’t forget to check the archive for more worksheets. There are now over 150 of them…!

More Writing Worksheets…

Not everything needs to be a matter of life and death, but death is such an enormous part of life that we can’t long avoid it in our writing. You might want to use this worksheet as part of your shadow work, for worldbuilding, or for personal reflection.

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Prompts for Writing About Death

1. What do you think happens after you die?
2. How does the thought of death affect you? Why?
3. Whose death has affected you the most?
4. What is the biggest lesson that death has taught you?
5. How do the deaths of people you didn’t know personally, affect you?
6. Recount your favourite death myth.
7. What would you like to happen to your body after you die?
8. What would you like to be written on your tombstone, in your obituary, or in a posthumous biography of your life?
9. If you were a ghost, what would be your favourite haunt?
10. What do you fear most about death?
11. How is death not what you feared?
12. Describe death as a person, creature, or symbol.
13. What are your thoughts on euthanasia?
14. Which fictional character’s death affected you the most?
15. Is your own mortality different to that of others?
16. How has your perception of death evolved over time?
17. Research a death ritual.
18. How does death create life?
19. Choose three very different characters and explore their relationships with death.
20. How would you solve the trolley problem?
21. Write a fictional will.

P.S. You might also consider killing characters, the death of the author, the death card, and the death of the seasons.

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