If you want to write a novel then you must begin to think of the situation, and the story.
Situation is context, the nature of events that brought about the story. Story is sequence of events regarding the preceding change.
And since all good stories are about transformation you want to isolate what caused the change. After that you must begin to think of how your characters handled the change.
Say for instance last week you saw a movie about sibling rivalry. Since seeing that movie you have been moved to write a story, or novel, on the theme of sibling rivalry.
You analyze and think about why this theme of sibling rivalry has provoked and stimulated you so. In so doing you realize that your spouse has been a part of sibling rivalry in her or his family, something you, a single child, have found quite fascinating and unnerving, particularly regarding how it affects you, and most especially, the relationship with your spouse.
You research and do some reading on the subject of sibling rivalry. Along the way you learn that not only does one’s relationships with parents, mother and father, effect the relationship with their wife or significant other, but their birth placement, and also, guess what, the nature of relationships with their siblings.
That would explain why sometimes, maybe oftentimes, in heated moments, your spouse says that you remind her or him of their elder, or younger sibling, the one with whom they have their greatest rivalry. And let’s say that this sibling that you remind them so much of is the same gender as your spouse.
Wow! You’ve got a lot of information here. You want to start writing. Still you don’t know where to begin.
Go back to where this all began, the movie that centered around the theme of sibling rivalry.
The movie was about two brothers who grew up always in competition with each other. The tough and successful, the elder brother who became wealthy has lost both his kidneys to diabetes. After being on dialysis for two years he is still waiting for a kidney to become available.
The younger less successful brother, a simple guy, nice, who never achieved much professionally, dies in a car accident, one that leaves his kidneys in tact. His driver license says he is an organ donor. Doctors extract his kidneys, and make it available to the donor network.
The older brother undergoes a transplant and receives a kidney unaware it is from his younger brother who has been killed.
Two days later he receives a call from his sister-in-law. “Your brother’s dead.”
At the funeral the elder, the successful brother learns that his brother died an organ donor and his kidneys were given to someone. The elder brother who has always prided himself on earning everything he has received begins to wonder. Did I receive my brother’s kidney?
He and his brother had not spoken in three years. Their last words were that of an argument. The elder brother had refused to lend money to the younger brother who had a penchant for gambling. The elder brother eventually learns he, in fact, did receive his younger brother’s kidney. Boy, what an upset in the course of one’s life?
This is the storyline of the movie that so moved, and nags you. It will not leave you alone, haunts all your thoughts
What part of the story most grabs you?
More importantly, what part of the situation of this movie will not let you go? Is it the aspect of the brothers not having spoken for three years? Or that they last saw each other at the end of an argument?
Isolate the sticking point, the nexus of identification for either yourself, or what meshes with what you witness in the interactions between your spouse, and her or his siblings.
What is the conflict?
This is the situation of your story.
Do you have a story you are working on?
What is the situation?
What is the plot?