From the course: Write a Bestselling Novel in 15 Steps

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Setup: Explanation

Setup: Explanation

From the course: Write a Bestselling Novel in 15 Steps

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Setup: Explanation

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- [Instructor] Now, that we've opened up the story with a dynamic, visual scene, it's time to do some more setup work for our hero and their world. That's why this beat is appropriately called the setup. Because it's where we firmly establish our hero, their world and all of the problems in it. In the opening image, we quickly showed one aspect of our hero's life with a single snapshot. Now, we're going to spend a bit more time showing the rest. The setup is a multi-scene beat. It spans multiple scenes and pages. The setup takes up, at the most, 10% of your novel. So, obviously, a few things have to happen here. In the setup, we establish the following: the hero's goal, or what we'll be calling their wants. These are the tangible things that the hero is after, like a new job, a new house, a date with a cute boy or girl at school, to avenge their father's death, to defeat the evil empire, etc. These wants should be something tangible that we, the reader, can root for for the hero to…

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