From Muse to Method: A (Creative) Writer’s Guide to Story Analysis

We’re used to thinking of writing as a creative art, and as such, one that should be born out of emotions, flow through your fingers under the guidance of the muse, and naturally lead to characters that come to life on the pages, practically writing themselves.

But if you’ve ever read a piece you’ve written and found yourself wondering if it was created by a group of monkeys (as the story goes), or had a staring contest with a blank page, you’ll know that that’s not always the case.

Writing is an analytical activity as much as it is creative. You need to analyze your characters’ motives, events, and plot lines for consistency and logical order. You need to solve problems when your characters find themselves in tangly situations, and play “connect the dots” to make sure a character gets from point A to B in a way that doesn’t cause your readers to ponder, “WTF?”

Analytical work such as this can be done at any point in your writing, whether it’s at the beginning when you’re planning the book, at the end when you’re reviewing the incoherent ramblings that stare back at you from your manuscript, or sometime in the midst of the process when the juices of inspiration run out and you need to stop and recalculate your route.

While not a must for when you’re just getting started, the technique we’re about to review can help you understand your characters better, ensure that they have depth, and that their actions make sense. It’s also a great way to validate your plot and uncover potential plot holes.

The Hero, The Villain, and The Comical-Relief Sidekick

Analyzing your characters is similar to the work User Experience (UX) professionals do when they brainstorm the different users—or personas—that will use an application.

The idea here is that you identify the main players and try to figure out what they want and why.

A great way of doing this is giving each a face and a name, and with AI at your fingertips, doing so is easier than ever!

If you’re in the midst of writing, or have started editing your messy first draft, you might have a pretty good idea of the fictional people you’re dealing with here. But if you’re only getting started, this is where vague ideas will start to coalesce into solid forms.

Be careful, though, not to spend too much time generating or finding the image that resembles your character best, or brainstorming a name you can later change, as that’s not the point. Close enough is good enough for this purpose.

Once the main characters in your book are identified, start answering the following questions for each character:

1. What are their main personality traits?

2. What are their strengths?

3. What are their weaknesses?

4. What do they want?

5. Why do they want it? (this is where you need to understand the emotional needs behind the character’s quest and what it would mean for them not to reach their goals.)

6. What are they willing to do to get it?

The end result of your work should look something like this (here’s an example of the analysis I did for Torik from Monsters and Heroes):

Main personality traits: Bold, clever, confident, curious and ambitious.

Strengths: Fearless and will take chances to get what he wants; he maintains composure in tricky situations and relies on himself to solve them.

Weaknesses: He’s willing to bend the rules to get his way, and his pride is the main force driving him forward. The need to maintain an image can push him to reckless decisions.

Goals: He wants glory and recognition; he won’t settle for a small achievement and a quiet life—he wants his name to be known; he wants the glory.

Emotional needs: He wants more than the simple life he led, and once he’s made his goal known to everyone in his hometown, it would be very shameful for him to come back empty-handed.

How far would be go: He would do almost anything. He won’t kill an innocent, but morals are not too big of a concern for him.

I haven’t generated a picture for this guy, but I had one of the characters from the series Vikings in mind when I was writing him (and if you subscribe and guess which one correctly—I’ll send you a free Kindle version of the book as a gift!)

Having this sort of profile for each character makes it clear if any action, response or feeling of theirs is in alignment. More than that, when you get stuck and don’t know what your character should do next—refer to this cheat sheet and the answer will become clear.

If, for instance, you’re writing a character whose goal is to become the greatest mage in the world and whose moral compass is low, you’ll know what they’re likely to do if they are faced with a situation in which they have an option to betray a friend for a chance to rise in rank.

You can also use this knowledge to create more obstacles for your characters, raising the stakes of the story. For instance, gifting your protagonist with the rare fear of strawberries, then making them fall in love with a strawberry farmer to make things more interesting.

The Quest, The Obstacle, and The Reward

Characters are the heart of your story, and identifying them, as well as getting to know them better, is the most important part of working on your book (aside from writing it). But what sets a book apart from a random flow of events is plot.

Plot is the next thing you’ll have to identify: the main events and the order in which they take place.

The main questions you need to be able to answer about your plot are:

1. What is the story’s setting? Where does it take place?

2. What is the story’s tone? Light? Emotional? Dark?

3. What are the main events in the story? (bonus points if you can explain why these events need to happen.)

4. What are the main conflicts that the heroes of the story face? (and why do they need to face them?)

5. How do these conflicts get resolved?

6. How does the story end?

These questions will help you ensure there are no loose ends flapping in the wind, and that you know where your story is going and why.

They also help validate the scenes and events of the story, and make sure they lead to the desired goal.

I won’t use my book as an example here for fear of spoilers, but let’s take a story about a brave goblin princess who’s on a quest to save her drunk half-brother from the clutches of a giant hedgehog that’s terrorizing the forest but secretly wants everyone to like him (and all of this takes place in a dark and dystopian world).

Let’s also say you wrote a scene in which this goblin heroine encounters a unicorn and they sing a duet about daffodils.

Understanding your plot and where it goes will give you a lens through which to evaluate the scene—does it take the heroine where she wants to go? Does it align with the atmosphere you’re trying to create and the tone in which you’re writing? In this example, the answer to both questions will likely be no (unless the song is the means to cast a spell to defeat the hedgehog, and it’s also on the darker side). The decision then might be that the scene, while wonderful and whimsical, just doesn’t belong here and should probably go.

Conclusion

While the idea of analyzing the story you’re writing might sound daunting, this process can be very creative. This is where you’re deciding what you want to tell the world with your story, who your characters are and what they will do (as well as what or who will stand in their way and how they’ll overcome it).