Thread: How Can I Make This More Interesting

I have this idea for a series of books about teenage girls who live in a utopia world. However I can only come up with general ideas and can't think of ways to make the stories interesting. My purpose in writing this series is to show people how I think the world should be. So far I'm only in the planning stages for this project. Attached are the notes that I've written so far.
notes.doc

For a novel, let alone a series of novels, you need long term drama, which in turn requires conflict. The most basic way of achieving that is by using protagonists and antagonists.

Now, you obviously have main characters in mind, but having a main character doesn't mean you have a protagonist. Rather, the protagonist is the person in the story who wants something; she has a specific goal or objective to carry out, which serves as her motivation throughout the story. This goal may change as the story progresses and the character developes.

To turn your characters into protagonists, just figure out what it is they want to achieve. Then, place obstacles in the way of that achievement. If the obstacle is another character, we call that an antagonist. The antagonist is the person who's motivation is at odds with the protagonist, and therefore hinders the protagonist from reaching her goal. The protagonist thus has to struggle to overcome the antagonist, which is the conflict of the story.

(Note that an antagonist doesn't necessarily have to be the villain, and the protagonist doesn't have to be the hero either. You can have a hero-antagonist and a villain-protagonist, or a hero-protagonist coupled with a hero-antagonist, etc, etc. You can also have multiple antagonists of varying degree of severity. It all depends on how you want to mix it up.)

Even if your goal is to describe a perfect world, I'm betting life will still not be entirely without strife. At least, it better not be, because that strife is what you'll want to focus on. We only care about characters when they struggle; nobody is interested in a character who is completely content with her life.

(Example: Star Trek, a franchise set in a post-scarcity future where nobody needs to work, everyone is healthy and there is no poverty or famine. And yet every episode is about hostile aliens, dangerous space phenomena or renegade holograms. Guess why.)

See also Hero's Journey, for the classical narrative pattern, which can actually be surprisingly versetile depending on how metaphorical your enterpretation of the stages is.

Some really good advice here from Anders.

Conflict: Of paramount importance to any piece of writing. Without it, you haven't got a story. If you have teenage girls, you're going to have rivalry over lots of things. How about having different cliques? One good, one bad. Fighting over boys, shoes, clothes. Girls are always spoiling for a fight, especially if there's a group of them who all like the one guy.

There's no such thing as a true utopian world. You will always have factions that disapprove of the status quo. They'll want to go back to the old world. Sometimes you might need to involve more than one storyline. Unless the story is riveting, reading about the lives of numerous teenage girls may only appeal to one market: teenage girls. One of the girls' father could be a cop who tries to deal with the rebellious faction.

Look for ways to expand your story to make it a little more mainstream. There are tons of ideas just waiting to be messed around with.

Good luck.

Originally Posted by Anders Ämting

Example: Star Trek, a franchise set in a post-scarcity future where nobody needs to work, everyone is healthy and there is no poverty or famine. And yet every episode is about hostile aliens, dangerous space phenomena or renegade holograms. Guess why.

To be fair, the Star Trek world makes no sense if you think about it for more than five minutes .

I think Iain Banks' 'Culture' is a better example, with a world many do consider utopian, which does largely make sense in its own terms, where most of the stories are about the Culture folks interacting with 'backward' civilisations in the rest of the galaxy.

A perfect world, a Utopia, will inevitably have someone who hates it. Because a Utopia is perfection, and humans are not perfect. Thus, you will find characters who rebel against the neat-and-tidy order of it all, and will attack it with passion.

You will also have characters who like the perfect harmony of everything, and will do everything they can to defend it.

Therein lies your conflict, and that would definately make things interesting.

Just a suggestion. Cheers!

Originally Posted by KyleColorado

A perfect world, a Utopia, will inevitably have someone who hates it. Because a Utopia is perfection, and humans are not perfect. Thus, you will find characters who rebel against the neat-and-tidy order of it all, and will attack it with passion.

You will also have characters who like the perfect harmony of everything, and will do everything they can to defend it.

Therein lies your conflict, and that would definately make things interesting.

Just a suggestion. Cheers!

To quote Demolition Man: "You can't take away people's right to be ***holes!"

Crystal, on this note, I suggest you try your best to think of way this utopia of yours might fail; try to see where all the cracks in the foundation are, all the little ugly problems that may arise. You're going to have to do that anyway simply because you won't be able to build a credible utopia otherwise, but if you are lucky, a few of those cracks and ugly things may be something you can use to tell a really good story.

Another way to introduce conflict to a utopia is to reveal all of the inherent flaws in it. Things like how humans can never be happy unless you take away their free will, constant pleasure can't exist because then it becomes the norm and is neither pleasure nor pain, and so on.

If you're trying to defend the ideas of your utopia, then consider what threatens it and how, or if, the society can adapt. Think of both internal threats and external threats. Maybe somewhere in there you'll find your central conflict.

Wow! This is an old topic I thought no one read anymore. If you read my new topic you will see I have come up with an idea for a story with a utopian world that has conflict in it.