Close your eyes. We’re going on a road trip.

Wait. It might be kind of hard to read the rest of this article with your eyes closed. You can go ahead and open them.

Okay, so you’re sitting in your car. You’re looking down at a map and…

Wait. A car? This is an imaginary trip. Let’s ride on dragons instead.

So you’re sitting on your dragon, looking at a map. You’re about to begin your long, hard, tiring, and maybe even bloody, journey of novel-writing. Before you is a map of infinite possibilities.

Character arcs. Development. Battle scenes. Romantic ones. Heart-wrenching character growth. Main characters, supporting characters, and background characters. Dastardly plans. Evil monologues. (Okay, maybe not.)

There are so many amazing things to see and explore. You can’t wait to get started. It’s going to be one thrilling ride.

So you take off on your dragon and start visiting the places you want to go. You head off to a place you can delve into a delicious sub-plot involving stolen griffin eggs and cheese. Or maybe a prince that was kidnapped by fairies, and the prince has a fairy phobia.

You’re well on your way, and you’re exited, and then…

…wait, where were we going again?

When writing a story, it’s quite easy to get distracted from what your book is really about, at its core – if we ever even knew in the first place. Now, most of us will have a general idea about where the story is going – but it’s often quite vague. When it’s time to start a novel, having a strong, core idea – the very concept or theme that your story revolves around – is crucial to its execution.

Since the core of a novel is the thing that everything in the story works towards – characters, plots, sub-plots, themes, scenes – if the core concept is not clear, then nothing else in the novel will line up properly.

Before people go on vacations, or road trips, or anything of the sort, they always plan ahead. They may stop at other places, go sight seeing, but they ultimately know where they’re going.

If someone is driving across the United States from, say, New York, they aren’t just going to get in a car and start driving, hoping for the best. Generally, people will plan their destinations far in advance – from New York, to Seattle. Or Portland.

Now, what’s the fun in having a road trip if you aren’t going to stop and go sight-seeing along the way? There are a lot of cool places in between New York and Seattle.

But if you don’t know where you’re going, there’s no telling where you might end up. Not having a clear direction when writing a novel can lead to problems.

At best, it can feel shaky and uncertain. At worst, it can be jumbled and chaotic.

Finding the ‘core’ or ‘center’ of a novel can be pretty difficult, especially for a writer. A core concept is simple, and clearly defined. It’s hard for writers to step back and let go of all the details and complexity and remember what it is, exactly, this story is about.

It’s really hard the strip away all the complexities of a novel and see what’s really underneath.

I know that’s the case for me. When I try to tell someone what my novel is about, my brain freezes. Because honestly, I don’t always know. Or even if I do, I can’t begin to describe it. There is far too much information in my head for me to describe it in anything shorter than, well, a novel.

So what is the core of a novel? And how does one go about finding it?

The core of your novel is the single idea that the entire story revolves around. It is simply this:

Your character.

What he strives to obtain.

And what gets in his way.

It sounds pretty simple, but defining it clearly is actually quite a bit harder than it sounds. It forces one to step back and strip away all the other, supportive themes or ideas, and focus on that one, single thing.

A good way to do this is simply sit down and explain your novel in one sentence. If that proves itself too difficult, try doing it in a paragraph – then gradually work your way down one sentence at a time. Keep doing this until you have one sentence. Don’t rush it – it can take quite a while to get it right. Sometimes it can take hours to get it right, possibly even more. But when you’re done, you’ll be looking at your novel boiled down to its purest form, looking at the central theme that everything else in the book, no matter how complex, revolves around.

So, what about you? Do you think it’s important to have a defined core or center to a novel to make it work? How do you go about finding it? Anything you might add?