I touched on the idea of identifying your core story in my post about how to describe your story in a way that makes people want to read it, but I didn’t go into detail about what I meant or how to best use this tool.

What do I mean by the core of your story? I mean what the story is about at its essence.

Twilight is about a teenage girl and a vampire who fall in love.

Wonder is about a 5th grade boy who looks radically different from everybody else and starts going to school with other kids after a lifetime of being sheltered.

Within These Lines is about an Italian American teenage girl who’s in love with a Japanese American teenage boy, and his family is taken away to a concentration camp during WWII while hers doesn’t.

Sure, there are a lot of other things that happen in these stories, but if you drill down to their essence, this is what they’re about.

Maybe you have heard this referred to as “the A story line” or the “main plot” or “the through line.” I think of it as “the core story” because that’s helpful to me.

Whatever you choose to call it, every scene in your novel should be about the core story.

That feels like an extreme statement to me, and I don’t often use extreme words when I’m teaching writing. I shy away from always and never, and I don’t say things like, “this is the best way to write” because I know what’s best for me isn’t best for everybody.

Here’s my thinking on why that statement is justified:

Just because every scene is really about the core story, that doesn’t mean that it’s obviously about the core story.

Maybe when your reader is experiencing the scene, they don’t see how it fits in with the core story. That’s fine, so long as you the author know why it matters.

Maybe your main character learns a skill or something about herself that she’ll need to know in the climax of the book. Maybe we’re meeting vital characters. There are lots of ways that a scene might apply to the core story, even if the ways are subtle.

When you show your readers something, you’re promising them that it matters.

When you’re reading a story, do you want to read scenes that don’t matter?

Neither do your readers. If you include a scene in your book, that’s a promise to your readers that the scene matters. And the longer we fixate on a topic (or character, or plot, or setting) the stronger our promise grows that this is important.

When you know what your core story is, you then have an automatic filter for, “does this scene belong, or does it not?” because the question really becomes, “does this impact my core story?”

Subplots are really about the core story too.

Subplots are entire plot arcs within the main plot arc. We see them often in epic stories. Subplots have their own inciting incident, their own black moment, their own climax, etc. Strong subplots, in my experience, always tie into the core story. They enrich it. Show it from a different angle.

The term “subplot” often gets used for things that are really story threads. The main character’s conflict with her mother or the love interest are probably story threads not subplots with their own story beats. Every novel has story threads, but not all novels have subplots.

Either way, all subplots and story threads work best when shown in the context of the core story.

The core story might exist only for your main character.

This is where a lot of your character-to-character conflict comes in. For example, in The Lost Girl of Astor Street, the core story is that Piper’s best friend Lydia has gone missing and Piper has to find out what happened to her.

This is only the core story for Piper. None of the other characters in the book are revolving their lives around this, and that’s why Piper is in conflict with them. Nobody else cares like she does. Even Lydia’s parents, who are worried about the disappearance of their daughter, are responding differently than Piper is.

If we make all the characters revolve around the core story, we end up with flat-feeling characters.

Now, that doesn’t mean that the core story should always only exist for your main character. Side kick characters or villains might have the same or very similar core stories as your main character.

What do you think? Do you agree every scene should really be about your core story? Do you think there’s wiggle room for scenes that don’t tie into the main plot? Are you unsure?