Add to your energetic marks of your plot planer the external antagonists in control of each of the major turning points.

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Internal antagonists

The antagonists that represent the inner workings of the protagonist offer the richest area of development. Especially:

1) His flaw: interferes with him attaining his goal. He must overcome it and release the consequent flood of emotion for his final transformation.

2) His fear: (a) we all have fears sparked by universal emotions. The protagonist's fears can be sparked by an external foe: it makes the energy of the scene surge and creates anticipation. (b) other fears: about something that could happen. What one fears gives the reader insight into his emotional makeup and shows what he must confront to transform.

3) His hate: powerful negative emotion. When caught up in it, the protagonist is never in control of his emotion. It controls him.(He can hate an internal or an external thing). Every scene where the threat of what the protagonist hates is nearby creates anxiety in the reader.

past = comfort?

An antagonist doesn't have to intentionally hold the protagonist back.

villain: conscious antagonist, intends to steal the protagonist's goal for himself.

See yourself as the sole creator of your story and your ego will create imbalance. See yourself as the conduit and your cooperation leads to balance,

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Curiosity

Conflict - though the readers think they know how the mc will react, they are curious about what aspects of the protagonist will reveal of himself. Antagonists operate as mirrors revealing the parts of the protagonist that need healing. For each of the antagonists indicate the elements of the protagonist they represent (e.g. fear, strength, flaw, love, hatred, prejudice...)

Emotion

Employ as many antagonists is necessary to display depth and breadth of emotions in your protagonist. The tougher and cleverer the challenges and confrontations created by the antagonists, the greater will be the protagonist's eventual transformation. When he stares down his greatest fear and seizes his prize he wins.

Nature as the antagonist

The protaginist is power to control nature. Rather than treat natural events as random occurences, assign them deliberate meaning in each scene and the overall story. Nature awakens primal emotions in both characters ad readers.

Nature unfolds through four seasons. Ground the reader: season, day/night, day of the week

dawn/dusk: "between times" -> the veil between the physical and the unmanifested, the past and the future, grows thin.

Adversity

Doesn't build character. It reveals what's already there. 

Supporting characters

Mirrors reflecting back to the protagonists the elements he detects on others but is blind to in himself. Every secondary character has something to teach, awaken, challenge and love in the protagonist.

The writer's way

The greatest gift you can give to your story is the courage to allow the protagonist and yourself to fail, appear foolish, lonely, tedious or ordinary. Until a character experiences failure, fear, emptiness and alienation the change can't occur.

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Characteristics of an appealing MC:

- An attractive quality

- Room for growth (beliefs can change)

- Clear goals

- Something to lose

• Provide characters with different roles to play
• Give each character a past
• Use dialogue to convey personality
• Choose unexpected details that are easy to visualise
• Checkov's gun: employ foreshadowing to deliver clever reveals
• Add a twist to familiar concepts
• Life's big questions: raise questions that go beyond the story

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Subplots are like main plots at their core: they have their own individual conflict, story structure, and relevant character arcs. The real difference is one of priority,

Subplots give your reader the sense your story takes place in a larger world, where time passes and people live their lives outside the immediate scope of your story.

If subplots only had ties only to the main plot, they'd still feel disconnected. Make sure each subplot's structure overlaps at key moments of your story. 

1) Plan each of your individual subplots as if they were their own standalone story. After all, they are microstories. They must have:

• hook
• 1st plot point
• midpoint
• 3rd plot point
• climax
• resolution

2) Compare their structures

3) With a chronology created, you now need to shift the events of your story around to overlap the major plot points of your subplots so that they occur close together (or simultaneously).

4) Create an impact. The subplots must matter to both the main plot and one another. To do this in your own novel, simply find ways the events of one subplot could matter to another. 

Subplots have the power to make your story feel real.

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Episodic story structure: each episode resolves the conflic at hand while setting up another conflict for the future. They're connected by a larger narrative or unifying theme. 

Each episode needs to be distinct, while still feeling like a logical part of a single story.

Episodes must have all the story elements a larger novel should have.

Episodes need to progress the overall plot, without stepping on the toes of later episodes.

Needs a connective tissue to bind each episode together thematically.

Three different types of episodic story structure

1) The overarching plot

Just like scenes function as microstories, each episode in this type of story acts as a miniature story within the larger narrative of your novel. They're still individual adventures with a clearly resolved conflict in each episode, but they build towards a clear culmination. Each episode has something to do with the larger conflict in some way. You still need the major turning points from the three act story structure to occur over the course of your episodes.

2) The framing device

Not a single overarching plot. Instead, they are linked by a common thematic element and an outside framing device.

3) The serialization

You just follow the same characters as they face similar conflicts across episodes. They likely change little from episode to episode and no larger conflict is being explored (e.g. Sherlock).

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If you're running out of ideas for fleshing out your story, think about how you can explore your secondary character arcs and give side characters more of a role in your story.

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Decide on what type of story you're looking to tell and then keep that tone consistent throughout your novel.