Ida is dubbed a priestess, with all the rights, responsibilities, and magical powers pertaining. But she says, “No, please not me!” She’s old, and wants to stay with her family (where she feels needed). Ida has never been anywhere, and does not want to leave her village, where she is an elder. But things start falling apart for her socially, she regrets her choice, and her confidence plunges. Skip ahead a few months…

Note: I can’t decide if the above section is Backstory or Story. Should I include the above section, or start with the next section?

Ida experiences a disturbance, and some difficult events occur that leave her feeling estranged from family and village. We get a glimpse of Narwa, a 16 year-old girl in trouble whom Ida cannot help. Ida finally accepts her role and leaves home in a dramatic exit. (6K)

Skip ahead a couple of years. During the skipped period: Ida left, uncertain about her new role, to sojourn in another land where she became a religious and political hero. It’s not terribly important to the plot. She gained experience and confidence. (I could come back later and write about her adventures in that other land, as a separate stand-alone book.) In the meantime things got worse in her country. Ida came back to see how she could help, and met opposition. She’s been marginalized and is frustrated. Narwa had her own problems and is now established in a somewhat tenuous position, with the opposition.

Note: I don’t plan to show/tell the section above, except as filtered backstory in the upcoming sections. Do I need a scene or two from the skipped period, for Ida? More? OR, should I start my book with the next section?

Now resume the story with Narwa and find out where she is, what she’s been up to, and what her subplot/setup problems are. This is really her introduction. (4K)

Cut to meet Renan, a 19 year-old member of an important family, and discover his subplot problems. He is forced to confront something unpleasant about himself. (3K)

Dip into Ida to see how she is and what she’s up to now (get a bit of Backstory).

Narwa hears about a threat against Ida, but doesn’t know (yet) who she is.
Ida experiences the threatened confrontation.

Renan goes to hear Ida speak publicly; he watches from the sidelines as she is thwarted and marginalized by the crowd. Then Renan’s uncle demands him to take on a new role, but he refuses.

Ida must now gather her team. She selects Renan and some others. She instructs Renan to leave where he is and take on that new role under his uncle’s authority.

Note: Now we have completed Act I, the beginning, and will move into the middle. Have I had too many beginnings for the various MCs, and is this beginning too long? Can I say I’ve already moved into the middle?

Ida’s story will be to tackle the story problem with her team’s help. The story problem is confronting the poor choices that her people have made, and their need to return to the right path. Ida gains some influence but is unsuccessful in spurring change. Using their special abilities, the team members finds out about a pending threat, get the people’s attention, and warn them to quit following the opposition. In the end, the threatened event occurs, but many people follow Ida’s lead and survive. The team is in place to rebuild their society.

Narwa’s story will be finding out she’s on the wrong side, and occasionally bumping into the other MCs; in the end she will switch sides and deliver an important piece of information to our heroes.

Renan’s story will be to support Ida while serving against his will in a political role, until he leaves that role to work with Ida’s team in tackling the major story problem. Renan will have a love interest on the team.

Thanks for hanging with me this long.

Here's one dynamic but generic listing of common themes in literature from San José State University, 30 or so;
http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/patten/theme.html

The synopsis suggests to me there are more than a few of those themes in the novel. Multiple themes are not necessarily an issue, although I'd like to know what the overarching one is. The last one in the above listing seems to me from the synopsis a potentially predominating one;

I found a couple of exercises helped me zone in on my novel's core questions early on, such as:

• writing a one-sentence synopsis. Ie, if someone asks me what my story is about, I can give them this.
• writing a pitch/query synopsis (~200 words).
• writing a sentence describing the theme.

With multiple pov characters and a large number of story arcs I still found trying to immediately write up a chapter-by-chapter synopsis completely impossible. I'm sure a more experienced writer can do it straight off, but I had to then write a bullet-point story for each character, weighing it against the theme I was going for.

Only then could I start taking plot points, swapping them about with virtual index cards until I had a series of events I could transform into a synopsis.

If this is your first draft of the plot, could it be that another way of approaching the plotting and central themes of your story would help?

The story you're ending is an event story. Something is out of balance and is put back in balance by choosing the "right path". If that's the case, then it seems to me that the story starts when Ida recognizes that or that she needs to do something about it.

The overarching theme is, “God forgives and favors people who repent; He punishes those who refuse to turn away from evil.”

The story problem is that the people of this land are worshipping false gods, and many people fear that God has forsaken them. Later, the problem builds: Ida will discover that God plans to punish them if they don’t return to Him. Ida and her team must do all they can to convince the population to repent.

When Ida is called to be God’s priestess and she resists, she is part of the problem. She sees how her culture is decaying, and knows she should act, but is afraid.

Can I have both an idea and a character story? Ida, Renan, Narwa, and the population all work out the theme in one way or another. The internal journeys of the MCs are just as relevant as the story problem.

There are three places to start:
1. When Ida was first called to be a wandering priestess. God allowed her to stay home, but only so long as she kept her new abilities/role a secret from the villagers.

2. When life is getting difficult for Ida and she realizes she has to leave. Her sister dies, believing God has given up on them (and now no one is dependant on Ida anymore). Ida can’t convince Narwa that God is still active in their land, so Narwa turns to the false gods. Ida feels like she’s been lying to the village by not telling them she is His priestess. Ida burns down her home trying to use her new abilities, fighting a creature sent by the opposing faith’s priests. She can’t explain how it happened and keep her secret. Everything comes to a head and she reveals who she is now, and leaves to go wherever God directs her.

(I’m wondering if I should discard the 1-2 year gap.)

3. When Ida returns from her journeys ready to get started in her own land, and struggles with an unwilling population and powerful followers of the false gods. Narwa is now a novice priestess in that other faith.

I’ve done a fair bit of the tasks Ben M mentioned, except for focusing on the theme—that’s always just been a given, not something I‘ve intentionally used much in weighing the choices. I’m still waffling.

Would it help if I move up Ida’s knowledge of the threat of punishment? My plan was to leave that until Ida gathers her team.

Meredith, I’m not fond of your suggested starting point because I like what I’ve written. I’m reluctant to scrap it. That doesn’t mean its not the best choice.

extrinsic, you accurately picked up on a pet notion of mine, about alienation in a more advanced society. It is a minor theme.

I can see why you want to start earlier. Your 2 starting place does sound interesting, has a lot of potential for character development that would be lost if given just as back story. What if you used flashbacks?

I think flashbacks are one of those things that we are not suppose to use, but I am not sure why. Maybe because they can be confusing. But all rules are meant to be broken, right?

Rereading the follow-on and orginal synopsis brought up several things.

From a theme emerges a conflict. As I know it in terms of literature an either/or "Conflict is [an] actual or perceived opposition of needs, values, and interests. A conflict can be internal (within oneself) or external (between two or more individuals) [or both]. Conflict as a concept can help explain many aspects of social life such as social disagreement, conflicts of interests, and fights between individuals, groups, or organizations. In political terms, 'conflict' can refer to wars, revolutions or other struggles, which may involve the use of force as in the term armed conflict. Without proper social arrangement or resolution, conflicts in social settings can result in stress or tensions among stakeholders. When an interpersonal conflict does occur, its effect is often broader than two individuals involved, and can affect many associate individuals and relationships, in more or less adverse, and sometimes even humorous way[s]." Wikipedia: Conflict.

So from the theme I project the conflict is the ancient and noble good and evil one. More specifically salvation or perdition. Mortals' souls are at stake. But that's kind of generic in that I don't see who's most in peril and striving to overcome a personal peril or has a specific personal conflict to resolve.

What I also don't get yet is who's the protagonist? A protagonist can serve as the vehicle a reader emotionally rides with through a story. A protagonist has the greatest problem to address, has the most at stake, changes the most from a story's contexts and circumstances, and experiences the most discovery and reversal. A protagonist is not necessarily the most focal character of a story, but often is.

I don't yet see that there's a high magnitude personal dilemma related to the theme for a character. Ida, for example, I project her as the protagonist. She's a central character, involved, but what's personally at stake for her I don't see. If she's the protagonist, what's her agony? More than a problem, what's her crisis (crises)? Conscience? Identity? Temptation? Lapse of faith? What's her discovery? Her reversals?

In other words, does Ida move through the story as a reluctant messiah and have no high magnitude risks and rewards, personal impacts, marked doubts and changes in the face of insuperable antagonism? Does she have a personal stake and how does that compel her changes?
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Gaps in a story's timeline have an unsettling tendency to allow a reader a gap in reading. The risk is that a reader puts down the story at a gap in a storyline and doesn't return. There's actually a playwright's term for that and similar stumbling blocks in a story, but I just call it alienation effect. Bertol Brecht named and mastered it, so it's named after him. Brechtian Alienation Effect's purpose is to distance an audience from a creative work by maintaining a conscious, critically thinking frame of mind. Works great in true crime dramas so that readers don't sympathize with the devil. The obverse is the Pinter Immersion Effect, which uses sympathetic emotional contexts to immerse an audience in a creative work.
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On structure, most every story type has structural similarities to the Aristotlean Drama, sometimes called a conflict resolution story. Aristotlean Dramas come in two categories, the Greek Tragedy where the reversal through the course of the story begins with favorable circumstances and progresses toward an unfavorable outcome for the protagonist, often through a noble sacrifice of the protagonist's. The other category, the Greek Comedy, the beginning opens with unfavorable circumstances and proceeds toward a favorable outcome for the protagonist.

A general outline of the Aristotlean Drama Tragedy;

Introduction
Inciting crisis
Rising action setback
Rising action setback
Rising action setback
Tragic crisis and climax
Falling action letdown
Falling action letdown
Falling action letdown
Resolving crisis
Denoument

At each step, a discovery and a reversal occur as a result of contexts and circumstances. Discovery and reversal are the two components of what script writers call a turn. Major turns at the crises, minor turns at the introduction and action steps. For example, a discovery made in an introduction, that there's a problem to address. The reversal then is upset emotional equilibrium.

From each discovery at each step, information gained allows progress toward a goal of resolving a conflict. Reversals are the actual setbacks or letdowns and caused by the new information and cause changes in strategy that advance progress.

An inciting crisis is what compels a protagonist to set forth and struggle to overcome a conflict.

A tragic crisis is what gives the final leap of discovery, often a profound epiphany, that causes a reversal that leads to the resolving crisis.

A climax is where efforts to resolve a conflict are greatest, opposition of forces are greatest, outcome is most in doubt, and all salient information about the problem or conflict is known by the protagonist.

A resolving crisis is where a final profound personal discovery is made and causes an abrupt, unexpected reversal.

Denouement is where emotional equilbrium returns.

An in medias res opening combines the introduction and inciting crisis into one step.

Comedies often omit the falling actions, and merge the tragic crisis, climax, and resolving crisis.

Adhering to a structure can result in a formulaic story, yes. In support of a formulaic approach, I believe it's all good as long as no step on a structure's staircase telegraphs the outcome to a reader. Further, that structural formula most closely and logically imitates real life experiences. And most readily suits a broad range of audience comfort zones because of familiarity. A majority of stories follow that structure.

Clarification: I won’t let Ida return to her village until late in the story, as much as she might like to visit sooner.

At first Ida’s focus is the village (it’s all she’s ever known) and the people there. The inciting incident is when Narwa says that either there is no God or he has abandoned us, so I’m going with this other faith. Ida decides to take the plunge and let Narwa know that God indeed does care, here is His priestess; even though she will now have to leave to go wherever God says. But when she “comes out” before the village, she discovers Narwa has run away with her bad-influence lover. Ida missed her chance, and now has to leave.

I’ve decided to scrap the 1-2 year gap in time, with Ida’s journey to another country and subsequent return to her own country. The problems here seem too big for Ida, and she will have a personal journey of discovering how to be effective. (It seems better to do that here-and-now than in some other place and time that we skip over.) Instead I’m thinking a gap of a few weeks, where she goes straight to the next locale, the big city. There she discovers that the religious (and political) situation is more corrupt than she realized. She fumbles about trying to figure out what to do.

I think I might like to cut first to Renan’s introduction, and then go to Ida preaching to indifferent listeners. (It will require some shuffling.)

* So, does the inciting incident merit keeping that early part where she is in her village?

* Do her arrival in the big city and her initial efforts work as Backstory, or do you want to experience that with her? She doesn’t change much during this period, but of course she must go through culture shock, and take the first baby steps in speaking out. (Hmm, maybe I answered my own question…)

More details:

Ida starts to care about the larger population, and asks God for help. He says she may form a team of priests/esses to help her.

Conflict: Good versus evil, two faiths. The leaders of the other faith have a secret power, to create and command evil creatures called twisters. Ida (and team) start to make the connection between the growing twister threat and the other faith, but have a hard time accepting that these false gods have any power at all. In trying to convert people, they meet resistance from the other faith and from the populace. Then the team discovers that God has decided enough with these people, He’ll wipe ‘em all out, unless they repent… and the race is on.

Personal peril? Loss of loved ones who will be destroyed (especially Ida’s concern for Narwa, Renan’s for his family, with repeated encounters); loss of people in general (Ida and Renan both experience growing compassion for everyone); physical safety from the twisters (everyone, with varying degrees of threat level); obedience/disobedience (the team are highly motivated to do what God asks of them, which is to warn the people); loss of powers (it takes awhile for the team to make the connection that if a member has sinned and not repented yet, no matter how minor a matter, his/her power is gone). This last item provides much fodder for uncertainty about when they can rely on their powers, and later introspection and confession when they figure it out.

Good question, I’m still not sure whether Ida or Renan will be the chief protagonist, because it feels like both of them. They must each learn to embrace leadership positions that neither one wants. I could explain more of the personal dilemmas, reversals, crises, discoveries, etc., but I’m already way beyond my original purpose in posting. I do have a lot sketched out, still in flux, and may come back for more help.

Thanks all for any and all comments! You folks are awesome. Extrinsic, thank you for writing down to me