Fair warning: this gives everything away, including what’s behind the screen. And if you only know the movie, brace yourself: the shoes aren’t ruby.
L. Frank Baum published The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in 1900. Almost everyone thinks they know it, but what they remember is the 1939 movie. In the book, the shoes are silver, Oz is a real place (no waking up in bed with a fever), and the story keeps going for quite a while after the Wizard floats off in his balloon.
The premise in one sentence
When a cyclone carries her house from Kansas to the Land of Oz, Dorothy, an orphan who only wants to get back to Aunt Em, has to reach the Emerald City and defeat the Wicked Witch of the West so the great Wizard will send her home, without knowing that what she needs to get there has been on her feet since day one.
The whole book is a twenty-four-chapter detour to something Dorothy was wearing all along.
Dorothy’s drawers
- She wants to get back to Kansas. She never changes her mind, not once.
- She needs to realize she can get home on her own.
- She believes she can’t do it alone: someone with powers has to take her.
Dorothy barely changes: it’s a flat arc. She’s the engine, and the book hands the changing to her three companions. An outside narrator tells it, with no opinions, almost always right beside her; that’s why every scene in the Outline has Dorothy in the “Narrator” field.
Twelve stages, nearly by the book
If one book teaches the Hero’s Journey without cheating, this is it. In Sunday Plot’s Structure, with that template:
- The Ordinary World: a gray prairie, a gray house, an aunt and uncle who’ve stopped laughing. So much gray that the color of Oz hits like a slammed door.
- The Call to Adventure: the cyclone. Literally.
- Meeting with the Mentor: the Witch of the North, who gives her the Silver Shoes, a protective kiss and directions.
- Crossing the First Threshold: Dorothy puts on the shoes and sets off down the road of yellow brick.
- Tests, Allies and Enemies: three companions, ditches, beasts, a river and a poppy field.
- Approach to the Inmost Cave: the Emerald City, where Oz tells them to kill the Witch, and the march west.
- The Ordeal: the Winged Monkeys take her friends apart, and Dorothy ends up a slave in the castle. The template’s symbolic death, here with straw all over the floor.
- The Reward: a bucket of water, a melted witch, the Golden Cap. Plus the twist: the great Oz is a man from Omaha behind a screen.
- The Road Back: the balloon leaves without her. Time to head south and find Glinda.
- Resurrection and Elixir: Glinda explains about the shoes. Three clicks of the heels, Kansas, Aunt Em.
Now the honest part, what doesn’t fit. Dorothy never refuses the call. The cyclone doesn’t ask. In that beat we put the moment she cries because she wants to go home, the only “no” she says in the whole book. And the resurrection is a quiet one: no final battle, just a goodbye. The big fight happened in the middle. It works because Dorothy’s last test wasn’t winning. It was letting go of her friends.
Three friends, three arcs
Here’s the most useful lesson. Each companion wants something they think they lack, and the book gives them scenes that prove they already have it:
- The Scarecrow asks for brains. He’s the one who suggests chopping down a tree to cross the ditch.
- The Tin Woodman asks for a heart. He steps on a beetle and cries until his jaws rust shut.
- The Lion asks for courage. He plants himself in front of the Kalidahs, shaking.
When the Wizard hands out bran mixed with pins and needles, a silk heart and a drink from a green dish, he isn’t giving them anything. He’s giving them permission to believe it.
Tip: if your side characters feel like furniture, give each one a want of their own and a scene that shows, without anyone saying it, that they already have it.
The bucket scene
Taken apart in three questions:
- Goal: get back the silver shoe the Witch just stole with an invisible iron bar.
- Conflict: the Witch tricked her and has no plans to give it back.
- Outcome: yes, and. Dorothy throws a bucket of water at her out of sheer temper, and the Witch melts. Dorothy had no idea it would kill her.
The big victory happens by accident. Dorothy never meant to kill either witch.
The stretch adaptations cut
After the Wizard, the book sends Dorothy south for five chapters: fighting trees, a country made of china, a giant spider and a hill full of men who fire their heads like hammers. A lot of adaptations drop all of it, and you can see why: the Witch is dead, the Wizard’s secret is out, and what’s left is a string of episodes with the tension already spent.
Put the novel into Sunday Plot and Checks notices: from the balloon to the last page, eight scenes in a row end well, and it asks whether a change of direction is missing. Still, the stretch earns its keep. It closes the Lion’s arc when he becomes King of Beasts, and in the china country a tiny princess explains that outside her own land she’d go stiff. That’s what Dorothy has been saying since chapter 4: “There is no place like home.” In the book it isn’t a spell to get back. It’s an argument she makes to the Scarecrow.
The lesson for your third act: after the climax, every scene has to close something. If it doesn’t close anything, it can go.
For today
Pick three side characters in your novel. For each one, write down what they think they’re missing, and come up with a scene where they prove they already have it. In Sunday Plot, that goes in the “Wants” and “Needs” fields on their page in the Story bible; if the arc is big enough, give it a subplot. And if nothing comes to you, “I don’t know yet” is a fine answer too.