I have an idea

I am attempting to write a novel and I have a rough idea, in a long sentance it can be summed up to be 'Johana (the main character) finds a document, in her fathers study, that explains three things :
The government are incharge of lives and deaths.
There are 100 people in the population who are under trial to see how people act so that the goverment can futher controll them.
Johana is one of those people, the variables.'

What do you think? How can I add to the plot?

Hmm... so the government control who lives or not. That's creepy!

For my evaluation, I honestly don't see a central conflict here. Try looking at a blurb of a novel to see how it's written. I'm pretty sure every blurb states a central conflict, and a short pitch as well. Right here, I don't really see it.

Sure, I understand what's going on but I don't know how the plot is going to move forward. In my opinion, plots are caused by conflicts and the characters' actions and for this, unfortunately not too much. And the "under trial" part would be nice if there was a notch more clarity.

Still, this idea isn't too bad

I hope I helped!

Thanks this really helped. @PrincessInk

This is a really interesting concept. It has similarities to the Divergent Trilogy, which if you haven't read yet you might want to check out. In Divergent the experiment is more genetic than social, but it has the same idea of having a very tightly controlled environment in which everyone has their place, for the purpose of observing how people react to certain stimuli.

I think, depending on your own strengths, you could probably go on to develop the world more, explore things like the relationship between the people and the government, and between various parts of society. Find out what issues there are that your character would face and which ones she would be particularly driven by.

You'll need a central conflict that can be introduced early on, become more apparent later, then reach a climax and fizzle out at the end. At the beginning there is no conflict. Johanna may be a variable but for as long as she doesn't know, nothing will change and everything will go smoothly. The letter is the catalyst, and it's up to her whether she acts on it or not. This is where the world building comes in.

If she's the only person who knows, she might fight to get herself out of the experiment. If there is some great underlying social injustice and she's suddenly found the key to why it happens or how the government gets away with it, then your conflict is going to be much bigger and much more complex.

It's up to you then what kind of story do you want to write? Is it a personal journey that will end up in finding a sense of freedom, or is it a political story that will end up in a civil war? This story could go either way, and that's what I like about it.

@Tenyo thanks for your help. I have a few more ideas in my head but this is the basic idea. I have read the first of the divergent series and the differance is this, to the average reader appears to be a normal sociaty like ours now, no differance, no cause for alarm. Does that seem a good idea?

That sound pretty good. Basing it in current society adds that creepy, uncanny aspect to it that it genuinely could be happening right now and nobody would know.

Let me know how this develops, I'm really curious to see what you can do with it.