This includes the physical location (real or invented) and the social environment of the story (including chronology, culture, institutions, etc.). Setting is one of my personal favorite elements.
Tweet The Third Element of Fiction: Setting However, every really good story has some kind of conflict-even if that conflict is purely an internal struggle with a heavy emotion.Įxtra: If you want to dive deeper into writing an effective plot, take a look at Joe's book The Write Structure. A lot of authors struggle with this since conflict is by nature deeply uncomfortable. If you've left any knots still tied, you'd better have a good reason why-and better make sure your reader has a clue that the answers are coming soon.īefore we move on, I want to circle back and remind you that you need conflict in your story. It does require a satisfying one, even if you mean to continue in a sequel. Again, this doesn't require a happy ending. It feels final, or at least, final enough that the reader can put the book down without flipping back through the pages to see if they missed something. It means everything has been solved, and your conclusion arrives at the place where all the events of the plot have strongly led. Don't let the word fool you: this ending isn't necessarily happy or sad. Finally, we have resolution (or what Joe likes to call the denouement).This is make-or-break, the moment when things matter the most. This should be the greatest moment of tension in your story everything is critical, with emotion and interest peaked. Now comes the climax, also known as the turning point.The rising action builds to a dilemma, the moment a character is put in a situation where they have to make an impossible choice.Now that your characters are established (along with some sense of what their “normal” looks like), you throw in the wrench and raise the stakes. Rising action, which reveals the conflict.The inciting Incident is an event in a story that throws the main character into a challenging situation, upsetting the status quo and beginning the story’s movement, either in a positive way or negative.Exposition or introduction, which establishes characters and setting.It's the organized structure, the thing that will end up in an outline on Wikipedia (with spoiler alerts, of course). It includes the order in which your characters face things. Your plot, its connections, and its structure determine the way you shape your story. If you do it differently, there's nothing to fear: you're still right! (I could say “write,” but you might click the back button.) I just put plot second in this list because when I write, my plot follows my characters, rather than the other way around. Your characters live inside your plot, but your plot revolves around your characters. One small aside: plenty of fiction writers would start this list with plot, not character. Both are fine. Understanding what your characters do and say (and how other characters respond to them) helps to paint the fullest possible picture of your fictional creation. But if your characters feel real and relatable, then your readers will eat your story up. If your characters are flat, your readers will have trouble empathizing. Your character should not be the same at the end of the story as in the beginning. They change, and their growth is a key aspect of your story's momentum. You'll need to understand the power of the character arc.You and I have both read books which annoyed us because the characters just didn't feel “real.” Often, this is because basic psychology was ignored, and the characters behaved in a way that made no sense for human beings. You'll need at least a rudimentary grasp of psychology.This doesn't mean your reader needs to know it, but your understanding of your character's history is crucial for how and why your character responds to things. Have you chosen a point of view? That's you following specific characters as you tell the story. Your characters are the people through whom your reader experiences the tale, and the trick is to make those fictional characters feel completely real through character development.
Is there conflict? That's going to involve the emotional and mental condition of your characters. In many ways, characters are the foundation for the entire work. Tweet The First Element of Fiction: Character
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