Disclaimer

The order in which these story elements are listed is not indicative of any order in which you should address them. In fact, understanding more about each element can help inform and develope the others. The best place to start is with whichever element you have figured out the most, or whichever has sparked the idea for your story. 

Want to write about a space pirate with bubblegum pink hair? Start with character. Want to write about the friction that arises when trying to make social change? Start with conflict.

As you discover more about your story, whether during your pre-writing or as you write your story, you can always come back to change or add more to your notes.

Ok, let’s get into it!

Characters

Every great story has a well-rounded and thought-out character at the heart of it. Characters allow the audience to emphasize and personally connect with a story(even if the premise is totally unrelatable). The most important step to getting your characters right is to figure out their ‘want’ and ‘need’.

Want

A character’s want is the goal that they are pursuing throughout the story. Pursuing the character’s want drives the plot forward. Once you’re clear about what the character wants, you can discover why the character wants it (their motivation) and what is keeping them from getting what they want (the conflict of the story).

Need

A character’s need is an underlying emotional desire or mental understanding that the character must discover in order to achieve their ultimate fulfillment/happiness. As they discover what they need, the character goes on a journey to accept (or reject) the internal change, creating a character’s arc.

Not only is this a sure-fire way to write characters that aren’t flat, it’s also how you add depth and meaning to your writing. Your readers will connect to the universal emotional struggles that your characters must overcome, even if other elements of your story are fantastical.

Conflicts

You can have an amazing premise for a story, but without well-written conflict, your writing will be dull and disengaging. Without meaningful conflict, a story is a struggle to write, but outlining your story’s conflict can give your writing direction, stakes, and intrigue.

Conflict is the friction a character faces when something or someone is keeping them from their goal. Having an idea of the sources of conflict for your characters will make writing your story easier because it gives your characters obstacles to overcome and interesting things to do to move the plot forward.

External Conflict

External conflicts are the obstacles a character must overcome in order to get what they want. A prime example of this is an opponent that a character must battle in combat, but it can also be a big test the character has to pass, or an inhospitable terrain they must traverse.

Think about what stands in the way of a character getting their “want”. Why can’t they get what they want immediately? if the characters are at the heart of your story, the conflict is why there’s a story to tell in the first place.

Internal conflict

Internal conflicts are the mental and emotional obstacles that a character must overcome to be healthier and happier (aka their need). This can come from lies and misbeliefs they tell themselves about themselves or the world around them. Examples include beliefs such as “I’m not good enough” or “I don’t need any help”.

Think about why your character hasn’t already come to the point of realization and acceptance of what they really need. For great internal conflict, give your character valid reasons for not coming to this realization sooner. For example, if they don’t believe they need anyone’s help, the character might believe this because others have let them down in the past when they needed help the most. This would give that character a valid and logical reason to refuse help.

Thinking about the inner conflict of your story will make writing easier because it can serve as a roadmap for your character’s arc.

Plot

Wherever you fall on the spectrum between discovery writing and planning out every element of every scene before writing the narrative, writing your story will be faster and easier if you figure out a few key things about your plot. The plot of your story is the sequence of key events that make up what happens in a story. A well-paced, captivating story will have conflict, tension, and rising and falling action woven into the plot events

A Free writing (pantser’s) guide to planning your plot

If you prefer not to plan your story’s plot before you begin writing, there are a few questions you can consider that will keep your story on track. Ask yourself:

• What does the character want?
• What’s keeping them from getting that thing?
• What happens if they don’t get it?

Knowing what your character wants will focus the narrative around them pursuing that goal, and guide your writing so that the key events can relate to their pursuit.

Knowing what is keeping your character from getting what they want will introduce conflict and tension to your story, creating rising action as your character struggles against the forces that oppose them.

Knowing what would happen if your character doesn’t achieve their goal will create stakes for the outcome of your story, influencing your character’s motivation and building suspense for your story’s outcome. 

Establishing these three things at the beginning of your writing process will help you understand your story on a deeper level.

They will give you a more natural narrative path for your story’s beginning (establishing your character’s goal and the consequences of not achieving it), middle (your character facing obstacles and conflicts as they pursue their goal), and ending (Your character facing their biggest conflict, and the result of them either overcoming to achieve their goal, or the consequences of their failure).

This is a good foundation for your first draft if you prefer to uncover the rest of your plot as you write.

Diving a Bit Deeper

For the rest of us, a more detailed plot outline is helpful to guide the writing process. If you want to go beyond “beginning, middle, and end,” consider plotting out major moments of your story

Your story is made of plot points and story beats. A story beat is a moment of significance that drives the story forward. A plot point is a major moment of significance that serves as a turning point for your story. This might be the moment when your character is thrust out of their comfort zone and onto a new path,  or perhaps when they get new information that changes everything. 

Plotting out these moments of significance can help you write your story because it allows you to create a rough outline of the most important moments of your story. This gives you a macro view of your plot. At this point, you don’t have to focus on the prose, grammar, spelling, or connecting the story beats together with a fluid narrative. You are essentially telling yourself the story, so you have a roadmap to guide you when you sit down to write the full narrative.

Plot Structures

Connecting these beats with the meat of the story and following the cause and effect of the story’s events can move a narrative forward until it reaches its resolution. If you want to ensure you include important plot points and story beats, consider using a plot structure.

If the plot is what happens in a story, a story structure helps guide when those things happen in the story and how the information is delivered to the audience. Not only can a plot structure help you to determine the events of a story, but it can also place the timeline of when events and information are revealed in your narrative (is it linear or does your story have multiple timelines?), and help your story’s pacing, naturally creating rising and falling action.

There are a variety of story structures out there that can help all kinds of writers. Choosing one is a matter of finding what works best for you and the story you’re writing.

Some commonly used story structures are:

• The Three-Act Story Structure
• The Hero’s Journey (and its simplified version: Dan Harmon’s Story Circle)
• Freytag’s Pyramid
• Christopher Booker’s Seven Story Archetypes
• The Five-Act Story Structure
• The Fichtean Curve
• 27 Chapter Story Structure

Personally, I love the 3-act structure, but I often will combine it with elements of other story structures. 

Different genres of stories will also have their own story structure elements and tropes. There are key beats that readers often expect from a genre, such as the moment when a detective reveals the killer and their motive at the end of a who-done-it mystery. These genre-specific elements can help bring a story to life.

It’s important to remember that plot is not the same thing as story. If a plot is made of the events that happen, a story is why it matters. To make a great narrative, I weave my plot through the characters and their motivations, conflicts that complicate the story and make it exciting, and an immersive world in which the story takes place.

Worldbuilding

Many writers either obsess over or neglect worldbuilding when writing their first drafts. Finding a balance between too little and too much attention to this aspect of a story is key to creating an immersive world where your audience can lose themselves.

My trick for finding that balance is this:

Really know what you need to know.

This means it’s better to spend more time developing a few important aspects of your world than to craft numerous elements with only surface-level depth (or, worse, spend a lot of time developing many elements and never actually write your story!). Before you start worldbuilding, first determine which elements of a world best serve your story.

Good worldbuilding serves as context for a story, so consider the other elements of your prewriting process to figure out what worldbuilding is necessary. If the plot of your epic fantasy revolves around a battle for the throne, then politics will be important. The economy of a small labor town would be critical to understand if your story’s conflict centers on the debate over whether to regulate its primary industry. If a character’s goal is to survive a child murder game a la The Hunger Games, your audience will want to know the history behind the existence of the games.

Thinking of worldbuilding as context for your characters, conflict, and plot can help infuse the right amount of worldbuilding into your story. If you know those other elements of your story are strong, but the narrative still feels flat, or if you’re coming up with last-minute excuses and reasons for things, you probably need to invest more in worldbuilding.

To avoid spending endless hours pondering cool aspects of your world, ask yourself, “What other aspect of the story is this providing context for?” If the worldbuilding element offers no benefit to the story, you might mention it if you think it’s a cool idea, but make sure you’re not overdoing it in your writing. Redirect your focus back onto your story.

To avoid spending endless hours pondering cool aspects of your world, ask yourself, “What other aspect of the story is this providing context for?” If the worldbuilding element offers no benefit to the story, you might mention it if you think it’s a cool idea, but make sure you’re not overdoing it in your writing. Redirect your focus back onto your story.

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Whether you take an afternoon to quickly outline your story elements or create a detailed pre-writing deep dive, considering your story’s characters, conflict, plot foundations, and worldbuilding will help make writing your first draft a breeze. Instead of struggling through your story, hitting roadblocks, or staring at a blank page, you will have already worked out the underpinning of your story. Set yourself up to write an engaging and well-written narrative and enjoy the writing process (even in my first draft). 

What do you think?

Do you have a different pre-writing process? I’d love to read all about it!

Please share your thoughts in a comment below.