The Two Most Important Things About The Story

There are two things that you should bear in mind when you start on a new story, and they are creating the right character that would resonate with the readers and building a proper storyline. Both are immensely difficult tasks and should include proper planning.

Personally I find the storyline the most difficult. Characters come to me easily. That’s how I start writing – I just see my character or characters and the predicament they get into. Of course, it is a superficial simplicity. Because then there are days of planning, placing the characters in different situations, thinking of their biographies. In general these are the days of creating a bond with your character and getting to know him or her. The further it goes, the deeper is your understanding, and in the end you know them as well as you know your family and friends.

It is necessary to build the proper conflict for your character at this stage, both the inner and the outer ones, because the conflict of the character is what is going to drive him or her forward. It must be viable and truthful. Even if – especially if – you are working in fantasy and science fiction genres. The more unrealistic the world you create is, the more logical it must be or the readers will not believe you.

Logic is a key element to the story, even when you write a story that involves hallucinations, confused personality, nightmares etc. When you deliberately try to confuse the readers, there should be a strong scaffold of logic underneath it all. Logic that in the end will explain to them all the absurdities, incoherences and what seemed at first like utter nonsense.

That is why the storyline is important.

There are two general things about the storyline. It should be intriguing. It must be carefully planned to the tiniest of the details.

An intriguing plot does not require time leaps and non-chronological sequence of events. It means that you do not tell everything at once and hold the readers on the edges of their sits for a time being.

By detailed planning I mean that there are no dead ends and no extra scenes and extra characters that are not involved in driving the plot forward or developing the main character.

Here we go with an example. Suppose the character works for law enforcement. He intrudes the Christmas dinner of his colleague. The reason he announces for his intrusion is to pass on his co-worker a certain task or information. His true ‘mission’ is to give his colleague something that will protect her from the serial killer they are looking for. Like a new gun because she has lost hers. He does not want to reveal his attachment and care, so he accentuates the information he passes while the gift-giving is supposed to look like an afterthought, a social nicety and nothing more.

On the one hand, you are safe with such a chapter. It is definitely not extra – it helps to develop the character and the relationship between him and his colleague. On the other hand, it is easy to forget about some details if you are too concentrated on the main aim. In the chapter the character passes information to his colleague. As it is holiday time, he would probably give her a flash drive or a file with documents. As the information is not the key function of the chapter, you may forget to develop it in the future. Perhaps, you just had it as a decoration for the main idea and did not even think what kind of information was on that flash drive. But if it is not mentioned further, the readers may get puzzled. At first, they would expect the information from the flash drive to be used in the future. When it is not, they will get disappointed. At least the editors will be.

This does not mean every scene you write should be filled with action. On the contrary, you should give your readers some rest from the constant chase of adventures and dramas. But the relaxing chapters must be meaningful too. They should not be created just for the sake of atmosphere.

As well as the dead ends there should not be spontaneous events. What I mean here are some situations that do not evolve from the logic of the narrative. Something my mentors called a grand piano in the bushes. That is when your character receives some power or ability which comes out of nowhere simply to help him overcome the villain. It does not mean there is no space for sudden events and revelations, but they should be consistent with the inner logic of the world and probably be mentioned in this or that form before. If we speak about getting superman powers, we can put a line a few chapters in advance that in the past this world knew magic unparalleled nowadays and that this knowledge was lost when the last of the Magi died. Then whoosh and we discover that there are some distant descendants. There should be a good reason for them to survive as well

All this shows how important it is to plan the story. I like creating tables, storyboards and timelines, which I revisit in the process of writing.

The idea about the tables I borrowed from J. K. Rowling who uses them to bring all the characters together and see where each of them is at a particular moment and what (s)he is doing.

From Harry Potter. A Journey Through A History of Magic. – Bloomsbury, 2017

In fact I would recommend J. K. Rowling’s stories as an example of meticulous planning. Whatever you take – the Harry Potter series or Cormoran Strike novels written under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith – every detail given in the book is then used and developed and finds its place in the overall puzzle. Nothing is superfluous in her stories. Everything is logical and explained sooner or later. Read The Career of Evil and see how Robert Galbraith juggles the information about three suspects so that each time we believe this person is a murdered, then no that one should be. It is amazing.

Time line is also a very good tool. You will not insert a winter scenery when it is high time for summer to arrive in your story. Sometimes it is easy to make a chronological mistake, because as writers we tend to stretch and compress time for our own needs. A timeline will help to keep everything in mind along with perhaps a few diagrams of relations between the characters.

Of course you can do without planning. For example, Laura Barnett, Richard and Judy Book Club winner, tells that now she prefers to let the idea drive her forward – this makes the plot less traditional and helps experimenting with the form. You probably do not need too much planning for a short story and even a novella. But when you work on a big novel for a long period of time planning can help you a great deal.