Check Out These 7 Must-Haves to Write a Story Your Readers Will Love

Before you ever write the first line of your story, make a few deliberate decisions that will supercharge readers’ involvement.

It is often said that the single best thing we can do for our story is to write it down. No planned story is better than a written story, and this is true. But before we throw ourselves headlong into it, there may be a few considerations to do. It isn’t really planning — though we can definitely do that too — it’s just gathering ideas and direction before we even write the first line.

I know, I know, if you are a planner you’re thinking, “Jeez, I’d never dream of starting a story without first planning it.”

If you are a pantser, you’ll be thinking about just dropping this useless piece of advice and look for something more sensible to read. But consider: you don’t need to plan a story if you don’t write your stories this way. Still, giving consideration to a few things before you even start writing may make your pansting a lot easier. It may provide direction, and ultimately, it will make the revising process easier and less time-consuming. Doesn’t this sound good enough to lend me your attention for a bit?

The magic of the story structure

In whatever way we write our stories, we all use the same basic tools, and the most basic of all is the story structure, which is what makes stories what they are.

Even as pantsers, we use the story structure. Most of the time, we do so intuitively. Besides, we are authors, we write stories, and what makes stories different from any other form of telling is the story structure. We know it so well that we instinctively use it whenever we write.

As planners, we analyse and build the story structure first of all, purposefully and in awareness. We’ll match every plot-points of the structure with our ideas so that we’ll know from the beginning every essential point of the story.

Whatever your method, I’m sure you’ll always make a few consideration before starting your novel. Becoming more aware of these elements before starting your novel will make the writing process smoother and ultimately more effective.

A few essential things to consider before we start writing our novel

1. Is there a story there?

This is, of course, the first thing to consider before we commit ourselves to write a story. Many writers, especially when they first start off, confuse a premise with a story.

A premise is how your story begins. What the gig of the story is, and usually this doesn’t need to be very complex. It’s the first sparkle, what gets us all excited to write, and if you think this is magic, you are absolutely right. If you also think this is enough to take you to the end… ehh, I’d think a little harder.

We know that we do have a story in our hands when we check it with the story structure. The basic story structure is the one devised by Aristotele a few millennia ago. Trust me, it works.

If you google ‘story structure’ you’ll find a lot of different templates. If you look closely enough, you’ll see that all go down to Aristotle’s Three Act Story Structure.

The structure will tell us what plot-points we need in order to have a complete story arc. If we can only cover the first few plot points, that’s a fair indication that we have the premise of a story, not an actual story.

2. Who’s story is it?

We don’t necessarily need to know who the protagonist is when we work on the story structure. Knowing that there is a protagonist and an antagonist is enough for that part of the job.

But before you start writing the first line of your story, I’d strongly recommend knowing who’s your protagonist (because the story will be about her) and who’s the antagonist (because the story depends on her).

By knowing who they are, I don’t just mean what’s their name and what they look like. I mean what is it that they desire and fear, because this is what the story is concerned with.

If we don’t know who’s the protagonist and what she wants and why, and who’s the antagonist and why she gets into the protagonist’s way, we won’t have an inciting incident, therefore our story will never take off.

3. Where does it start?

I’ve heard it said many times, but it’s such good advice that I’ll repeat it here: start the story as close as possible to the inciting incident.

The inciting incident is where the protagonist’s world gets shaken so hard that it can’t be the same again. The protagonist needs to take action in order to adjust to the new state of things.

How do we determine what the inciting incident is? We have a few crucial elements. Who’s the protagonist, and what she desires (which may as well be ‘that things remain as they are’). Who’s the antagonist that gets in her way (and remember the antagonist doesn’t need to be a person). What the outcome of this collision will be (how the story will end).

If we don’t know all these elements from the beginning, it becomes challenging to work out where the story even starts.

This is something we really really want to know before we write the first line. Trust me. I’ve started stories in the wrong place more than once. It wasn’t nice. Especially when it comes to revision. That’s why, in my opinion, having an idea, however faint, of how the story will end, is hugely beneficial to the story and to our mental and emotional balance.

4. How does it end?

Not having any idea of how the story will end — not even the faintest — is one of the more common ways to see your story is incomplete. It’s also one of the most common reasons why stories don’t get finished. Even pantsers and discovery writers write better and more cohesively when they have an idea of how the story will end because they’ll have a stronger structure to work with their intuition and above all, they’ll have a direction.

A direction is really everything we need. Even as plotters, we shouldn’t stick to our ending too fast. Endings do tend to morph as we write. So many unexpected things enter a story even when we plan it. We should let the story have its way and tell us what the end will be, even when we carefully planned it from the beginning. And never fear. The story always knows better.

A few more things to consider

The above are the very essential points to consider before we start writing our story. If we decide on these few things before we start writing, it becomes much more unlikely that we’ll abandon the story.

But there are a few other considerations that, although not essential, will make our job easier if we decide upon them before starting to write.

5. POV anyone?

The matter of the Point of View is one of the more tricky and complex regarding storytelling, and I won’t discuss it in any detail here. Yet I didn’t include it in the essentials because, unless we use just one POV, it is likely that entire sections of POV will change in the course of revision.

Still, I think we should at least decide how many POV we will use and whose POV they will be. Deciding this at the beginning will give coherence to the story.

There are authors out there who use innumerable POV in one novel (Stephen King? Did I mention him?), but as a general rule, it is advisable to have only a small number of POV characters and stick to them. This will give a definite personality to the story, and we’ll be able to pursue that personality from the first draft.

6. Does it fall into a genre?

I didn’t include this in the essentials because I don’t think that genre should diktat what we want to write. This said, some authors first choose the genre and then the story, and in that case, choosing the genre will, of course, be part of the essentials.

Whether we choose it at the beginning or just fall into it naturally, the genre of our story will shape part of it. Genre creates expectations in a reader. We will be expected to use certain tropes, certain formulae, or to play with them. Genres are their own particular language, they generally deal in specific themes. In short, they tend to be very specific.

Having a general idea of what genre we are writing will definitely help us shape our story and give it a definite flavour.

7. When does it happen?

This is actually an essential question if we are writing historical fiction, or contemporary. Though it would be more accurate to say: when and where a story is set.

It is important even if we’re dealing with an imaginary world, or with an indeterminate one. Some stories never state where or when they are set. This doesn’t mean that we, as the writer, don’t need to concern ourselves with this question. We may get inspiration from a specific place and time, even if we don’t state it. And even in this ‘vagueness’ we need to be aware of when and where it happened to the characters.

Characters never happen in a void. They do have a past and hopefully will have a future outside of the story. If we have an idea of these parameters, our characters (and so our story) will be more sound and realistic.

Deciding to start a novel is a big undertaking. If we dedicate a little thought to these ideas before we write that first line, we will help the story (and ourselves) to start off with the right foot.

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Sarah Zama wrote her first story when she was nine. Fourteen years ago, when she started her job in a bookshop, she discovered books that address the structure of a story and she became addicted to them. Today, she’s a dieselpunk author who writes fantasy stories historically set in the 1920s. Her life-long interest in Tolkien has turned quite nerdy recently.She writes about all her passions on her blog https://theoldshelter.com/