4 Elements You Need To Write A Story

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In a previous post, I offered 5 tips for new writers that were designed to give you the right mindset and approach to starting your first story. If you’ve followed that advice and began your story then congratulations! That’s an important first step.

But now, in this post, I want to drill down into some tips that will give you more concrete, actionable advice on how to get your first story off the ground. What does it take to set up so you can start telling the story that’s been swirling around in your head or in scribbled notes somewhere? I’m here to tell you, and to ease you in so you don’t feel overwhelmed. So, I want to start with four basic elements of story: Premise, Setting, Character, and Plot.

To even begin imagining how a story will take shape, you really need to start by developing a premise, a setting, at least one character, and a general sense of plot. Every story needs these basic components. Someone would probably argue that there are experimental, literary works that don’t include all these elements, but there’s no point focusing on exceptions. In almost all cases, a story will need these four things—as well as other components I won’t cover in this post. They’re the foundation, the framework, the skeleton of the story. Without them, there won’t be anything on which to build your nifty ideas for explosions, broken hearts, falling kingdoms, and all that other good stuff.

Think of it like a play. You need a stage, people to make things happen, a progression of events, and some notion of what the play is about. This last bit, which you can call the premise, is a little more elusive than the first three components. Let’s get a little deeper into it.

A premise is the idea that inspires your story, and it comes in all sizes and degrees of complexity. It could range from something simple like “What if a boy found a friendly dragon?” to more intricate ideas like “What if body modification became so extreme in the future that everyone in society could completely alter their appearance at will, but this resulted in widespread crime because criminals could simply change what they look like?”.

The point is a premise can be really anything that gets your mind working and thinking in terms of story possibilities. It should suggest ramifications and consequences for your story world. What if a boy found a friendly dragon? How would those around him react? How would society handle it? Would he need to hide it? The premise raises potential points of conflict, and conflict generates story.

A premise by itself is just a neat idea. It’s the seed of a story. You need to nurture it and expand it to eventually produce fruit.

A premise by itself is just a neat idea. It’s the seed of a story. You need to nurture it and expand it to eventually produce fruit. To do that, you need to think about the details and specifics about how your premise will impact your story world. This brings us to…

Just as every play needs a stage and every painting needs a canvas, a story needs a somewhere: a place where it can live. It’s the where in the who, what, where, when, why, and how of a story (and yes, you need to answer all these questions).

At the very broadest level, you have two choices when it comes to deciding on your setting. You can choose to set your story in a primary world or a secondary world. A primary world is our world: the real world. That doesn’t mean you can’t make adjustments, like adding a class of magicians to every society or deciding that Paris will be governed by a race of giant earthworms. But it does mean that your worldbuilding will be restricted to earth as we know it (or the universe, if your scope goes beyond earth).

If you write a story based in New York City, you better not decide that Times Square doesn’t exist unless you have a reason for it. When you write in a primary world setting, you have the advantage of already having society and space set up for you, but it means that you’ll have to accommodate the expectations of that world the reader will naturally bring with them. If you get things wrong about New York City carelessly, then every New Yorker reading your story will have a bone to pick with you.

In contrast, you—the writer—control the reader expectations when you create a secondary world setting because you set up the rules for that world. As you’ve probably guessed by now, a secondary world is any world that is not ours. This includes places like Middle-Earth, Narnia, the planet Dune, and so on.

Understandably, a secondary world setting requires more extensive worldbuilding. The benefit, of course, is that you can set your own rules and build societies, peoples, and landscapes however you see fit (provided they’re consistent with the logic of your fictional world). Your limit is as far as you can push your imagination.

There are many great stories set in either of these types of settings. The important takeaway here is that once you’ve decided on a primary or secondary world for your story setting, you then need to develop the actual rules and features of that setting. This is often a large task that remains ongoing throughout the process of writing the story.

To avoid being overwhelmed, take it one step at a time. What kind of landscapes do you want to exist in this world? What kind people and societies populate it? How will political, economic, social, and ecological contexts impact the way they interact with the world? And, especially important in my opinion: what is the relationship between the premise of your story and setting in which it takes place.

Let’s take my example for a simple premise and apply it to a specific story setting. So, the story will feature a “boy who finds a friendly dragon” and it will take place in a world that is all one big city. The people of this city hunt dragons because they’ve proven dangerous in the past. It’s a basic story concept, but now it’s rooted in a setting.

We can see right away how the interaction between the premise and the setting creates potential points of tension and conflict; how will people react to the boy’s friendly dragon, considering their hostility to dragons in general? Will they accept that perhaps dragons and humans can co-exist after all, or will this story take a darker turn?

So, you see that just putting a premise and setting together can start to generate the questions that will drive your story forward (will they accept the boy and the dragon?). But wait! We’re starting to get into both character and plot and I haven’t even covered those yet! This is an example of how these elements constantly bounce off each other.

Okay, you’ve got a decent idea of how to incorporate a premise and setting into your story. Let’s move on to the next element, which I think is the most important of them all in terms of delivering a satisfying experience to your reader.

Who does the reader experience the story through? In the example I keep using, it might be the boy who finds the dragon, and maybe some other people who have a stake in the boy’s relationship with the dragon.

But let’s forget about that example for now. Because the character(s) you decide to write the story through the eyes of will be a decision that is personal and specific to your story. But how do you create a character? Who should be at the center of the story?

This is an aspect of craft that writers spend their entire careers honing, and there are a gazillion ways you can approach this. People have their own processes that work for them, and that process will likely change even from story to story.

You can come up with characters after you have a solid premise and have done a lot of worldbuilding, or you can start with an interesting character first and build a story around them, and so on forever and ever. “When is he going to actually give a piece of concrete advice about this?” you might be asking. Fair, but it’s important to realize that character development, like worldbuilding, is an ongoing process that can take shape in infinite ways.

A good way to think about what kind of character will be appropriate for your story—especially if you have an idea for a premise and a setting but not a character yet—is to ask yourself who in your fictional world has the most at stake? Who stands to gain the most and lose the most from the events and conflicts that shape the story?

If the character has nothing to gain and nothing to lose—if they don’t have anything to care about, then the reader won’t care either.

By placing your character at the center of the story “action”, you’ll ensure that they always have a stake in what’s going. This is crucial because if the character has nothing to gain and nothing to lose—if they don’t have anything to care about, then the reader won’t care either. If that happens, your story will be dead before it even starts.

I can’t stress this point enough: a character is only interesting so long as they have goals and motivations that the reader can root for. And those goals and motivations should be relevant to what’s happening in the story. Think about the characters you have loved most in works of fiction, whether in books or some other media. What about them was so riveting?

Certainly, part of it is due to personality and quirks. But what really engages us is seeing a character struggle in the face of adversity. It’s no good if they just steamroll everything that gets in their way while having no personal growth or conflict beyond the external events of the story. That kind of stalwart hero belongs mostly to another era of storytelling.

These days, the characters we want to see at the center of stories are flawed and imperfect, just like the rest of us. Aside from not being fully prepared for whatever the external plot of the story will be, an engaging character also has an emotional/internal arc throughout the story that will track their growth as an individual.

But what does an emotional arc, or internal conflict, look like? Well, a useful way to think of it is this: Just like real-life people, characters at the center of your story will be missing something in their lives. Like many of us, there will be some aspect of themselves they’re dissatisfied with which prevents them from feeling fulfilled or self-actualized.

Let’s take an example from Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. Luke Skywalker, our main character, is dissatisfied with an aspect of his life. He wants off the back-water planet where he lives. He has big dreams of attending the Imperial Academy with his friends, but can’t make them come true while he’s stuck out in the boonies. Things happen, people die, and suddenly Luke is off on his adventure—though in a way he never imagined it taking place.

By the time he runs into Ben Kenobi and learns he can become a Jedi, he’s thrilled that he can do something that doesn’t resemble the dull drab of his everyday life. Of course, being a Jedi isn’t exactly what he imagines. He struggles with the demands it puts on him, must contend with forces much greater than him, and has a healthy dose of skepticism about the whole thing. But when push comes to shove, he’s able to turn off his targeting computer and “trust the force” to blow up the Death Star.

That is an internal character arc. Apart from all the external conflict of fighting the empire and becoming a more capable Jedi, Luke also has to struggle with his own internal setbacks. This makes him an engaging character not just because he’s deeply wrapped up in the external conflict of the story (a ruthless empire that must be stopped). He also has his own personal desires and motivations that cause conflict and setbacks for him, intersect with the plot of the story, and ultimately lead to him growing as a character. He went from being skeptical about the force to trusting it, thus allowing him to achieve an important goal.

This is what you would call a rounded character as opposed to a flat one. A character like this has depth and dimensionality. They’re the type of characters we love to follow because they’re so damn interesting and relatable. They have crippling flaws and self-destructive tendencies just like me? Sign me up.

A character is not interesting because interesting things happen to them. A character is interesting because they have clear goals and motivations, internal conflicts that hinder them, and are forced to make hard choices that test who they are and what they value.

There is so much nuance when it comes to talking about characters, and I can’t possibly cover it all here. But not to worry, I’ll be coming back to this topic in future posts. For now, especially if you’re a new writer trying to start their first story, I just want you to keep this in mind: a character is not interesting because interesting things happen to them. A character is interesting because they have clear goals and motivations, internal conflicts that hinder them, and are forced to make hard choices that test who they are and what they value. First make the reader care about your character, and then be ruthless and brutal to that character.

In most cases, I think you’ll find that an engaging character is more important than any other storytelling element. That’s because we, as humans, are emotional and social creatures first and foremost. We empathize with the personal, not so much the grand ideas or intricate plots; those things often fall short when there’s not a strong personal connection to a character.

Now, there’s one more thing we need to cover before you’re ready to embark on your story adventure. What the hell actually happens in the story, to the setting and the characters I’ve spent so much time talking about? Well, what happens is called…

Plot is extremely important to storytelling, but it’s also important to realize that plot and story are not the same thing. Plot is a component of story; you could say that it’s the mechanism that makes the story move from point A to point B (and keep in mind that a story can move without the setting ever shifting. A whole story could be told about what happens in a single room. In fact, it’s a classic of whodunit mysteries.)

But now that you have your setting, your premise, and your characters at least partially developed, how do you go about constructing a plot that makes the story engaging, that keeps the reader on their toes, and that is satisfying when it’s all said and done?

Just like the other components, this is a can of worms topic that I could spend many posts talking about (and I will). It’s a subject of entire courses, books, and other learning mediums. So, instead of diving into the deep end, I’m going to just cover a few basic things that you should keep in mind about plot.

I say basic, but these are foundational concepts that will continue to inform the way you approach plot as you grow as a writer. Arguably the most important concept to keep in mind is that of promises and payoffs, which go hand-in-hand.

A promise is something that you setup for the reader, something that you indicate will change over the course of a story. A payoff is when you actually deliver on that promise later on in the narrative.

The idea is simple, but it can stump even experienced writers once the messy context of an actual story is involved. A promise is something that you setup for the reader, something that you indicate will change over the course of a story. Typically this is character desires/goals, consequential events, and other things of that nature. A payoff is when you actually deliver on that promise later on in the narrative.

Here’s a simple example: Our main character, Julia, wakes up one day and realizes that she’s late for work. As she rushes to get ready, she’s thinking about how angry her boss is going to be since this is her third time being late this month.

This is a promise.

You are showing the reader that something has occurred (waking up late) that will have consequences for the character down the line. If you don’t deliver on that promise–as in you never mention what happens as a result of her being late–you can be sure that the reader will forever hate your guts.  And by delivering, I mean that you need a payoff to that promise. The promise can resolve in all kinds of ways, but it must resolve.

Let’s say Julia arrives at work, she gets chewed out, and is subsequently fired. This is a payoff to the earlier promise. But you can also take a different approach. She might arrive to find her boss is even later than her. When her boss finally comes in, he has no idea Julia had been late to work. This is still a payoff, but a very different one that will impact the shape and direction of your story.

You can also think of promises and payoffs in terms of cause and effect. Put very simply, things happen (a cause) that lead to specific consequences (an effect). That is, in essence, what plot is.

One very important thing to keep in mind about promises and payoffs is that they should be happening in your story all the time, both in small scale as well as the grand scheme of things. For example, in Lord of the Rings, there is a story-arching promise and payoff that occurs: Will Frodo destroy the one ring in the fires of Mount Doom? The payoff is that he does.

But there are many other minor promises and payoffs throughout the series. Will Bilbo successfully surprise his party guests? He does! Will the hobbits escape the Ringwraiths at Bree? They do!

So, hopefully you see that you can think of plot as a series of promises and payoffs. The real work is in tying these together, having them build on each other in surprising and satisfying ways so that your story is riveting and continues to escalate.

It’s important that the stakes rise over the course of the plot; that the promises and payoffs intensify.

It’s important that the stakes rise over the course of the plot; that the promises and payoffs intensify—not just that they become more exciting, but that the potential repercussions to the story grow more significant. For example, it’s not as important to the story whether Bilbo pulls off his party trick as it is that Rohan wins the battle of Helm’s Deep; the stakes are not equal.

One last thing: You may have noticed that promises and payoffs often take the form of questions (Will the hero achieve their goal? Will Sally make enough money this summer to go to Italy with her friends? Etc.) That’s because promises and payoffs are also often talked about in the form of story questions and answers.

Every story can be boiled down to one or a set of questions and answers. The questions you raise throughout your story and the way you answer them are what determine the structure and flavor of your plot. Will Harry Potter survive and overcome Voldemort? Yes. Yes he will.

It’s a deceptively simple concept, and one that you should always keep in mind when you’re trying to develop your story’s plot. It is your surest foundation and best diagnostic tool. What are the questions you want to raise for the reader and how will you answer them over the course of the story?

If you can identify the points of potential conflict in your story—in other words, what could go wrong for your characters and your world—then you can start to build your plot by thinking about the promises and payoffs, or the questions and answers, that you could include.

What those are will change from story to story. The important thing to remember is that plot is guided by this continuous raising and answering of questions, and that for it be successful they should fit together in a larger scheme (think of how small moments in a story build up and compound to impact the whole narrative.)

Not only will focusing on promises and payoffs help you develop your plot from the very beginning, it’ll make diagnosing plot-related issues with your story much easier. Often, these issues are related to faulty promises and payoffs. So, when you get stuck because something isn’t working (a plot hole, a development that falls flat, etc.), you can usually identify what went wrong by examining it in relation to the promises you’ve set up and how you’ve delivered on your payoffs.

Wait. There’s More?

There are at least two more crucial elements to building a story called tone and theme.

Time to come clean. There are at least two more crucial elements to building a story called tone and theme. I won’t get into them now because they’re a bit headier than the elements I’ve covered so far, but I will cover them in a future post.

I hope these tips have given you the confidence and knowledge to get started on that first great story idea you’ve been mulling over. Now that you have a better understanding of the 4 elements you need to write a story, you can start off on solid footing. And if you still can’t seem to get into the right headspace, check out my other post where I give 5 tips for new writers to get into a healthy writing mindset.

So, now you should have the tools you need to get crackin’ on that masterpiece. If you still feel hesitant, be sure to read some of my other posts.

Well, what are you waiting for? Go write!

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About The Author

Austin is a freelance writer, editor, and fiction author. He applies his expertise and knowledge of storytelling craft to write engaging content and provide top-notch editing services. Check out his blog on writing fiction, and you can also follow him on Facebook and Twitter.