The Elements of Fiction

Intention: On some level, we all finish reading a story and ask ourselves -- and the author -- "So what?" Good stories leave you feeling like you can answer that question, like you know why you just read them. Sometimes there's a specific, tangible reason and you can summarize it in a sentence or two. My favorite stories tend to be those that leave me with just an intuitive sense of why I read them. I "feel" why they're important. And they seem to be about a lot of things while maintaining a certain simplicity and accessibility.

Details: In a way, this is the starting point. No matter what, great stories (great writing of all kinds) appeal to the five senses. The absolute best way to do that, hands down, is to use a predominance of interesting nouns and verbs. Adjectives and adverbs tend to be abstract (difficult to touch and taste and hear and smell and see), while nouns and verbs are concrete. You access them through and with your body.

Character: Characters change. At the very least, they have the clear opportunity to change and, for whatever reason, turn it down. Either way, this change (or lost opportunity for change) leads to real consequences for the character, positive and/or negative.

Setting: Setting is sneaky. It's really a support mechanism for two of the other elements, Details and Character. Knowing where in the world the story takes place -- and rendering it in an interesting way -- does more than half of the work in creating believable characters and giving a reader lush sensory details. When you forget your setting, you forget to ground -- literally and figuratively -- your story.

Beginning: All stories start somewhere. Most good ones, in my experience, start with a vibrant sensory image, a compelling action, and they leave me with an open-ended question. Beginnings are supposed to spur you to keep reading, and the combination of those three things (image + action + open question) will almost always do just that.

Ending: And all stories end. Or at least all stories stop. Stories that truly end -- and end well -- have the quality of resonance. When a sound resonates, it echoes for a while after the note has been struck. Think of a bell. There's the initial ding and then there's the sound that issues forth. Sometimes that sound can last a long time after the ding. It's sort of the same with the end of a story. The story comes to a close -- the "ding" -- but a good story lingers with a reader long after she's put it down. Often it helps you to make new connections to other elements of the story, and if you're really lucky as a reader, it helps you make new connections to what it means to be human.

Plot/Organization: All good stories are well-organized and most good stories have some sort of plot. Plot means that every cause has an effect. Somebody does something and that causes another thing to happen. Which causes another thing to happen, and so on. Stories are well-plotted when those causal sequences lead to a significant change in the essential elements of the story. Usually that change occurs in the main character.

Voice: Voice is the most difficult to define element. It's also arguably the most important one, especially if you're going to follow Tenet #4: Make it interesting. Voice is about the idiosyncratic choices you make as a writer. The vocabulary and sentence structures you use. The details you choose to describe. The characters you choose to populate the story and the aspects of them you choose to focus on. Also your thematic preoccupations and obsessions. It is, by definition, subjective. It is how you get "you" on the page.