Story Course

Writing stories is like telling a huge detailed believable lie. Tell a really good lie and people will thank you for it. Huge detailed and believable lies are highly valuable and difficult to create, but they are also really fun. 

In this guide I’ll walk you through the basic elements needed to write a great story. These elements are the basic foundational components needed in all stories. It doesn’t matter what story you want to write, it can be a crime thriller, a love story, a western, or a sci-fi. All the good stories have these elements. All the bad stories never get finished. Without these story elements you don’t have a story, and if you don’t know what they contain, make them up. Hence, it’s a really big lie. 

After the story elements comes the outlining which are split into Acts or Parts (a beginning, middle, and end). Generally, you need to know the end before anything else because without it, you don’t know what’s important for the middle or the beginning. The middle is where most of your story happens so it also needs to have a purpose and be powerful, otherwise you’ll get bored or lost writing it, and the reader will too. The beginning has to be thought about as well because if it waffles and drags the reader will get bored, put the story down, and maybe never return to it. 

The below elements are non-linear: you can tackle them in any order.

This makes for a much more enjoyable reading experience.