David Farland’s Daily Kick in the Pants—The First Four “Parts” to a Story

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Category: David Farland Newsletter

Published on Sunday, 15 January 2012 06:26

Written by David Farland

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Over the past 2000 years, a number of critics have tried to come up with ways to dissect good stories and create a "formula" for writing a great story. Interestingly enough, nearly all of these formulas can point to some examples that work brilliantly. The five-act play structure of the Elizabethan period gave way to the modern three-act film. My mentor, Algis Budrys, used a seven-part structure that worked well. I prefer to divide stories up into nine parts—or maybe we should call them "steps."

You see, a part is a static thing that just sits there. But in creating a story, there are really nine major "steps" to creation.

These nine "steps" that you take I’m going to outline here, but will expand upon them over the next few days. You don’t have to follow this order precisely. In fact, I know that you won’t. But listing these as steps helps to understand the process of how stories are created.

Step 1: Create your setting(s) for your story. I list this first because whether you’re setting your tale in a fantasy world, a far-off galaxy, or in Spain on August 12, 1922, your story has to take place somewhere. That somewhere limits the types of characters that will inhabit your setting. If you’re writing a story set in 1922, you’re not likely to have it inhabited by characters from 2012

—unless it’s a time travel story of some kind.

Please be aware that you don’t have to begin a story by creating the setting first. Very often, you may have a character or situation pop into mind, and you work backward from there. But you still have to have a setting. I’ve seen people try to write stories without settings, and they don’t work well

—for reasons that I will explain later.

A setting consists of a place and a time. New York was a vastly different place 89 million years ago from what it is now. Heck, it’s a vastly different place now from what it was twenty years ago.

Of course, a story can have multiple settings.

Step 2: Create your characters. To some degree, the characters in your story arise from the setting and are defined by it. A boy growing up in Rome in 318 won’t have a Harvard education.

Now, your cast of characters might be quite wide

—with literally dozens—or might be as few as one. But at some point you’ll need to consider who and what your characters are. Your character could be a human, but it might be an alien, a village, a mouse, or a brave little toaster. Still, a story can’t occur in the absence of characters.

Among your cast, remember that you also have entire societies and cultures that you also have to deal with. These might be anything from Haitian refugees to Hollywood journalists. At some point, your characters need to grow out of their societies and become individuals.

Step 3: Create your conflicts. These arise from the characters (and the societies) that you’ve created. If you’ve studied conflicts at all, you know that there are different types. You’ll know that most successful stories deal with different types of conflicts. You might have a protagonist who is hoping to save the world from a global financial meltdown (a societal conflict), while at the same time he struggles to elude a brilliant detective (a personal conflict), as he falls in love with a smart and effective elderly woman (a romantic conflict), and tries to overcome his own shyness (an inner conflict), all while defying the will of a just god. Good stories typically have several types of conflict in them at once. But again, I’ve never seen a story that works that doesn’t have a powerful, compelling conflict.

Step 4: Create your themes. What does your story say about the great questions in life? How does it really affect the reader? This is something that as a writer you need to consider at some time in the writing process.

You see, we make up stories as writers, but ultimately the reader needs to feel intellectually and emotionally fed. The story isn’t "about" the characters and worlds that you create. It’s about the reader

—her life, her emotional needs, her wants. A great story can at times help readers reach new intellectual and emotional plateaus. Have you ever read a story and felt that you somehow . . . transcended what you were before you began the fictive journey. That’s what a great story can do. I recall one critic talking about how he read War and Peace at age 12. He said, "When I started that book, I was a child. But when I finished, I felt that I suddenly understood the world."

I list this as the fourth step in creating a story simply because the themes of your stories grow out of the world, the characters, and the conflicts that you explore in the first three steps of telling a tale.

Very often, I find that I "discover" my themes quite late in a story

—perhaps even in the final draft. That’s all right. You don’t have to begin a story with a theme in mind. But you don’t really finish the tale until you actually figure out what the story is really about.

So those are the first four "parts" to a story. In effect, they’re rather static. You can jog on a treadmill and think about each one, and never type a single word on your keyboard. Yet as you begin thinking about them, you’ll most likely have scenes begin to come to mind, and pieces of the larger tapestry will emerge.

Next week I’m going to take this to the next step

—the place where we actually begin putting words on paper.

. . .

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www.runelordsmovie.com from Jan 16th to 20th. Amazon.com is actually paying me a small fee for each story we give away, so please go download yours with my compliments. While you're there, take a moment to vote for your favorite stars for the Runelords Movie.

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