Contents
Overcoming the Monster – A story where the hero recounts their conflict and triumph. Rags to Riches – A story where the underdog overcomes obstacles to rise in social status or quality of life. The Quest – A story in which the hero goes on a journey to obtain or save a treasured object.
They are true masters at combining the five key elements that go into every great short story: character, setting, conflict, plot and theme.
Story Writing usually follows a format that helps writers to structure their work. This format is a recognisable feature to lots of stories, and typically have five main components. Character, Setting, Plot, Conflict, and Theme.
Simple Plots
The simple plot is defined as a unified construct of necessary and probable actions accompanied by a change of fortune. Change of fortune is a crucial aspect of this type of plot — particularly the word change.
Story structure—which is also known as narrative structure, storyline or plotline—is the organizational framework of a story. Stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end.
The traditional three-act structure includes the following parts. Act I – Setup: Exposition, inciting incident, plot point one • Act II – Confrontation: Rising action, midpoint, plot point two • Act III – Resolution: Pre climax, climax, conclusion. Every story needs a good hook to lure in its readers.
A story has five basic but important elements. These five components are: the characters, the setting, the plot, the conflict, and the resolution.
Aristotle’s Poetics. In his Poetics [1] Aristotle (384-322 BC) classifies plot into two types: simple [haplos], and complex [peplegmenos]. The simple plot is defined as a unified construct of necessary and probable actions accompanied by a change of fortune.
The two categories are: Stories about abnormal characters, and; Stories about abnormal situations.
Aristotle concludes that the best kind of plot involves the misfortune of someone who is neither particularly good nor particularly bad and whose downfall does not result from some unpleasantness or vice, but rather from hamartia—an error in judgment.
A good story is about something the audience decides is interesting or important. A great story often does both by using storytelling to make important news interesting. The public is exceptionally diverse. … A good story, however, does more than inform or amplify.
Since there will be many plot points in a movie, I call these The Magnificent 7 Plot Points. They are: the Back Story, the Catalyst, the Big Event (we’ve mentioned that one), the Midpoint, the Crisis, the Climax, and the Realization. Let’s start with the Back Story.
The average short story should run anywhere from 5,000 to 10,000 words, but they can be anything above 1,000 words. Flash fiction is a short story that is 500 words or less.
A narrative work beginning in medias res (Classical Latin: [ɪn ˈmɛdɪ. aːs ˈreːs], lit. “into the middle of things”) opens in the midst of the plot ( cf. ab ovo, ab initio).
The essential elements of a novel include chapters, characters, such as a protagonist and antagonist, dialogue, point of view, theme, setting, and plot.
How to build a fictional world – Kate Messner