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It is impossible to read one page about the Manderley estate without feeling its sinister energy. Rebecca is a master class in how to grip readers by their necks and pull them into a story.

 

At a bare minimum, your story’s setting must inform the reader where and when the plot takes place. Beyond that, it’s useful to describe the scenery using as many senses as possible: not only what things look like, but what they sound like and how they smell, taste, and feel. This will help flesh things out but has a limitation: it’s basically just describing things.

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To take things to the next level, show your characters reacting to their setting. Readers take their emotional cues from characters. A haunted house will only be scary for the reader if the characters are scared. A romantic restaurant will not click with the reader until you put a romantic couple in it. A baseball stadium won’t mean anything to a reader until a character has a tale of redemption, hope, loss, overcoming the odds, etc., in it. Character reactions are what make settings come alive.

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Sometimes, less is more. Starkness and simplicity can be powerful tools for evoking feelings in your characters and readers. The measure of a setting isn’t the sheer number of details, but whether it draws the reader into the story.

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Strong Plot

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A strong plot is the cornerstone of a strong story. Plot is what keeps readers turning pages.

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Not all books are plot-driven. Literary fiction, in particular, focuses on deep themes, complex characters, and multi-layered relationships. Sometimes the plot in literary fiction is secondary or non-existent. But by and large, a strong plot is essential. New authors rarely succeed with plotless literary fiction.

 

A familiar example of a successful plot-driven book is The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, which sold over seventeen million copies and has led to sequels, a prequel, and movies. It’s a post-apocalyptic tale of children forced to fight to the death in neo-gladiatorial spectacles to win food and supplies for their impoverished regional districts. The action is fast-paced, with the highest possible stakes: there can be only one winner of the contest, so the protagonist (Katniss Everdeen) will either die in battle or be forced to kill a friend who loves her and has already saved her life.

 

While The Hunger Games does touch on deep themes (justice, totalitarian government, punishment, revenge, and love), it is, in the end, a rollicking adventure. A plot-driven story.

 

Scores of books and articles have been written about how to develop a strong plot. We’ll go into some advanced tools and techniques in future articles. For now, let’s look at four basic elements of good plotting: structure, pacing, surprise, and stakes.

 

Structure is how your plot is organized. Every novel is organized in some way, to pull scenes together into a coherent story. The three-act structure is an overwhelmingly popular way to do it, because things generally have a beginning, middle, and end. It’s how readers naturally think and expect a story to unfold.

 

In a three-act structure, the first act introduces the characters and their motivations, backstories, and relationships. It ends with an Inciting Incident: something that gets the main character out of complacency and into gear, such as the kidnapping of a daughter or being wrongfully convicted of a crime. Act 2 consists of subplots that build out the story as the protagonist encounters obstacles in pursuit of his goal (getting his daughter back; getting out of prison; etc.). In Act 3, things get resolved in a final showdown.

 

“In the first act get your principal character up a tree; in the second act, throw stones at him; in the third, get him down gracefully.” - Anonymous; first mentioned in 1897 in the Bridgeport Herald

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There are other ways to organize a story, but for most writers and most stories, the three-act structure, which has been around since Aristotle, is a good organizing framework.

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Pacing is also an important element of a plot. There has to be enough action to keep readers on their toes, but no one can read an entire book of action sequences. Readers need a break now and then to digest what they’ve read and bond with the characters. If the pace is too slow, though, readers will get bored and stop reading. It’s a delicate balancing act.

 

Surprise: A good plot isn’t predictable. “Jennifer went to the store, bought a shirt, and came home” is not a good plot. “Jennifer went to the store, and the cashier turned out to be her long-lost sister, who she thought was dead,” takes the plot in a surprising and interesting direction. Surprises and plot twists keep readers on their toes—and keep them reading.

 

Of course, no one wants to be surprised by plot twists inserted just for shock value. Twists have to fit organically within the story and be hinted at earlier. Readers should know that Jennifer had a long-lost sister before finding that out in the clothing store.

 

The set-up for an eventual twist or surprise is part of what a good Act 1 is about (and for); the acts have to support each other. In a James Bond novel, if he’s given a new poison dart weapon in Act 1, he will use it by the end of the book; otherwise, it’s a false promise. If he uses a new weapon in Act 3 that hasn’t been introduced beforehand, it’s a deux ex machina, a solution to a big problem that magically appears out of nowhere. Readers hate those. Surprises and twists do require planning.

 

“There’s an old rule of theater that goes, ‘If there’s a gun on the mantel in Act I, it must go off in Act III.’ The reverse is also true.” - Stephen King, On Writing

 

Stakes: the stakes of your story must be high or no one will care what happens. Is your protagonist trying to save the planet, her country, or someone she loves? Is a great injustice being committed, which must be routed out for things to be made right? Is the story truly a matter of life and death for the main characters? In The Hunger Games, readers glean quickly that the outcome must either involve the death of a sympathetic main character or a revolt against the government. High stakes are what keep readers turning pages.

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Worthy goal

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No one wants to read about a character without a goal. What would that even look like? “Bob went to work, came home, and watched TV.” That’s life without a goal. There’s no purpose and no conflict, nothing you can build a story around. This is why you never see a protagonist without some kind of goal.

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But what kind of goal should your main character have? A goal doesn’t have to be admirable or one the reader would share. Shakespeare’s Macbeth didn’t have a warm and fuzzy goal. Informed by three witches that he is destined to be King of Scotland, he kills the current occupant of the throne, Duncan, and takes it for himself. Wracked by paranoia and guilt, he becomes a tyrant, killing more and more people until his madness ends in civil war. So basically, Macbeth was not a nice person. His goal (power at any cost) was grisly, immoral, and not one that most readers share, but no one would say that makes it a bad story.

 

While a goal doesn’t have to be admirable or noble, it does have to be worthy of the main character’s, and the reader’s, time. “I want to get laid a lot” is not an atypical real-life goal for some people, but it’s a hum-drum goal for a story. Why? Because you can’t drive meaningful conflict around it. The character either gets laid a lot in the story or doesn’t; who cares? However, “I used to get laid a lot, but now I wish I had a family, and I wonder if it isn’t too late after all those years of screwing around” is a more complex goal that can drive a story. A goal like that is worthy of the reader’s emotional investment. 

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Conflict

 

Closely related to a worthy goal is conflict. As soon as something stands in the way of a protagonist achieving his goal, voila, conflict!

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Conflict is the heart of any story, the thing that gives it energy and life. Without conflict, there is no tension. Without tension, there is no emotion and readers will not be engaged.

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“Stories are based in conflict, and when the conflict is resolved the story ends. That’s because for the most part happiness is amorphous, wordless, and largely uninteresting.” - Ann Patchett

 

In the classic formulation, conflict can be man-versus-man, man-versus-himself, man-versus-society, or man-versus-nature. Sticking with that dated, gendered nomenclature (which looks odd to the modern eye), we can also add man-versus-technology, man-versus-the supernatural, and man-versus-fate. So that’s seven types of conflict, and conflict can be physical, emotional, or psychological. There are a lot of possibilities, and books can have more than one conflict. The best novels often do.

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A novel famous for its multifaceted layers of conflict is J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. It’s sold over sixty-five million copies since 1951 and regularly shows up on lists of the greatest novels of the past century. In it, we follow protagonist Holden Caulfield—the iconic angst-ridden rebellious teenager—as he is kicked out of boarding school and becomes a wanderer in New York City. He struggles with relationships (man-versus-man), rebellion (man-versus-society), and his own mental health (man-versus-self). The multiple layers of conflict create a complex character that readers have found compelling for seven decades.  

 

Painful choices tend to make for good conflict and drama. “Dave could either have a million dollars or the love of his life, but not both” is much more interesting than “Dave figured out how to get a million dollars and worked hard to make it happen.” In the absence of difficult choices, plots are just people doing stuff. Many powerful works of fiction have been built on forcing protagonists to make heart-wrenching choices, such as William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice (1979), in which a character is forced to choose which of her children will live or die in a Nazi concentration camp. Painful, almost unimaginable, choices make for riveting drama.

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Without conflict, a story will be dull and lifeless. You must be able to articulate a central, driving conflict for your story. If you can’t, it’s time to rethink the story.

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Resolution

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A resolution resolves the central conflict, ties up loose ends, and brings the story to an end, giving the reader a sense of completion and satisfaction. 

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A good example of a satisfying resolution is Book 1 of C.S. Lewis’ classic fantasy series The Chronicles of Narnia. Siblings Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy Pevensie discover a magical wardrobe that transports them to the land of Narnia. Narnia’s under the rule of a cruel witch who has placed a curse on the land, so that it will always be winter but never Christmas. With the help of Aslan, a lion who turns out to be the true king of Narnia, the Pevensie siblings are able to overthrow the witch and break her curse. Narnia is restored to its rightful state as a peaceful and prosperous kingdom. It’s a satisfying, complete resolution (until the Pevensie kids go back to Narnia in book two).

 

A resolution must be believable within the story that’s already unfolded; it shouldn’t require that characters do things that are entirely inconsistent with their capabilities up to that point. And it shouldn’t need a brand-new character or plot trick. In H.G. Well’s War of the Worlds, Earth-invading, human-killing aliens are suddenly wiped out in Act 3 by bacteria. Yep, the aliens get colds and die, the end. H.G. Wells could pull off that deux ex machina resolution, but that was a very different time in fiction, and H.G. Wells was H.G. Wells. If you pull that plot stunt, readers will savage your book in their reviews. The final resolution has to make sense and not require a groan-worthy suspension of disbelief.