When coming up with a new story, it is easy to get lost in the details before establishing an outline for your plot. Drawing up a plan, even if just a sketch, will help you remain focused and contain your ideas to produce a coherent and entertaining story.

The Beginning

One of the most important components of any story is its starting point. Not only does it provide a context for the rest of the plot but also, it establishes many other aspects of the story through which the book may be judged. It is at the beginning that we first meet the characters and become familiarized with the writer’s style. Another important factor of the beginning of a story is that it has the potential to attract new readers.

The Viewpoint

The viewpoint dictates from whose point of view the story is going to be told. The narration could be told from the main character’s observations or the narrator could be a third party appearing to observe the characters’ thoughts and actions.

From the beginning, it is crucial to establish your story’s viewpoint as this, in turn, determines other aspects of the book such as which events should be included and what should be left out. When a story is told in the first person, events related to the main character tend to take almost all of the focus as opposed to the other characters’ experiences, which is not always the case when the story is told in the third person.

The Pace

Different stories move forward differently. When beginning to write your book, you need to decide what amount of space you want to allocate to various scenes and how fast you want the pace to be. If it is an action-packed book, the pace could be faster than in stories from other genres. In every story, the pace must have a balance, not too fast that the reader is not able to feel the impact of the scenes and dialogues and not too slow that it makes the story dull.

The Goal

What is the point of writing the story? What does the author want the reader to grasp? The intent of writing a story could be as simple as just wanting to tell your own story. It does not have to be too complicated.

The Climax

You have started your story, you have defined its goal, now it is time to formulate when the mission will be actualized. A book can have various climax points; it does not have to be one scene. Still, the suspense should lead to a satisfying point for the reader. The narration should not drag the story on for too long before getting to the climax.

The End

By the time the story is approaching the end, it should have gone through the earlier steps and the end should close the story in a satisfying way. The mission or the goal introduced at the beginning should have been achieved and no strands of the plot should be left hanging.