1.WRITING PROCESS: Conceive-Story Concept

Ok, so you have an idea for a story. What do you do next? You develop that idea into a solid and complete concept. I stress the word complete because, I know very well the frustration of going off, halfcocked, on a story concept that’s not “ready”.

To have a complete story concept you need to have a conflict and its resolution. There are a couple of other elements involved but those are the main two. I’ve had plenty of story ideas where I knew what the conflict was and I took off running with that alone, only to have my momentum slowly grind to a halt because, I didn’t know where I was going with the conflict.

Where was my story going? What was everything leading up to? I didn’t have any direction because I didn’t have a resolution. I learned that conflicts are directed by their desired resolution.

If you have a character that is going to rob a bank (conflict) before you start writing the story you need to know what’s ultimately going to happen to your character (resolution). Will they get away with it? Will they get caught and sent to prison? Are they going to get killed during the process of robbing the bank? By knowing how you want the conflict to end, you’ll have a specific direction in which to take your writing.

To solidify my story concepts I follow the steps below.

CONCEIVE: Story Concept

Title

This isn’t very important in the beginning because story titles have a tendency to change while you are writing the story, but I try to come up with one anyway just to have a name to refer to when I talk to other people about the story. Be it cryptic or not, the title should have something to do with the story, of course.

Plot Summary

Here I write a nice short summary of what the story is about excluding its resolution. Writing out the summary and memorizing it allows me to tell others what the story is about without babbling on endlessly, as I tend to do, when I talk about a story. Normally I tell of the opposing forces at work, the main conflict, and what weighs in the balance.

Major Conflicts

What is the character trying to do and why are they trying to do it? You have to know the “Why” behind a conflict because that’s what fuels it. For instance, if Sarah wants to find her long lost twin sister, we need to know why. This is the heart of the story. This is the reason why people will go out of their way to read it. Usually there is only one “Main Conflict” but there can multiple conflicts, depending on the story type.

Minor Conflicts

What are the smaller conflicts/sub plots of the story and why do they exist. These can be a mix of internal conflicts bound within a character’s sense of moral and duty or, they can be external conflicts between other characters that are not major factors in the story’s Main Conflict.

Plot Twists

If there are any in the story, I keep track of the “what and why” here. Plot Twists can come from the conflicting objectives of other characters or, they can come from an “unforeseen” event that forces the main character to achieve their goal through other means than what they planned.

Conflict Resolutions

Here is where I direct and “end” the Main Conflict, Minor Conflicts, and Plot Twists. Resolutions are the goals that you write towards; they are your directions that guide you. If the bank robbing character mentioned earlier is going to get away with the heist, you have to write the story in the “direction” that allows them to escape. 

Now my story concept is complete. I have conflicts, plot twists, resolutions for them all, and a summary for the story. Once I have completed the Story Concept, I move on to the “Chapter Summaries” to start planning the major and minor events of my story. I’ll go into detail about that next week.

I hope this process helps some of you out there.