Introduction: What is needed for a story?

Whenever you read a book, you are holding a story that needed hours and hours of writing and thinking. The first thing necessary for a book or a novella is an idea of what the story is about. Is it about a princess who’s in need of a prince? Or is it maybe about a villain who’s trying to take over the world and turns into a hero when he or she gets beaten by another villain? This is the primary key for a story, just the beginning for the plot.

A plot is a short summary of what is going to happen in a book, sort of like a plan of what is going to happen. If you take the plot of Harry Potter for example, you see the beginning, where he is brought to his aunt and uncle by Hagrid, the middle part, where Harry figures out he is a wizard, is being taken to Hogwarts, attends classes and plays quidditch games. You see what the foundation of the story is. While writing, the plot is being used to write the chapters and the plot will become long pieces of texts.

Next up is the character guide. Some writers even make a separate document where they write down their character’s appearance, personality, hobbies and relationships as if they’re writing a chapter in which the character is completely introduced to the reader, keeping nothing a secret. Not everything that has been written down in that document is used in the story itself. Most of the time, the document is just for the writer, so he or she doesn’t forget how a certain character thinks or acts. This is highly important, because one change in the point of view of the main character for example is not a really big problem, but when someone keeps changing from personality – for example, from tough to sweet to someone who gets angry really quick – the reader might question what the writer has done and it affects how the reader reads the story. They might stop reading or think it’s boring when the writer is not consistent with the characters.