It is impossible to create an original story. Don’t bother trying. It is equally impossible to create a story that is NOT unique, short of direct plagiarism. You want to write Romeo and Juliet. Change the character names, use your own language (assuming you have not time travelled here from Elizabethan London), and you will have something that is familiar, but different enough to be an original work of fiction. Not an original story, an original work of fiction. Big difference.
Idea
Most ideas start as a variation on a theme. Die Hard on a Ferris wheel. Sense and Sensibility in a Lunar prison colony. Ferris Bueller’s Day off in Mogadishu. All spectacularly bad ideas. However, you can play with it and make substitutions until it is only a moderately bad idea. The key of making it into a good idea is to have the story teach a valuable lesson.
Lesson
Money is evil. Racism is bad. One cannot survive alone. Misery loves company. There are thousands of these tropes and you simply need to pick one. Your story may have many, all but one of which will be eliminated in the revision process. Just kidding, but not really. It isn’t important to pick one because your story will eventually reveal what it is.
Setting
Where the story starts is less important than where it will go. Air travel can get you anywhere in the world within a day or two. When a story begins is far more important than where it goes. If you are in ancient Rome, air travel is off the table… or is it? (Your main character… Larry Cotter has a time travelling magic broom and accidentally ends up in the middle of the Coliseum during a gladiatorial battle. I am full of bad ideas today…) Choosing the when of your story will narrow where it can happen, and those two will further narrow who it can happen to.
Character
All stories, good and bad, take a character from one place to another. Usually, it is a change of mind more than physical location, but more often than not you will have both. Who would get the most value from the lesson? A starving child is not going to get as much from the ‘money is evil’ lesson as the Wall Street banker will. The road ahead is going to be rough for them, so who do you want to torture?
Most of my stories start simply with a character in a situation. Trucker driving in a snow storm. Where is she going? Is he about to crash? Maybe they find someone stranded and have to help. Why do I care what happens to them? The possibilities are many, and your job is to enumerate all the possibilities and then pick the most interesting one.
Additional characters will accumulate. Give them unique names (so it is easy to find and replace them) and write them down on a (separate) pad of paper. When you get a few pages down, you don’t want to have to scroll back up to find the name. Scrolling backward is THE ABSOLUTE WORST THING YOU CAN DO when creating a story. Make notes next to their name like age, occupation, hair color, etc. as these facts reveal themselves. That way you don’t have worry about consistency in later chapters.
Never predetermine how important a character will be. You may decide to kill off your hero in chapter three and make the barista she had a single conversation with the new hero of the story. Remember, this is Creation, not dictation. Even if you have written a precise outline, you need to be flexible enough for the characters to have some free will of their own.
Beats
This is purposely a musical term because your story must have a rhythm to be enjoyed. There are many guidelines that have been offered to define the structure of a story. Inciting incident, call to action, etc. I use the following beats only as a rough outline for what needs to happen.
- Introduction – What is your world and who is in it?
- Main character – Why should the reader care about them and what do they want?
- Explosion (inciting incident) – What has turned the main character’s world upside down? The bigger, the better. This is often where the villain of the story is revealed.
- Stages of Grief – How the main character tries to avoid the repercussions of the explosion
- Acceptance – the final stage of grief is realizing the explosion has changed their life and they need to deal with it
- Pursuit – Chasing after the new goal
- Obstructions – The goal is impossible
- Change – something new makes the goal possible
- Repeat Pursuit/Obstruction/Change without being repetitive
- All is lost – The villain has won, the main character has given up
- Final Twist of Fate – Somehow the tables are turned and the main character nears their goal, often a different one than they started out pursuing
- Success – The lesson is learned, the aftermath is explained, and seeds of the next adventure are planted
When do you know you are done creating your first draft? When The lesson has been taught and all the questions have been answered.