Planet Justin

It seems really basic, but the point that new creators miss when crafting a story — fiction or non — is that at its root, a story has to start somewhere, develop and then finish up. In other words, it’s got to have a beginning, middle and end.

The beginning is critical, because it has all sorts of jobs. It has to hook the reader. It has to set the scene and usually, introduce us to our protagonist (or main character — I like the term hero, but that can be confusing because the protagonist isn’t always a hero in the traditional sense). Then, something has to happen that upsets the characters’ worlds. Screenwriters call it an inciting incident, an event that takes our protagonist from his happy, comfortable state to one in flux, one that spurs him from the status quo to seek out a goal (ie, Harry Potter learns he’s a wizard, a train derails in Super 8). The inciting incident pushes us to the middle.

This is where most everything happens, and it’s often the hardest part. Most creators have the beginning already figured out and most see the end in their mind, but taking that long winding path to it is a challenge. The middle is where everything develops. Because of the inciting incident in the beginning, our hero has a goal — something he wants to accomplish. Throughout the middle of a story, we watch as he overcomes obstacle after obstacle to reach that goal, finally bringing us to the ultimate obstacle at the end, his final test.

In the end, he either wins, or he doesn’t. He accomplishes his goal, or he doesn’t. Everything returns to the status quo, or he’s forever changed. We finally see what was promised to us in the beginning: a resolution that ties off the loose thread we created with our inciting incident. Endings are just as difficult as the other parts of the story, because if you don’t meet the expectations of your audience, if the ending doesn’t feel “satisfying” (a vague term that will never apply to 100 percent of your audience 100 percent of the time, no matter how well your story is constructed), the your ending just doesn’t work.

People ask me a lot about how to write flash fiction because I run a flash fiction site. They always want to know the secret to writing short. My advice is simple: break the story down to its simplest parts, the beginning, the middle and the end. If you can write one sentence for each part, you’ve got a flash fiction story. You can start that way for a longer, more complex story, too. Describe the beginning, the middle and the end and you’ve got a solid roadmap for a great story.