Welcome back writers! Yes, it’s Monday once again, and that means we’re back with another Being a Better Writer to talk about!

But first, in the old traditions, let’s have an update! And there’s really only one thing there could be an update about: Axtara – Magic and Mayhem! The update is … editing is going well. Chapters have been trimmed and reworked, descriptions have been tightened, and loans have been finalized. By our protagonist, that is. Sadly, there’s nothing to report on the cover yet, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t any other good news. With the edits coming along at a good clip, I think I’ll start dropping teasers next week. On Patreon first for our supporters, and then later here on the site. Who’s up for chapter previews?

The goal is still to release before Christmas, but I do acknowledge how tight that schedule is looking. I’m doing what I can. With a little luck, and a lot of work, Axtara – Magic and Mayhem will be in your hands by then.

All right, with that I suppose I could dive into today’s BaBW topic, but … what if I offered just a little teaser? Here you go, fresh from the pages of Magic and Mayhem:

“Good morning,” Axtara said, lifting one set of claws to give the woman a wave. “I apologize for startling your animals. I don’t think they’re used to dragons landing nearby.”

The woman seemed to weigh several responses before replying, her eyes darting from Axtara to the goats and back again. “They’re not,” she finally said. “Did you … want one?”

That’s it! That’s all you’re getting at the moment. With that little teaser given, let’s talk about writing!

So today’s topic is a bit more straightforward than most of you are used to. Usually on BaBW we dig into a topic in some depth, but with the caveat that the digging is done for those who already have a grasp of the associated topics (or just love diving in).

Today’s post though isn’t quite like those. Instead, we’re stepping back with this one, back to the very start for those who think “Hey, I’d like to write a story!” but have no idea where to start. And I put emphasis there because for some it is daunting to think about actually writing a story. I’ve spoken in person with people at cons and appearances who have that glimmer of desire to write, but quite literally have no idea where to begin, outside of the glimmer of an idea they have.

So today we’re giving those folks a boost. We’re going to talk about five things you need to start your own story. If you’re starting from nothing, then this is the basic list to get you going.

So hit that jump, and let’s talk writing.

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1 – Characters

We’re diving right in with the first thing you’ll need if you’re going to write a story: Characters. And yes, that’s a link to every post Being a Better Writer has ever done on the subject, for when you’re ready to take that dive. We’ll do that for each of these five topics.

But without characters, your story has no one to take shape around. Characters are the basic vehicle of any tale, carrying the reader through their world as they present all the material that makes up what our audience experiences.

Now I do want to note that “character” is a broad ranging term. It can be a narrator, regaling your audience with the story you have in mind. A character can be a person, but it can also be an animal. Or even an inanimate object that has in some way been slightly anthropomorphized—or given human-like traits so that there’s a familiarity to the audience. This latter form is how there can be stories about cities as if they were people: the city is the character.

But whether your tale is fast or slow, deep or simple, no matter what you’ll need character of some kind. Think of a character as an “agent” to convey the reader along your tale. This concept is so key to a story that you’ll notice it even being used in non-fictional forms of entertainment, such as documentaries. Have you ever watched a documentary where an animal or insect is given a name or followed by the camera through their “day” as if they were a person? Or followed a train or some other heavy piece of a machinery as the narrator talked about what it was doing? Those are just making characters to view the information from the perspective of for the audience.

Your story will need to have the same. It will need characters. If you don’t have characters, you won’t be able to craft a story, much less write it out in a form readers will recognize and bond with.

And again, characters can be inanimate objects. Stories have been written that have no “people” in them but tell the tale of cities as if they were living things, or even household objects. Never giving them a voice, but following them much in the way a documentary would.

So, if you want to tell a story, ask yourself who the characters are in it. Who is this story going to be about? What are they? Who are they? Once you can answer that, even with a one-sentence answer, you’re that much closer to having your story written.

But character isn’t all you need.

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2 – Setting

Once you have a character (or characters), you need the location that your story is going to take place. You need a setting. A local. The where of where your story happens. A criminal-charged city? A distant mountain landscape? A decrepit moon base? Where?

As with characters, this isn’t something you can do without. Even the most minimalist of stories still have a setting. It may be implied to be a blank white room, but it is a place. A space of some kind in which the events of the story occur, in which the character or characters interact or engage with one another.

Now, a few may wonder if you can come up with the setting first and then the characters. Yes, this is totally fine. You can come up with either in any order as long as you do have both. Usually most of the people I’ve spoken with taking their first step into telling a story have a character in mind, but not nearly as much about the setting.

And the thing is, setting is critically important. Just as each of us is shaped by our environment (like it or not, it’s true) in some fashion, so will you characters be shaped by theirs. Going back to our documentary example, an insect or a prey species will have adaptations and habits that help it survive in its environment. And your character may not be a prey species, but they will have picked up habits or elements of their character from the setting.

Let me rephrase that: This goes both ways. If you have a character who needs to have a certain skill, can you build a setting that brings that out in them. Likewise, If you have a setting that needs certain characters to work, you build those characters.

Both should reflect one another, regardless of which came first. But in order for you to have a story, you must have a setting in addition to your characters. As simple as a room with only one exit, as complicated as an empire struggling to avoid collapse.

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3 – Conflict

Now some think that once they have the prior two things, that’s it, they have a story. Not true. There’s something else that any story must have to be a story. And that’s conflict.

At some point in your life, you may have learned of Newton’s Three Laws of Motion. Greatly simplified, they are first that an object in motion will stay in motion unless acted upon, second that the force on an object is equal to its mass times acceleration, and third that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Well, fiction runs the same way. Stories run the same way. Our characters are like objects in a setting, and in order for them to begin to move, or change their course—in other words, for something to take place—something must act upon them with force.

Your story will need a conflict. Small or large, but it must have one. Without a conflict, your characters will drift in an aimless void, nothing to act upon or have act on them, and you don’t have a story if that’s the case.

Now, note that I’m not saying the conflict must be grand or epic. Cozy stories, for example, are often built around having low-stakes conflicts such as “these two characters are having a disagreement” or “figure out who sabotaged the knitting contest.”

These are low-stakes conflicts, but they are conflicts. Disagreements between friends are conflicts. Characters at odds with one another over what path to take is a conflict. Struggling to overcome a fear of public speaking is a conflict.

For that matter, so is being thrown into a life-or-death struggle. Or trying to find food to eat. Disagreeing over where to eat.

Occasionally you’ll hear someone who isn’t a writer postulate that a story doesn’t “need” conflict and that the whole concept is mistaken (usually arguing, at least in my experience, that it’s just “western” culture poisoning) before then offering stories that they believe are free of conflict. Except in every one of those cases I’ve seen, there has been. They just didn’t recognize it as conflict, but there were characters at odds with one another, or striving to achieve some goal, or even just trying to stay in one place as the world pushed at them.

In other words, if you’ve heard that as a wannabe writer, ignore it. All stories have conflict of some kind. Yours will be no different.

So then the question you must ask is what that conflict will be in your story. What shape will it take? Will it come from the characters or the setting? What striving will it introduce? Maybe you want it to be an aggressive, life-or-death struggle, or perhaps you’d like something a bit more relaxed.

Whether grand or small, your story will need a conflict. Even just two characters disagreeing with one another. It needs something to create or inspire that force that will move your characters through the story.

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4 – Time

All right, you’ve got characters, setting, and conflict. You’re ready for your story to take shape!

Well, almost. See, there are two more things you’re going to need in order for that story to take shape. Not everyone talks about them, and sometimes people don’t even want to talk about them, but we’re about getting a story written here, so we’re bringing it up.

That’s right. I’m talking about time. More specifically, time management.

See, even if you have all the components of a good story, it doesn’t matter if you never set aside the time to write it.

I realize some of you are going “Yeah, and?” but the truth is that a lot of people, and I mean a truly staggering amount miscalculate how long actually writing a story will take. As a result, even if they have everything else figured out, they never give themselves the time to actually write the blasted thing, and as a result the story never takes shape.

If you want to write a story, then you need to give yourself the time to write. And I’m not speaking of “sitting back with a drink and a laptop in a hammock thinking about how hard you’re going to write once you’ve relaxed the to the right state of mind” like a character in a sitcom. I’m speaking of setting aside time to write, like you would a chore, a job, or any other endeavor you wished to see done, and then doing it.

Take the time to write. Take the time to put your story—characters, setting, and conflict—to the page. Commit an hour, or a half-hour, or a weekend … Whatever it takes. But set aside the time and use that time to write.

Give yourself time. I cannot stress this any clearer.

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5 – Determination

Now, with those four things given, let’s talk about the fifth and final one: Determination. In order to write a story, you need to have the dedication to actually go through with it.

I saw a survey once. It said that something like 80% of Americans state that they would like to write a book “someday.”

You know how many people ever finish a draft? Estimates put it at around 3%. And only a tiny fraction of a percent past that ever actually take the work to polish it up and submit it anywhere, much less go through with publishing anything.

Why? Because a lot of people say they want to write a book with the same energy they say they’d like to be a billionaire. With the subtext of “I don’t actually plan to change anything or move toward it, but if you hand me a completed book/billion dollars I’ll gladly take it.”

They don’t have the motivation. Writing a book is, as some find when they try, incredibly difficult. There’s a massive amount of work that goes into it. Not really wanting to do that work, 77% of people surveyed in America just sort of sidle away and say “someday.”

But if you really want your story to make it out there, someday won’t cut it.

This means removing distractions. Some writers turn off their Wi-Fi when they write. Others write at the same time every day, making it a habit. Others still will write to specific playlists of music, training themselves that “When you hear this song, the time to work has come.”

Yes, work. Writing is work, even when we enjoy it. It’s an effort that requires flexing a lot of mental muscles and skill. Mental muscle and skill you cannot acquire without pushing yourself to attain it.

So if you want to write a story, the last thing you need is the determination to see yourself through the process. To sit down again and again and write. To edit and change characters or scenes as needed to make things improve. To do it day after day until the story is done, and ready to release into the world.

You may have all the other things you need to write a story, but where will your motivation come from? It’s not something anyone else can answer for you, but something that is you and you alone. Find your motivation, your drive to write this story.

Once you have it, you will.

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All right, there you have it. The five things you need to start your own story: Characters, setting, conflict, time, and determination. With those five things you can take someone anywhere. From the lobby of a bank run by a dragon, to a mysterious underwater colony world, to a space pirate base, to a grandmother’s bake sale.

So find your five. Put them together. And get your story.

Good luck. Now get writing.

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Oh, and if this post felt a little scatter-brained, I apologize. I did my best, but as noted, I am still recovering from a cold that had me fuzzy-headed.

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