Over the last month we’ve been building up story elements. We started out by creating a Dwarven character, finding out what they want from life and where they come from. Then we created a secret room with its own mystery. Last week we created an ancient structure, plus the lore and superstitions alongside that story.

This week we’re putting all of that together to start a larger story. Before we get to that, a couple notes.

Don’t worry if you haven’t done all the exploration exercises. They’re meant to help you start building out usable ideas and aren’t a requirement for writing a larger story. You’re welcome to jump in now, but the remainder of this exploration does assume you already have the elements built in previous explorations.

Second, although I say ‘larger’ I don’t automatically mean a novel! The intention is to give you the tools to write a story that’s over 5,000 words. Although you can absolutely use these elements to create a novel, the exploration here is only intended to support a single plot story.

Ready? Let’s get into it!

Finding the Plot

There are three elements that need to be present in every story: Plot, Setting and Character. The earlier writing exercises this month explored setting (our monolith and our secret room) and character (our Dwarven Character). To get to the final element, we need to understand what plot is.

If you were asking ‘what is plot’ and answered that plot is what happens in the story, you’d be half right.

Plot is what happens as a result of trying to resolve the story’s conflict. Conflict can occur from dozens of different sources, but without your characters don’t have much of a reason to do anything.

To find your potential conflicts, start asking questions:

• What does your character what and what’s in the way of them getting it?
• What secret does your character know about your monument?
• Why would they want to keep this to themselves?
• Who else would want to know about this secret?
• What connection does the secret room have to your monument or monolith?
• Why is this connection important?
• What could your character discover in the secret room?
• How would this negatively or positively impact them?
• What could be discovered at the monolith?
• How would this negatively or positively impact your character?

Once you’ve started answering these questions there’s a solid chance you’ll come across the conflict you want to explore more. This is the start of your story’s plot. There’s three main questions you need your story to answer:

• How is this conflict started or discovered?
• What does the character do to resolve this conflict?
• What occurs as a result of their actions?

Go ahead and start writing whenever you’re ready. Pantser or discovery writers may want to keep the three above questions nearby in case they get stuck. Plotter or archictect writers will likely want to answer those three questions and may be more comfortable completing a brief outline first. Choose whatever method you like and get to writing!