Three Important Story Elements

by Hank Quense, @hanque99

To a new fiction writer, there are a bewildering number of story elements that are essential to the story and incorporated into the work.  To mention a few, there are character development, plotting, setting, point of view, and others.  These story elements are explained in depth in any number of books and are easy to research.

However, there are three other story elements that are just as vital, but are hardly mentioned in books on fiction writing.  When they are mentioned, the description is vague and hard to understand, let alone use in stories.

In this article, I’ll discuss these three elements which are: dominant reader emotion, the character arc, and the emotional arc.

Dominant Reader Emotion

This is the emotion you want (hope?) the reader will experience whenever a character is in a scene. For the story’s protagonist, you want the reader to have positive emotions such as empathy, sympathy, delight, or intrigue.  For the bad guy, the emotions can be animosity, irritation, pity, hostility, and anger.

When I’m developing a new major character, the DRE is one of the first characteristics I assign because it affects the way I develop and write about the character. For instance, if I want the reader to admire the character, then I can’t have this character kicking puppies or running away from a fight. The DRE dictates that I develop the character’s attributes so the reader won’t be turned off by the character.

Character Arc

In short, the character arc is how the character’s life changed as a result of the events in the story. If nothing changed then the story is a ‘who cares’ because everything after the story is the same as before the story.  So, nothing happened except the character got a bit older.

The character arc can be physical or mental but a mental change is more interesting to readers than a physical change.  In a mental character arc, the character learned an important lesson.  In a physical one, the character’s situation changed for better or worse.

Here are a few examples of character arcs.

• A character starts out as a bigot, but during the course of the story, learns to be less bigoted and becomes more open-minded.
• A proud or pompous (or both) character gets humbled as the story unfolds.
• A lazy character gets motivated.
• A character evolves from an uninterested bystander or a follower into the leader of a movement.

Emotional Arc

Most writing books don’t emphasize, if they mention it all, that the main character in a scene must undergo an emotional change.  To put this another way, whatever the character’s emotional state is at the beginning of the scene, it must be different at the end of the scene.

Further, in the next scene with the same character, the starting emotion is the ending emotion from the last scene.

In the case of the protagonist, these emotional changes are negative as his failures to solve the plot problem take a toll. Thus, the emotional arc can start at happy at the story’s beginning and change to annoyed, startled, alarmed, and desperate as the story progresses.  By the time the character is desperate, the story will at the climatic scene at the end of the story.

These three story elements are covered along with many other elements in my Story Design lectures.  You can learn more at: https://bit.ly/338UqjY

You can also find out more about my lectures on this webpage: https://padlet.com/hanque/rph7u51miayn

Hank Quense writes satirical fantasy and sci-fi. Early in his writing career,
he was strongly influenced by two authors: Douglas Adams and his
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. Happily, Hank
has never quite recovered from those experiences.

He lives with his wife in northern New Jersey, a mere 20 miles from
Manhattan, the center of the galaxy (according to those who live in
Manhattan). They have two daughters and five grandchildren all of whom
live nearby.

For vacations, Hank and Pat usually visit distant parts of the galaxy.
Occasionally, they also time-travel.

Besides writing novels, Hank lectures on fiction writing, publishing and
book marketing. He is most proud of his talk showing grammar school kids
how to create a short story. He used these lectures to create an advanced
ebook with embedded videos to coach the students on how to create
characters, plots and setting. The target audience is 4th to 7th graders. The
book’s title is Fiction Writing Workshop for Kids.

Photo on VisualHunt.com