What is a story? An idea or a setting or a character alone do not make a story. A fictional story is all of those and more.
For the convenience of analysis and discussion, stories often are broken into parts. These parts typically are referred to as the five elements of fiction. They include:
• Plot – How the problem in the story is overcome, typically thought of as physical action
• Setting – Where and when this action occurs
• Character – Whoever attempts to solve the story’s problem as well as those who create the problem and those that appear incidentally
• Point of view – Perspective from which the story is narrated
• Theme – Purpose for which a story is told
It’s easy to think of the five elements of fiction as a matter of the 5 W’s and 1 H, or what, where, when, who, why and how. Plot is what happens in the story. Setting is where and when the story happens. Character is who the story happens to. Point of view is how the story happens to be told. Theme is why the story happened to be told, or its message.
Each of these elements appears naturally in the story, whether you consciously intend them to or not. For example, the plot of a story may be about a lone Roman legion that must stop a barbarian invasion. The setting is the northwestern corner of what is now modern Germany in the land once ruled by the Cauci. The characters are the Roman Legion commander, his lifelong best friend who is a tribune, and the barbarian leader with his second-in-command. The point of view largely is from an outside perspective, as if we were seeing all that occurs in both camps from a bird’s eye view. The theme might be the folly of war.
Virtually all of the problems with poorly written stories are that they in some way muddle one or more of these elements. In addition, you may perfectly nail each of these five elements but still tell the story poorly because it lacks flair; such problems are a matter of style, which is a part of understanding the craft of writing though not an element of fiction itself.
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My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past 15 years, I’ve helped more than 400 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of the Storytelling 101 writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.
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