It took me a long time to figure out there was more to writing a novel than creating a hero with a problem, and playing it out over the loose scaffolding of a beginning, middle, and end.

1. Conflict and Threat

Internal, external and interpersonal conflict is essential to your story, and each has an entirely different impact on how events play out. While conflict is not the same as a story’s threat, it’s often tied into it in some way. Threat is the potential. Conflict is immediate. You need to work them out and incorporate them.

2. Emotion

The emotional needs, desires and problems for your characters, which if done well (and combined with the story’s threat and conflicts), will generate empathy among your readers and lead to an unputdownable page-turner. Character is story, and for a story to work your characters need to care (desperately) about something.

3. Theme

A novel needs a deeper meaning, and that meaning is a concept neatly wrapped up in a slippery little word called ‘theme’. Theme isn’t something along the lines of love or sacrifice or hope – at best those are expressions of a theme. No. Theme is a statement – with your story acting as the stage to debate it.

4. Beginning

Beginnings, middles and ends seem so simple – but each part needs to achieve something very specific. Believe it or not, the beginning of your novel isn’t actually the beginning of your story – it’s the introduction to your characters and their world. The story starts when the beginning’s over, because that’s when the protagonist leaves their comfortable world – by choice or otherwise.

5. Middle A

The middle makes up half your novel and is divided into two parts. The first part (Middle A) lets your protagonist discover what they’re really in for. It’s the fun part of your story, culminating in the realisation that there’s no easy option – and certainly no turning back.

6. Middle B

The third quarter (Middle B) is where things get serious and everything they’ve been striving for falls apart. This is where you raise the stakes to the point where all is lost, climaxing with some sort of false victory or defeat that sets the scene for the final battle.

7. Ending

To conclude your novel, your hero(s) regroup, form a plan and take the actions that eventually see them reach a satisfying resolution (or, at least, it better be satisfying if you want people to recommend it to their friends). It helps to tie up loose ends and if necessary, set the scene for sequels.

8. Sequences

If you’ve never heard about sequences, look them up. They’re mini-stories within the bigger story, often spanning several chapters – like how a character becomes a werewolf, or how a couple meet. There needs to be an equal number of sequences too, the total divisible by four and divided into the beginning, middle A, middle B, and end.

9. The Premise

Whatever else you do, make sure you meet the promise of your story’s premise. If you promise a story about a girl trying to survive assassins, everything that happens must contribute to setting up, sustaining and resolving that promise.

10. Cause & Effect

Even when you think you have everything right, writing a Cause and Effect can pick up problems. Every cause must generate an effect, and every effect has to lead to a new cause. Look hard at your story and if necessary rework it to create an unbroken chain of effects from beginning to end.

To see how most of these structural elements fit together, take a look at my Novel Structure Diagram. Other elements can be found in The Craft.

If you liked this post, you might also like two additional elements I forgot to mention, Hooks and Buttons.