Just write, everyone always says. Word vomit, sprint, whatever it takes to get those words on paper. Your first draft is a marble block, and subsequent drafts are when you chisel it down to a beautiful statue. A work of art. And this is great advice… but many (myself included) would like more guidance. Directly after building a skyscraper is a pretty darn awful time to decide to go ahead and rebuild the foundations. And while there is no right answer here, only preferences. My preference is that a story is no different. There are some core structural components to a story that I like to have down pat in draft one, and if that fails to be so, then perhaps I need to step back and seriously reconsider my approach or even my concept entirely. Here’s what I care about nailing on a v1 of any work:
Stories absolutely revolve around characters. When it comes to characters, everything, and yes, I do mean everything, takes a back seat. (For more on my rants on characters: Yet Another Character System). I spend endless hours absolutely marinating in my characters before I so much as type a single word of the story. When I write a story, I’m very much ‘character first’. Before I know what the world will look like, before I even know what the plot will be, I obsess over characters. What type of characters do I want my next story to have.
To understand this better, I need to rant a bit about my ‘inception of a story’ process, aka - where do I get my ideas. Well, the shortest answer is that something happens to me in life, or through reading/watching other fantasy I like, that inspires me in some way. Then I get a… sort of itch? A motivation. In writer’s parlance: a theme. “I want to write a story about the fall of an empire,” or “I want to write a story about a kid at a magical school”, or “I want to write a cozy romance on the coast”. Maybe from there I consider other themes or topics I’d like my story to explore - but this really isn’t a formal process. This is just random thoughts popping into my head while I’m at a red light, waiting for a meeting call to start at my day job, that sort of thing. It involves almost no thought. From there I say, “okay, I vaguely know what sort of story I want, let’s build some some characters I want to know.” This is the first formal part of the process, where I truly begin writing things down and obsessing over stuff. Who do I think would be most interesting to explore that? What are their belief and misbelief? What are their flaws? Their key moments? What type of life have they lived and how have they arrived at becoming the type of person they are today?
I will leave the character exploration to my Yet Another Character System blog post, but needless to say, I have this part down pat. I don’t even know what the plot will be, I don’t know what the climax is, I have only vague vibes on world building - but I know my characters. I write dossiers, example journal entries in their voice, I walk around town pretending to be from their perspective and imagining how I’d react to certain things (if I weren’t in shock from the different context/time), I lay in bed for hours on end with my eyes closed just imagining what it’s like to be them. However you want to do it, it’s not enough to know them, you must understand what it means to be them. And if that doesn’t sound like some insane bullshit an actor who’s too full of themselves might say, I don’t know what does, but it’s the honest truth. To understand their perspective, how we both look at a cookie and they see a treat while I see a potential to ruin my diet. How they show up to work each day because they have a master plan to save up and afford the world’s largest estate while I show up because I'm a sucker and believe in what megacorp 5000 is doing or some garbage. What stress do they carry with them each day? Etc.
Now, this is inherently iterative. By that I mean, you can only build a character so much without a plot and a world, and vice versa. So at some point you end up building up the character, then going back to the plot, then going back to the world, then going back to the character - you get the idea. However, you can get pretty darn far without much at this first step. Gandalf’s ‘vibes’ as a person. What it’s like to be in his head, or just to be in a room with him. That sort of thing transcends time, space, and context. You can get a lot of the way there in a vacuum.
This is step one.
Why do I care? Going from ‘micro’ to ‘macro’ here on the draft one advice, the next major thing I always absolutely want to nail on a first draft is throughline, why do we care?
We spend a whole scene of a chapter with the MC going to visit some old wise-woman in the woods, why? One of our characters dies, why? We’re four pages into an interview between our MC and a reporter, why? Readers are really good at keeping tabs on this, even if they don’t realize it. They give you a surprisingly short leash. If there is ever a moment they don’t understand the why, the throughline, they will get bored - and potentially even put down the book.
Throughline can be gauged by using 2 questions:
Worded different, is the scene relevant to the character at a specific given moment, and is the character relevant to the story at a specific given moment.
Thriller books are amazing at this. This is what defines what it means to be a thriller book. I call it Hooks and Hangers. Much like a growing adult will eventually have the ‘birds and the bees’ conversation at some point. A budding thriller author will, through some way or another, come to have their ‘hooks and hangers’ moment. Let’s define these:
Hook: An attention grabbing way that tells/informs the reader what the character (and thus the reader) cares about in this moment, usually happening within the first paragraph of a scene.
Hanger: An attention grabbing, question raising, conclusion to a scene that lets us know that there is more throughline here and our character must revisit this later.
Yes, we are still talking about epic fantasy / SFF here. But - every genre has lessons for us. Thrillers teach us ‘hooks and hangers’ and throughlines more generally. Romance teaches us internalization, emotion, and perspective. Poetry teaches us prose. Epic fantasy teaches us world building and themes like hope and change and bravery. Etc. - And at least on a draft one of any book, you want to have that throughline, from higher level up down to every scene and every piece of dialogue spoken, as clear as day. If it is not clear, it will most likely bore the reader.
How did we get here? Why are we going there? Where do we want to be? This is not something to get too hung up on as a newer author, but it’s a question you should probably ask yourself when you’re starting/ending a chapter or just keep in the back of your mind. What is concretely happening in this scene (someone dies? Learns a secret? Achieves a new height?) that is directly and visibly causing the next scene to happen for a character.
And more vaguely, how does this fit into the roadmap we have in our head? - Your mileage may vary on this point in particular. For all the ‘pantsers’ out there, I don’t think it’d work to have a giant map of how your story will go. For the ‘plotters’, I’m assuming you have this in full. Regardless of your leanings, at the very least most people will have a vague idea of what the climax of the story will be, or at least that they want it to occur roughly in the last third of the book. Perhaps they have another scene or two in mind throughout the book of beats they’d also like to hit. However much or little you want to plan or just coast on vibes before hand, this ‘beats’ consideration is just holding yourself to account to the level that you are comfortable. You set the bar, no one else. However much or little you care to plan and orient yourself throughout your writing journey, just holding yoruself to whatever standard you decide upon. And that’s all up to you.
If you’re first draft nails those three things on the head, you are in amazing shape! You can massage dialogue and setting. You can change, add, remove, and edit. But those are the fundamental foundational things that everything else in your story will have to be based on, and that changing retroactively will absolutely cause you pain to touch down the line.
Character, throughline, and causation, and you’re good to go for your first draft! This is easier said than done, but that challenge is part of what makes writing so fun I suppose. Best of luck fellow writers.
Enjoy!