Storytelling is a critical part of human development, shaping children’s imaginations, language skills, emotional understanding and worldview. Stories help them understand complex ethical concepts in a way that is easily relatable and meaningful to their lives, teaching them the importance of things like fairness, empathy and resilience.
To create a compelling story, it is important to develop its characters, conflict and setting. This will give the reader a sense of its narrative potential, ensuring that there is enough material to sustain a full-length plot. In speculative fiction, it is also helpful to spend time developing the fictional universe, including its geography, cultures and religions.
Developing your story begins with identifying its central concept, a pivotal idea that will serve as the foundation for all its elements. This can be anything from a character’s journey to a gripping event or situation. For example, imagine a young inventor with a quirky obsession for creating contraptions that backfire. Their journey could explore themes of innovation and personal growth.
Once you have identified your central concept, it’s time to begin drafting the narrative. For some writers, this is a lengthy process that involves detailed planning and pre-writing tasks. Others, known as pantsers, prefer to approach the craft of writing more intuitively. Either way, it’s essential to collect all the ideas that come to you, whether they are scenelets, possible spin-off ideas, new characters or scraps of dialogue. Over time, you will learn what kind of stimuli inspire these new bits of story, allowing you to plant more seeds that will grow into more fully developed characters and plots.