Since I am new to Steemit and I'm not used to blogging, I want to talk about how to create a story. This is easy for me as someone who also likes to write.
In creating a story, you need to think what it is all about. Basically, the subject of the story. Thinking is about is important since this is where the story revolves. Whether it is about romance between a pleb and a prince, adventures of a young man getting women here and there, it is something that writers must think about.
After being able to think the story's main topic, you can now distinguish the genre of your story. What your story is all about decides what the genre of your story will be. Well, it IS where the story revolves. If you do not know what a genre is (every writers know of it, though), it is the kind of your story (e.g. Horror, romance, action).
Now that you have your genre of the story, you must have your setting. Setting is where and when it takes place (if you still don't know about it). Defining where and when your story takes place is important not only to readers but also to the writers themselves. Why? So that the writer himself knows what kind of place it is, if there are machineries present in that time and how people in the story interacts (yes, the time and place of the story also defines how the characters in the story acts and interact with others).
If you have decided where and when the story occurs, you now should focus on the conflict of the story. A novel may have many conflicts and a short story has only one but basically the conflict is the problem that the protagonist is facing. There are many types of conflict: Man vs Man, Man vs Environment, Man vs Society, and Man vs Self. If you want to learn more about the conflicts, google it.
After deciding on the conflict of the story, you can now decide on your characters: the main characters, the antagonists, and the side characters. This is one of the easiest and hardest point in creating your story.
Creating your own characters is fun! Deciding own their looks, how they act and how they speak is the most fun in the process of story making. However, since talking about characters is long, I will cut it now and share it in another time.
For now, let's go to the plot outline. The plot outline is basically, in short stories, where the exposition, rising action, climax, falling action and denouement enters. If you feel burdened by writing all of this, then you shouldn't write at all (jk). One of the strategies is to first start with the exposition and denouement. The exposition is basically the start of the story. The protagonist gets introduced and the place and time is also introduced. The denouement is the ending of the story where the conflict has already been solved. Why is creating the beginning and end part a good strategy? Because you can bridge the other part of the story afterwards. If you already know how it ends, you can now think of how to get there from the exposition.
Now, if you already have these all, you can now start writing your full story. I'll explain the characters next time 😀.