[Moejoe]

Buy these two books: Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury and Techniques of the Selling Writer by Dwight Swain - one for inspiration, the other for craft. These are really the only two books that are worth your money and time as far as I'm concerned.

While you're reading them, you write, but let me save you some time and share some shortcuts that came to me over time.

Plot

There is only one story and you don't need to plot the story. Here it is:


The pursuit of a want or need through adversity that ends in either triumph or defeat.

There, that's every story ever told from Moby Dick to The DaVinci Code, the same basic skeleton to hang your story baubles from. Whenever you get stuck ask 'what your character needs or wants' then make sure they don't get it, and you have the essential conflict of any story.

Characters

Now all you need to do is add characters and their wants and needs. As to characters, you need only one sentence to pin a character in the mind. This sentence consists of an adjective, a job and a name.

Stubborn NY cop John McLane
Stoic Lawyer Atticus Finch
Cynical Private Eye Philip Marlowe.

Character is action so just keep your characters in line with their simplistic descriptions and they'll write themselves, no need to know what their best friend's name was in 3rd grade or what happened to their pet cat that awful summer before they graduated (those experiences grow organically as you write the character)

Where to begin?

You begin just before, during, or just after the springboard scene of your story. The springboard scene is what sets up that essential need or want of your main character. Let's take a Private Eye story for example. The springboard scene of a Private Eye story will almost always be the hiring of the Private Eye by an outside source, so you begin your story just before the hiring, during the hiring, or just after. This then leads to a story question which will fix the path of your character in the mind, in the above example the Private Eye might have been hired to recover a diamond necklace, so now we have the simplistic want of:

Recovering a diamond necklace.

Which then becomes a story question:

Will the detective recover the diamond necklace?

Everything that happens must stop the character from getting that want until the very end of the story, which is what we cover next.

How do you end a story?

The ending of every story is an answer to a question first asked in the springboard scene. It's is either yes, no, or maybe, depending on the effect you want to gain.

The Private Eye is hired in the first chapter to recover a missing diamond necklace. So the story question becomes: Can they recover the stolen necklace? Yes, no, or maybe is the ending of your story.