You’ll often hear me equate writing to cooking: the right ingredients, in the right amounts, in the right order.
The only true failure? A story that doesn’t engage and entertain.
As an editor and mercenary writer over a couple decades now, I’ve been tapped to fix or rework countless stories. I’ve learned you usually can’t fix everything on every project. Clients always want the luxurious level blue medical care; deadlines and budgets often dictate level red triage.
The question that’s always stuck with me: when resources are limited, which elements do you tackle first?
Of course, the real answer is always project-specific.
But if I had to prioritize generally, across hundreds of projects, my list might look something like this. Broken into two sections, ranked from most to least critical:
FUNDAMENTALS
1) Master Theme
A story that doesn’t get the reader thinking, is a joke without a punchline–wasted time on everyone’s part. Master Theme is an immediate separation between fiction that matters and fiction that doesn’t. Master Theme is your message to the reader. It touches everything in a narrative acting as a core anchor. If your story’s Master Theme is “Revenge is a dish best served cold,” when your protagonist catches the villain in the climax, he can’t sit down and have a heart-to-heart, he can’t show compassion, that’s not the story you decided to tell. According to your Master Theme, he’s got to have ice water in his veins.
2) Fully Developed Characters / Character Arcs
We experience story through the characters. If the characters are made of paper, the story burns. This point includes the Protagonist, Villains, MAFs and Foil/Mirrors/Archetypes.
3) Friction, Conflict, Jeopardy, Stakes, and Tension
A perfect day is NOT a perfect story. Humans must overcome. The power of the super trifecta (conflict, jeopardy, stakes) must never be underestimated. Combined with Friction and Tension, these 5 are absolutely essential to good fiction and intimately linked together.
4) Core Concept
Execution is king, but a poorly thought out core concept and more importantly, not defining the how and why you plan to express this concept, are the bedfellows of failure. This includes, Story Gravity and Story Shine.
5) Character Goals and Agency
Without goals you have a meandering, passive story. Agency is the character’s influence over outcomes. Their ability to control their own destiny, through active choice. A story that forces a character down a path, even when working toward a specific goal, still falls flat because it doesn’t allow the character to actively choose.
6) Promises
Every writer makes promises to the reader, in every work of fiction. Not every writer keeps them. Don’t be that writer. Also don’t underestimate the power of promises, it is the bedrock of everything you’re working on. If you’re thinking promises really should be under execution, technically, you’re right. But practically speaking, their value and influence earns them a spot in the top 6.
7) Structure
You can write a story without premeditated structure… Just like you could build a car without brakes, fuel lines, axles, etc. Things go where they go and do what they do for a reason. Narrative structure lays out the bones of the story. It captures this reason through the fundamental anchor points of “what happens.” Take note, structure is not plot. A midpoint turn that turns the story upside down, that’s a structural point that could apply to a LOR story just as easily as it could a Cyberpunk story. Your structure system with its collection of plot points, like inciting incident, and point of no return, live here.
8) Scene Selection (and Plot)
What you choose to (and not to) show. Scene selection is key, taking “what happens from structure and building it out into how it happens.” It’s the final stage where the narrative remains fully malleable, your last opportunity to freely adjust core narrative elements before solidifying everything in the details of script execution.
9) Causality
Cause and effect. Action consequence. Plausible Causality lives here.
At the bottom, events connect logically, crack an egg in the hot pan, it fries. In the middle, events connect logically and character decisions reasonably line up, the Protag throws tons of pepper and salt on the frying egg. Some people love spice, some people don’t. At the top, events connect logically and character decisions feel like the only possible outcome of the character acting under specific pressures. The character steps away to check their email and the egg burns. Of course they burn the egg, they are completely absent-minded, serving the perfect egg breakfast up just isn’t something THEY would do.
10) Story Weave
Story Weave is how you connect (or weave) your scenes and plot together. You may know the monster attacks as your midpoint turn, and you may know this attack takes place in the secret government lab, with a handful of specific characters. Story Weave dictates how you lead up to that attack so the surprise twists don’t come out of nowhere or feel disjointed. The heart of story weave revolves around timing, not necessarily pacing, but how you interconnect subplots and narrative elements at the exact right moment so the details have deliberate purpose, don’t clash, and culminate in a satisfying resolution. Good words like: foreshadow, continuity, progression, logical, developed, inevitable, promised, all live here.
11) Point of View / Narrative Perspective / Narrative Tense
Who tells the story? First, Second, Third person; limited or omniscient. The writing delivery system. Narrative Perspective is how they see it. First person from the hero’s perspective, the villain’s perspective, or maybe a victim’s perspective… same story, three different perspectives. Lastly, tense, when it’s told relative to the events. Past or present. Most fiction is past, dialogue of course, lives out of time in its own moment.
12) Narrative Distance
Psychological distance of the narration from the character’s consciousness at any given moment. Direct conduit of reader intimacy. Also, experiential distance of the narration from the sensory reality of the scene. Direct conduit of reader immersion.
13) Emotional Core
While a good story runs the full emotional gambit, there is generally one core emotion at the core of the story. Most of the time, this emotional thread stems directly from the Master Theme, “The people we love are worth sacrificing everything for, even when they’ll never know what we gave up.” The emotional core is self-evident, grief, selflessness, unrecognized devotion. But when your Master Theme lands, “Untethered technological advancement corrupts the ethic based systems meant to contain it,” the emotional core is far more ambiguous. In these instances, you need to get a handle on what the fundamental emotion governing the story actually is… and make sure it lands across the narrative.
14) Climax
It may be the most beautiful domino course ever created. It might have taken you a thousand hours to set up. If you never knock them down and all the dominoes don’t fall–who cares?
15) Setting/Worldbuilding
Worldbuilding disconnected from story is doom… but properly established setting pressurizes story. It doesn’t become decoration and fluff, it becomes structural constraint.
16) Relationship Dynamics
The obvious ones are between characters… but the not-so-obvious, but equally important ones are the dynamics between the character and the environment or system they’re struggling against. Underdeveloped dynamics are a hallmark of overwriting and scenes with no narrative drive.
17) Subplots
The cement that can strengthen a story, or the water that can weaken it. Choose wisely.
18) Ending / Resolution / Denouement
The final conflict/confrontation, the climax might be the actual ending. Lots of old, you know B+W old, movies did the abrupt ending as soon as the climax landed, but often there’s a little more meat of the story to cook up before the credits roll. If you botch the ending, if the threads aren’t all tied neatly, and the parting good bye doesn’t land satisfactorily, the entire narrative can leave a bad taste in your reader’s mouth.
EXECUTION
19) Narrative Drive
Your scene either progresses the story or doesn’t. Yes some scenes that don’t progress the story still have value, but deviating too long from narrative drive is like speeding at night with the headlights off.
20) Characterization
Hollow characters disengage readers. Characterization is the surface life that we connect to.
21) Pacing and Escalation
Pick the tortoise or pick the hare, just make sure the race is entertaining, in other words, your pacing must be deliberate. Scene vs summary and narrative distance hang out on this stoop. When you tell and when you show. And escalation is required, nobody wants the end at the beginning, big, bigger, biggest.
22) Dialogue
Words have been around a long time and serve us well. Bad dialogue kills. Mediocre dialogue flies under the radar. Superior dialogue can make a story stay with us for a lifetime.
23) Tone, Mood, Style
The emotional delivery of the content. Own it.
24) Reveals & Turns
Surprise is the life-blood of a good story. Keep the reader guessing. Keep the story moving.
25) The Tantalus Principle
Tantalus was a king and son of Zeus imprisoned to Tartarus for cannibalism. His torture was an everlasting hunger and thirst, standing in a pool of water that would recede the moment he reached down for it, and a fruit tree hanging overhead, that would pull up and away the moment he reached up for it. What the hell does any of this have to do with writing? Actually, it’s one of the most important principles of execution: “Cultivating strong emotional desire/attachment, only to have narrative friction delay gratification.” In the Rom Com, you want the leads to kiss, they get into a quiet, intimate moment and it looks like they’re going to kiss… but they don’t kiss. Something, some friction, derails the moment. The more the reader wants it, the more it doesn’t happen, the more they want it to happen. This principle applies across genres to just about everything and is fundamental to getting readers/audiences squirming in their seat.
26) the Opening Scene
First impressions increase your fan base–period. Your core story promises live in the opening scene, make them, keep them.
27) Final Image
Readers can’t remember everything. As the last thing they see/read, the final image holds a special place psychologically speaking. Don’t leave it on the table.
28) Backstory
Everything that happened before page one necessary to understand what’s happening after page one. Keyword, necessary.
29) Foreshadowing
Important things that happen out of the blue land false. Foreshadowing is another term for the setup, preparing readers for something coming up. Connected to Action and Reaction, Choice and Consequences, and plausible causality.
30) Internal Monologue
Character’s inner thoughts, unspoken but in their own voice, real-time. In comics internal monologue often lands as narrative captions.
31) Believability / Consistency
Accumulation of consistent character behavior, plausible causality, grounded detail, and internal logic that makes the reader trust the story. Breaking it a little, breaks immersion. Breaking it a lot, breaks the trust and kills the story.
32) Exposition
Essential information delivered invisibly. In comics it’s essential to avoid big exposition dumps. It’s essential in all mediums, but in comics, giving your precious real estate over to an exposition dump causes irreparable harm.
33) Blocking & Choreogrpahy
Where’s everybody at and how they movin’? Commonsense and silly sounding, until you realize spatial coherence, how readers build mental imagery is a real thing (more pertinent to prose, since comics actually show the imagery, but still relevant when writing the script, because you have to build the mental imagery first.) And characterization and subtext live just as much in physical movement than they do in dialogue… maybe more so.
34) Symbolism
Something that represents greater meaning.
35) Motifs
A pattern of repetition that when seen as a whole means something greater than each individual showcase.
36) Information Equilibrium
Who knows what and when. Reader knows more than the character, often suspense. Reader knows less than the character, often mystery. Reader and character know simultaneously, revelation. The reader knows different things than different characters, often tension through secrets.
37) Visual Storytelling
What we see and experience first hand makes a bigger impact than what we’re told.
38) Time Management / Compression – Decompression
Where to put emphasis and where to understate. When to jump ahead in days, months, years, or centuries, and where to let a single second linger. Transitions from one scene, time period, location, or POV live here. A hallmark of the comic medium.
39) Genre Conventions
The underlying elements that must exist for the story to qualify as a specific genre. Think of it more abstractly, these are the broader strokes, the underlying essences. A monster that can’t be reasoned with in horror. The ‘ticking clock’ time pressure in a thriller. Be respectful. Be imaginative. Give the audience what they want… and what they don’t know they want.
40) Genre Obligatory Scenes
Specific dramatic moments the reader is waiting for whether they know it or not. The false ending for horror, for example. The protagonist at the mercy of the MAF, in the thriller. The mentor’s gift and departure, in fantasy.
41) Economy of Language
Maximum narrative effect with minimum words. Make each and every word work for a living. Important in prose, critical in comics where you simply don’t have the room for verbosity.
42) Rhythm
Walk without rhythm and it won’t attract the worm. If you walk without rhythm, huh, you never learn.
43) Repetition and Variation
Specific moments to create rhythm, emphasis, contrast, or emotional escalation.
ARTISTIC SIDE OF EXECUTION
44) Lyricism and Prose Elegance
Elicit an emotional response independent of the words meaning. Not purple prose. Prose where beauty does the heavy lifting.
45) Iconic Voice
The classic rule is a reader should know which character is speaking without an identifying dialogue tag. In this same vein, the narrator’s voice should be equally identifiable by readers from a single paragrpah.
46) Emotional Precision
Hitting emotional context right on the money. Not overdoing or underdoing it. Delivering the core emotion without the reader seeing the mechanics at play.
47) Structural Elegance
When scene selection, story weave, subplots and structure come together with their own innate beauty.
48) Transcendent Moments
Key climatic moments that don’t necessarily have anything to do with the climax. Passages readers underline, reread, and quote to others. Moments that become part of our being, changing us forever.
49) Cultural / Philosophical Insight
Exposing truth, purty or ugly, about human nature and society.
50) Negative Space
Things left unsaid can sometimes land louder than things shouted.
Harvest your ingredients. Use them wisely. Make a good dish. I’ll come back and see if I can’t figure another 2 and round the list to an even fitty. ▪
About the Author —
Nick Macari is a full-time freelance story consultant, developmental editor and writer, working primarily in the independent gaming and comic markets. His first published comic appeared on shelves via Diamond in the late 90’s. Today you can find his comic work on comixology, amazon and in select stores around the U.S. Visit NickMacari.com for social media contacts and news on his latest releases.