Whether you're a student analyzing a story or a writer intent on crafting a compelling story, there are a few basic story elements that will help you better understand the parts of a story. 

If you want to see some of these key story elements specifically applied to short fiction, take a look at Sarah Gribble's article on the 9 Elements of Short Fiction. 

What are the parts of a story?

If you're an avid reader, it might feel annoying to be asked to look at the various parts of a given story. I get it. We don't always want to see the recipe behind the magic of our favorite character or story. But story magic is so often born of a mix of basic elements combined with the unique voice or storytelling perspective of the author, so there is still plenty of mystique to appreciate.

If you're a student of story, knowing the parts and essential elements can help you appreciate the craft and replicate it in your own work. 

A number of basic elements go into any story. You may notice that some stories focus on one key element over another, but all stories include most of these core elements (especially a character with a goal and conflict).

1. Characters

The most important part of any story is character. Whether those characters are animal, human, superhuman, or otherworldly, your story must have at least one character (even in the most simple narrative).

Why? Characters have capacity for change– they react in the face of conflict and mirror back our own humanity (even if they are not human!). A story is always about the pursuit of change, and that's why characters are necessary. 

Types of characters

Main or central characters: In most stories there is one main character, the protagonist, that we are rooting for as readers. You can identify the main character by looking at two things:

who has the strongest goal in the story and faces the most conflict getting there?

Who changes the most in the course of the story?

Protagonist: the protagonist is the main character in a story, often the hero or heroine. 

Antagonist: the antagonist is the character or force that opposes the protagonist or main character. Sometimes the antagonist will be cast as a villain, but it can be anyone who creates conflict and obstacles for the protagonist to overcome. 

Note: an antagonist doesn't have to be human. Forces of society or nature can counter a protagonist and make their pursuit difficult. 

Minor or secondary characters: All the other characters in a story are minor, secondary, or supporting characters. If you are analyzing how these minor characters work, consider what each one brings out in the main character.

How does the sidekick challenge their friend to reject the status quo? Do they draw out the best or the worst in the protagonist? 

If you're writing a story, take a look at the article What Characters You Need to decide how to cull your character list if needed. 

Other character considerations:

Sometimes, especially in courses, you'll find questions that ask you to evaluate characters based on their actions, development, or degree of change. Here's what to look for when you come across those types of questions as a student. 

Static vs dynamic characters: These terms are used to describe how much a character changes throughout a story.

Static characters are those who remain relatively unchanged from the beginning to the end of a story. They may encounter obstacles and challenges, but their core beliefs, values, and personalities stay the same. Think of them as consistent or unchanging in their behavior.

On the flip side, dynamic characters are the ones who undergo significant change and growth throughout the story. They are affected by the events and conflicts they face, causing them to evolve in some way. Dynamic characters often learn valuable lessons, overcome personal flaws, or develop new perspectives as a result of their experiences.

Flat vs. round characters: Another way to think about characters is in terms of their complexity and depth.

Flat characters are those who lack depth and development. They are often one-dimensional, with a limited range of traits or characteristics. Flat characters typically serve a specific purpose in the story, such as providing comic relief or serving as a plot device. They do not undergo significant change or growth throughout the narrative.

On the other hand, round characters are more fully developed and multi-dimensional. They have complex personalities, motivations, and emotions. Round characters feel like real people with layers of depth and nuance. They may have conflicting desires, flaws, and strengths that make them more relatable and interesting to readers.

Interested in learning more about characters? Check out our most popular articles on characters:

Character Development: Create Characters Readers Will Love

Why Are Characters Important in a Story?

How Characters Change

2. Setting

Setting depicts the world of your characters, and it's just as important to get right for a contemporary romance novel as a time period historical piece or a magical fantasy world.

It includes the locations, time period, culture, and overall mood of the narrative.

When creating a setting for your story, think about how it influences the characters and their actions. Is the setting a bustling city with skyscrapers and honking horns, or a peaceful countryside with rolling hills and chirping birds? How does the setting impact the characters' behavior, motivations, and interactions?

Consider how the setting can create conflict or tension in the story. For example, a character struggling to survive in a harsh desert environment will face different challenges than someone living in a lush, thriving jungle.

The setting can also help establish the tone of the story – a gloomy city might create a sense of mystery or foreboding, while a sunny beach setting could evoke feelings of relaxation and joy. (Also note that in horror, using a setting that should feel lighthearted and fun can be terrifying. See Shirley Jackson's story “The Lottery.”)

In addition to physical locations, consider the time period of your story. Is it set in the past, present, or future? How does the time period influence the characters' beliefs, values, and experiences? Historical settings can provide rich opportunities for exploring themes like social change, cultural norms, and political upheaval.

Conversely, futuristic settings can offer a glimpse into potential advancements in technology, society, and human behavior.

Overall, setting is a crucial element of storytelling that helps establish the world in which your characters live and the events of your story unfold.

For more, check out our World Building article. 

3. Conflict

Once you have a character working toward a goal in a setting, you need conflict to make it a story. The conflict forces the character to act and change. Types of conflict in fiction can be divided into several categories, including:

Internal conflict: This type of conflict occurs within a character's own mind. It involves the struggle between opposing desires, beliefs, or emotions. For example, a character may be torn between following their heart and following their head, or they may grapple with feelings of guilt or self-doubt. You will likely have at least one source of major conflict that is internal. 

External conflict: External conflict occurs between a character and an outside force, such as another character, nature, society, or fate . This type of conflict can take many forms, including:

Man vs. man: A character faces conflict with another character, such as a rival, enemy, or antagonist.

Or Man vs. nature: A character must overcome obstacles presented by the natural world, such as extreme weather, dangerous animals, or physical challenges.

Man vs. society: A character struggles against societal norms, expectations, or institutions that restrict or oppress them.

Man vs. fate: A character battles against forces beyond their control, such as destiny, luck, or supernatural entities.

Relationship conflict: This type of conflict involves tensions and disagreements between characters in a relationship, whether it's romantic, familial, or professional. Relationship conflicts can stem from misunderstandings, differing values or beliefs, jealousy, betrayal, or other interpersonal issues.

Moral conflict: Moral conflict arises when a character is forced to make difficult ethical decisions that challenge their beliefs or values. They may be torn between doing what is right and what is convenient, or they may struggle with conflicting principles or moral dilemmas.

Situational conflict: Situational conflict occurs when characters are faced with challenging circumstances or unexpected events that disrupt their lives or goals. This could include a sudden disaster, a betrayal by a trusted ally, or a twist of fate that changes everything.

Understanding the different types of conflict in fiction can help you create dynamic and engaging stories that keep readers hooked from beginning to end. By incorporating various forms of conflict into your narrative, you can deepen the complexity of your characters, drive the plot forward, and explore themes of struggle, growth, and resolution.

More reading: How to Find the Conflict in a Story

One other thing to mention here, especially for writers, is that there are nine types of stories that are defined by the type of conflict the protagonist faces. We have a full series on the nine types of stories that you can check out for more in depth story analysis. 

4. Plot and Story Structure

Plot is a sequence of events in a story that force a character to make increasingly difficult decisions, driving the entire story toward a climactic event and resolution.

Structure is how those events are ordered to create the maximum amount of drama, entertainment, or instruction.

The thing to note is that every writing form has structure and every good story has a plot. There are other ways to organize, but just know that most stories will include these structural elements, even if used out of order for a certain narrative effect.

Here's how Joe outlines them in his book The Write Structure:

Exposition

Exposition is the opening of a story where you introduce the character and their setting. Sometimes you'll hint at the opening problem, what makes the character tick, or other world information needed to help the reader begin to root for your character. 

More on exposition here. 

Inciting Incident

The inciting incident prompts the character to act on behalf of their goal. It forces them to stop coasting or living in the status quo. In hero's journey stories, this is the moment they have to set out on their adventure. In romance, it's likely the meet-cute where the pursuit begins. 

If you're looking for the inciting incident, you'll usually find it in the first 10-20% of a story depending on the genre. 

For more tips on the inciting incident, check out this article. 

Rising Action

The rising action, also called progressive complications, is where the character begins to act and react to the new conditions caused by the inciting incident. This is the middle of our story. 

In the rising action, we see characters try and fail, try and learn, try and adjust. It's a battle between values—to hide or be known, to risk or stay safe. 

Our full guide to rising action is here. 

Crisis

The crisis is the moment when our character has to face the toughest choice yet. It is this dilemma where they know that nothing will stay the same no matter what they choose. That's what makes the choice difficult. 

The crisis is the moment they realize they have two choices and they don't like either one. 

Read more on literary crisis here. 

Climax

The climax is usually during or directly after the crisis, as it is the moment of greatest tension in a story. If the crisis is where the character realizes they have two choices, the climax is the place where they choose one and commit to it, knowing there will be fall out.

Read more about climax here.  

Denouement

The denouement is the action after the climax, where we see how the character or their world has changed as a result of their choice. It's where the reader feels a sense of closure, even when the story ends in a surprising way. 

More on denouement here. 

Other Story Structures: 

There are other popular plot structure methods, but most correspond loosely with those in the Write Structure above. Here are a few you might be asked to work with as a student trying to understand specific types of texts: 

Freytag's Pyramid

Five-act structure

Three-act structure

You'll notice quite a bit of overlap as you look through the various structures. That's because stories using any structure still need a strong character, after a goal we care about, facing conflict in their pursuit of the goal. 

5. Point of View (POV)

You can read our full guide on Point of View here. Point of view is crucial because it determines who is narrating the story and how much information the reader has access to.

First-person point of view is when the narrator is a character in the story, using pronouns like “I” and “me” to tell the reader about their experiences and thoughts. This type of POV allows for a deeper connection to the protagonist and their emotions, but limits the reader's perspective to only what that character knows or experiences.

 In a third-person limited POV, the narrator is not part of the story but focuses on one character's thoughts, feelings, and experiences. This allows the reader to get inside the head of the protagonist and understand their motivations and emotions, but still maintains a sense of objectivity.

A third-person omniscient narrator is an all-knowing narrator who has full access to the thoughts and experiences of all characters in the story. This is a much broader perspective.

Much less common is a second-person POV, using “you” pronouns to put the reader in the story. See our full guide on second person here. 

Narrative Devices

As you consider point of view, you might also choose from a narrative device. 

Narrative devices, also known as narrative framing devices, are the method which a story is narrated. Narrative devices involve who is narrating the story and how they’re narrating it. The narrative device becomes the guideposts by which you tell your story.

Most stories default to chronological narrative, but there are others writers can use that may be more effective for certain stories. In my article on narrative devices, I identify nine:

Chronological Narrative
Reverse Chronological Narrative
Real Time Narrative
Breaking the Fourth Wall
Epistolic or Diary Narrative
Mockumentary Narrative
Story Within a Story, also known as Framing Story
Story Within a Story Within a Story
Stream of Consciousness

Learn more about each narrative device here.

6. Genre

Every story is a dance between the author and the reader. A story doesn’t exist in isolation from the reader. And the expectations that your readers are bringing to the story  is just as important as the story you’re trying to tell (assuming, of course, you want to tell a story that connects with the reader and not just tell a story for your own sake).

Genre is about understanding the reader’s expectations, meeting those expectations and then going beyond them to craft a story that is both familiar and unexpected.

When I talk about genre, we’re not talking about more than just where the story appears on the bookshelf or what category it’s on in your Netflix queue. Although commercial genres are related to a story’s genre, from a writing perspective, genre is a much richer subject that gets down to what kind of story you’re trying to tell.

Genre itself is made up of several parts, including:

Desires, Needs, and Values

What does your principle character want? What do they need?

Perhaps it’s safety, as in a horror story or an action story. Maybe it’s love or belonging, as in a romance story (or buddy story involving best friends). Perhaps it’s the discovery of their calling and their unique offering to the world, as in a coming of age story.

Needs and desires are central to story, so much so that the definition of story itself involves them:

A story is a character who wants something and goes through conflict to get it.

Since there are only so many things people need, you can categorize stories based on the needs of the protagonist, which is how we get genre.

Character Alignment and Maturity

Characters are an essential part of every story, and we’re going to discuss them in more detail later on. However, for the purposes of genre, there are four important characteristics we need to focus on.

Anti hero vs hero. Do we like this character or not? Are they essentially good or bad with a good side?

Naive vs. sophisticated. Many stories follow a character as he or she moves from a simple, naive understanding of the world to a more complex, sophisticated (and perhaps even cynical) understanding of the world.

Where the character fits on the scale of each of these traits changes the genre and the reader’s expectations for your story.

According to The Story Grid by Shawn Coyne (a resource I highly recommend), there are twelve content genres and seventy-seven or so subgenres. Each is based on a different needs and different character alignment and maturity.

Conventions and Tropes

Every genre has conventions and tropes, things that other stories in the same genre have done so much that it would be weird if a story didn’t have them.

That doesn’t mean you can’t leave out one or two of them. It just means that you better know what you’re leaving out before you do it, and that you shouldn’t leave out all of them or risk alienating your readers.

7. Tone

Tone in writing refers to both the writer's feelings and attitude towards the subject and the audience and how those feelings are expressed. Writers convey their tone through word choice and syntax.

Like tone of voice, it helps set the mood of the writing piece and influences the reader interpretation.

Examples of tone can be formal, informal, serious, humorous, sarcastic, optimistic, pessimistic, and many more.

See our full guide on Tone in Writing

8. Theme

Theme is like the hidden message of a story, the underlying meaning that ties everything together. It’s what gives your story depth and resonance, making it more than just a series of events happening to characters.

Students are often asked to analyze theme in a story, identifying that underlying universal truth and then backing it up with examples from the text. 

For example, in the story Little Red Riding Hood, the theme might be “Don't talk to strangers” or “Be careful who you trust.” Examples would include Red's interactions with the wolf that put her at risk. 

To see more work on theme, check out The 25 Most Common Themes in Literature.

The Parts of a Story and Practice

Those are the most common parts of a story that you will need to know as a student or writer. Obviously more goes into writing than these eight elements, but they are a good starting place as you craft papers or stories of your own. 

Also, since we all know that our purpose is to practice, looking through this list can help you find places where you want to grow. 

Which parts of a story do you want to improve in your own writing? Share in the comments.