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Narrative elements and my priorities

According to the first search result on Google, there are five narrative elements. The pages below the first result say there are four and six respectively, but they aren’t the first search result, so they don’t matter. The five listed narrative elements are:

For simplicity, I’m going to combine plot and conflict together. They are different concepts, but I often think about them together. Additionally, I like to think of theme being connected to all of the other concepts. So the updated list is this:

What is the order of importance?

For fun, I asked my local LLM what the order of importance was for these three (minus theme). This is a bit of a silly question because the question “which are more important” is a bit impossible to answer. What is the genre? What is your writing style? What specific thing are you writing about? Additionally, LLMs are not always right about things. But they are prediction machines with the sole purpose of producting a statistically correct result. It’s answer summed up was this:

This was of course a trick question. All of them are important! You could say the flour is the most important part of a cake, but without the sugar, it would be a very strange cake. Just because it’s not as bad doesn’t mean we should strive for “not as bad” over actually good.

What I really like to think about is less how important they are in general and more about what am I locking in early on and what can change in the future. If I say I’m going to make a story about pirates, that locks in the theme pretty early on. The theme is pirates and it’s probably going to stay that way. The setting is also probably pretty locked in unless I’m doing a twist on the genre. That leaves the plot, conflict, and characters. Obviously, the characters are going to be pirates (along with some non-pirates), but what specific traits they will have is open to change. The plot has a lot of freedom here too. Are they trying to find a buried treasure? Are they trying to get rid of a curse? Are they stealing from so many ships that their bounty has grown too large to notice? There can be a lot of wiggle room for this element too, so I’d say this is where most of my time designing the story would be spent on. To recap:

  1. The theme and location is set in stone. The theme is simply “pirates” and the location is somewhere in the sea, maybe occasionally heading onto land. They are important in the sense that for it to be in this genre, they must have these elements. But I don’t put much thinking into the “design” here. The theme and locations are pretty well-known and won’t change much from the norm.
  2. The characters may be next. Since we’re going to be spending a lot of time with these characters, they should be interesting and varied. Maybe the audience disagrees with some of their actions. Maybe the main characters can’t even get along half the time. I’d say it’s important to get the main characters fleshed out and any side characters, assuming they are not integral to the plot, can be inserted later into the story.
  3. The plot is last. Now that we have theme, location, and characters, we can a plot that these characters follow. The plot is the most important, but I decided in this made-up story that the plot heavily depends on these characters. Maybe the captain has an extreme amount of luck. The plot is now about this crew that somehow always finds a way to get what they want. Maybe the captain is really bad at his or her job. Now the story is about how this mismanaged crew somehow still makes it through. The conflict doesn’t have much of a dependency on the characters as plot, but I could argue that the conflict of “becoming too successful” is only because of the high luck ability or the competent crew that always fixes the captain’s mistakes.

Sure, this is just an example I came up with while typing this, but if I was making a story like this, this is how I would approach it. But I wouldn’t approach all stories the same. At the moment, I am currently writing a sci-fi story that takes place in a world with a small, dense, and rich island country in a war against a different large, poor country. There’s a huge contrast between the two and how they’re described and how it affects people’s view of each country.

  1. The theme is set in stone. It’s the future, there are flying cars, space elevators, etc. There’s also the wealth gap trope in play. The setting needs to faciliate that theme, so we have one location that’s a very rich area and one that’s a very not-so-rich area. How those are setup is very important because the primary conflict will be based on this theme. If the setting does not reflect this, it doesn’t make any sense for any of this to be happening.
  2. The plot and conflict is next. We need to nail down what is happening and why. In my situation, I need to find a way to justify the existence of the theme (dystopia) in the first place. Otherwise, we’re just saying “the world is a dystopia because reasons, trust me bro.”
  3. Last are the characters. I only had two characters in mind when I started writing, and everyone else was a character inserted when I needed them in the plot at that point. If I needed someone to be able to hack into a robot, I introduced a character that could hack into that robot. Maybe they were hard to find, maybe they had an annoying personality, but I would find a way to insert them nonetheless.

Saving characters for last doesn’t necessarily mean they are the least important. The characters are important! But in this particular setup, characters have the least dependents; that is, the least amount of other elements depend on characters. The location doesn’t really care about the characters all that much. The plot will require characters who can carry out the plot, but there is are a lot of valid choices for characters that can meet those requirements. The only thing that depends on characters is the theme. The theme requires characters to act and behave in a certain way. They might dress in more futuristic clothes, do things we’d never do ourselves (using a robot butler or something, I dunno), and speak in a more polite way.

Other things affecting the order of importance

I’ve listed two examples of stories and the order I would take with them. But there’s nothing wrong with changing the order to something else! There are supposedly two types of main writers: planners, pansters, and plantsers. The planner writer plans out the entire story ahead of time, sometimes making bullet points of all of the events that will happen in the story. The pantser writer starts with a basic starting point and works from there, maybe not even knowing the resolution of the story. The plantser designs some of the major plot points up front, but leaves the problem of getting to those plot points for later. Depending on how you write, you can take a totally different approach to how you value each narrative element.

Now I mentioned planners and pantsers just to explain that there are different writing styles, but I don’t like the idea that someone is only a planner or is only a panster. I often times have a lot of variety in how I come up with a story’s design and it’s not necessarily because I could be considered a plantser. It’s because my motivation for making a story differs between stories, and I’m sure it’s the same with other authors. In the sci-fi story I talked about earlier, a priority for me was the vibe of a futuristic city of rich, well-off people sent into an apocalyptic world. I didn’t care much about what specific characters I used as long as they made the cool stuff happen. In other stories, the characters are the main focus point. The setting has to make sense for these types of characters to exist, but there are many different settings that could make the characters work for what I want, but only a few characters to make the rest of the story work in the first place.

It all depends on you

To be clear on my opinion on this, theme is generally the most important; it’s basically what glues everything together. From there, everything else is just as important as the other. You can argue some are more important to some people in some genres in some specific cases, but the reality is it just depends. What’s really more important is what you should lock in first and what can change as more of the story develops. Although you want to have options, it ends up being a lot more interesting to use restrictions set earlier to build off of for later elements. So, do what you think is right! If you think characters really are the most important, why not? If you value the location or the society or whatever else you can think of, put the most time into those things.

Anyways, I’m out. Eat more dino chicken nuggets or something. See you later.