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Narrative Planning Structure Organiser

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Narrative Planning Structure Organiser

Use the aquarium scenario as a starting point, or adapt it. Build a clear character arc and a purposeful structure. Your choices should connect: the conflict should drive the events, and the resolution should reveal what has changed.

Build the story engine

Scenario seed: During a busy evening at a coastal aquarium, a tank alarm sounds just as a public event begins. Choose what is really at stake; the alarm could be a fault, a mistake or a deliberate act.

1.Write a provisional title and one-sentence premise. Your premise should name the protagonist, their goal and the main obstacle.

2.Choose a point of view and a tense that suit your premise. State one advantage and one limitation of your choice for revealing information to the reader.

3.Create a protagonist. Give them a practical goal, a fear or mistaken belief, and a strength that could help them. Explain how the pressure of the aquarium emergency tests that strength.

4.Choose a precise time and place inside or around the aquarium. Add two sensory details and explain how one detail increases tension or affects a character’s decision.

Shape the turning points

Make each event cause the next. A satisfying structure escalates the consequences rather than repeating the same problem.

5.Use the five-part arc to plan: opening image, inciting incident, rising complication, climax and resolution. For each stage, write one concrete event; make the climax depend on a difficult choice.

6.Write one sentence linking two events in your plan with a clear cause-and-effect relationship. Avoid using only “and then”.

7.Who has authority, who has useful knowledge, and who is being ignored? Plan one persuasive attempt by the protagonist and show what is at risk if it fails.

8.Draft four to six lines of dialogue between the protagonist and someone who disagrees. Give each speaker a different aim, and use a pause, action or word choice to imply an emotion without naming it.

9.Choose a recurring object or sound—such as a blinking alarm, a keycard or the filter’s hum. Write two brief images using it: one near the beginning and one at the climax. Change its meaning between the two moments.

Make the ending matter

Resolve the immediate problem, then leave the reader with a consequence or insight. Avoid explaining a lesson that the events have already shown.

10.Explain how the immediate conflict ends, what it costs the protagonist, and how their choices or beliefs have shifted. Make the change believable rather than sudden.

11.True or false: If a narrative uses first-person past tense, every sentence must stay in the past tense, even when the narrator comments on what they understand now.

TrueFalse

12.Complete this statement with an idea your story demonstrates through action: “When people have different kinds of power, …” Then name one planned moment that will help the reader see that idea.