How to write your first story

So, you've decided to become a writer! But where does one start?

The first thing you'll need is an idea. This could be a detailed idea of the events of the story or just a vague idea of a character or genre. For the purposes of this tutorial, let's say I've decided to write a story about intelligent plants.

The next thing you'll need is a character. The character should follow logically on from the idea, either by being the ideal person for this form of story or by being a complete outsider for this type of story, thus offering a fresh perspective.  In order to keep things simple, the most logical character for this story would be a botanist.

Now let's flesh out the character a little bit. Many good stories revolve around the conflict between what the main character believes they want, and what they actually want, so it's a good idea to give the character a shallow and obvious goal, and also a deeper hidden desire. With our botanist, we'll give him the shallow goal of becoming famous for his work, and the deeper desire to settle down and start a family.

Now that we've got the important character points sorted, we can give our character a bunch of other traits – don't worry if all of these don't appear in the story, as they're mostly to get a picture of the character in your head – so here we go: His name is Henry Marmaduke, he works at the Happyville nursery, he likes Godzilla movies and Mexican food, he gets overly excited about his interests, and he loves watching ice-skating but would never admit it. And because he has a desire to settle down and start a family, we'll add in that he's attracted to the woman who runs the frozen yoghurt stand across the street.

The next thing you'll need is a plot. In a character-based story such as this, the plot usually revolves around the difference between the characters shallow and deeper desires – so what we'll need to do is let the character achieve shallow success at the expense of what he really wants, and see where that takes us.

Given that this is a story about intelligent plants, it seems straightforward that Henry's early success would occur when the orchid he's been breeding starts talking to him. At around the same time, he finally gets up the courage to ask the woman from the yoghurt stand out to see a movie (If we're going to keep referring to her, let's give her a name – Sienna will do).

Now we need to put the two desires into conflict – in this story, this happens when the time he spends on his orchid experiments starts meaning he can spend less time with Sienna. This is further compounded when the talking plant story hits the news, and he starts prioritising his newfound fame over his relationship.

Finally, it all comes to a head when Henry has to choose between his orchids and his relationship – we'll work out exactly how later on, when we've developed the bigger story.

What you've got so far is the heart of the story, the human element that will keep people caring about the characters. With some stories, this may be compelling enough for the entire story – but I feel that a story about intelligent plants needs more. So now we'll throw some big dramatic stuff into the plot, just to keep things interesting.

• As the plants gain more intelligence, they realise they want to see beyond the nursery, and eventually decide they want to move to the Amazon.
• A large military corporation wants to breed the plants as weapons.

That should be plenty – and it gives plenty of extra details for plot points. If we try marrying the plot we have with the dramatic points, we might end up with something like this:

Henry the botanist lives a quiet life of orchid crossbreeding experiments, while pining over Sienna, the woman who runs the yoghurt stand across the road from his nursery. One day, he is startled when one of his orchids repeats one of his sentences back to him. After work, he tells Sienna about his discovery, and in the resulting conversation he gets up the courage to ask her to a movie (Perhaps "Day of the Triffids", or "Little Shop of Horrors").

During the next few days, the plants become more and more responsive, until eventually Henry is able to conduct entire conversations with the plants – So Henry is living his dream life, with a new relationship and groundbreaking work ahead. Eventually his work begins taking over, and he begins ignoring phone calls and missing meetings with Sienna, causing a strain on their relationship.

Around now the plants begin talking about what they want from their life, and settle on relocating to the Amazon to develop their own culture, rather than being dependant on human culture. Henry tries to convince them otherwise, as this would mean an end to his research. When he mentions this to Sienna, she surprises him by taking the plants side, causing a fight.

When the plants begin to develop movement capabilities, Henry becomes concerned that they may attempt to escape the nursery on their own. At this point, Henry's research has caught the eyes of Starlac Corp, a military corporation specialising in biotechnology. Starlac offers Henry a specialised containment facility and a funding grant to expand his research in return for the right to breed the plants as biological weapons, which the plants find abhorrent. Sienna finds out and leaves him, telling him that she could not love someone who had no compassion – so Henry now has to choose between continuing his research and giving it all up to pursue the woman he loves.

Of course Henry chooses the military corporation, and lives a miserable life thinking about his past love until a militant group of plants end up taking over and destroying mankind. Or possibly he chooses to give the plants their freedom, and asks Sienna to move to the Amazon with him among the orchids – either one works…

So now that we've got our story summary, all you need to do is flesh it out. Give the other characters a bit more personality and reserve the right to change where the story goes if it seems to fit – Keeping in mind that being true to your characters is the most important thing. If they really want to open an ice-cream shop in Graceland instead of moving to the Amazon, then let them.

Of course, this story is fairly formulaic, but formulas are a good place to start – as you become more skilled as a writer you'll learn to break the rules in interesting ways, but you'll need to learn how a basic story works first.

Enjoy! And bonus points if you can make this dodgy little plot summary work…