Background reading · English

How a story works: setting, plot and theme

The parts of a story, how tension keeps you reading, and how to find what a story is really about.

Every story you love, from a School Journal piece to a 300-page novel, is built from the same parts. Once you can see them, you can use them in your own writing.

The story mountain

Orientation: who, where and when. The reader gets their bearings.

Complication: a problem arrives. The character wants something and something stands in the way.

Rising action: things get harder. Each event raises the stakes.

Climax: the moment of highest tension, when the character must act.

Resolution: the problem is solved, or not, and we see what has changed.

Setting does a job

Setting is more than where and when. A storm on a black-sand beach, a quiet kitchen at 3 am, a trench in France in 1916: each one creates a mood before anything happens. Writers choose a few sharp sensory details rather than describing everything.

Keeping the tension

Writers keep you turning pages with cliffhangers at the end of chapters, short sentences at tense moments, and questions they leave unanswered. In a short story there is no room to wander: start close to the problem.

Theme: what it's really about

The plot is what happens. The theme is what it means. Themes are big ideas many people relate to, like belonging, courage, loyalty or injustice. Say a theme as a statement, not a single word: not 'family', but 'families can hurt each other and still hold together'.

Try it

Take a story you know well, even a movie, and map it on a story mountain. Then write its theme as one sentence. Do your friends agree?

Sources and further reading

Written for Kōkiri Learn students in our own words. Check facts against the sources.

Used in: Stories That Shape Us