The first building block: Plot and story (part one)

As you begin to build your story, they way you will structure it is a fundamental consideration, says Ian Ayris

In the last issue, we finally came face to face with the Building Blocks of Creative Writing. They stand before us. There are large blocks and there are small blocks. There are blocks of different colours and shades. They sit there. Disordered. We can see they will all fit together somehow, and the possibilities of their construction are myriad. We have a sense there is an order to them. An order of size or importance, or something. We don’t know what. We feel there is also something else, something beyond what we see.

Something inside us tells us these are not just blocks.

They are gateways.