By this point in the process, you’ve come a long way. You’ve thought about ideas, characters, settings, plots, and how to get started. If you’ve done all that, you can congratulate yourself.

The next question, though, is how you’re going to make your story feel as exciting and compelling to a reader as it does in your mind when you imagine it.

You can have the best plot in the world. The most fascinating characters and the greatest setting, the most brilliant over-arching idea. And when it comes to writing it, you need to be able to do justice to your idea, so that you’ll be able to tell yourself: I did it, I made it feel as if you were right there, rooting for the characters, believing in the events that unfold, not wanting the story to end but desperate to find out what happens next.

This won’t happen by accident, though. You’ve got to make it happen. You’ve got to create the drama that draws people in.

So now it’s time to examine the writing techniques that are going to bring your story to life, and think about how you can use them. In this step, we’re going to look at how to add the dramatic elements that will make your story come off the page, straight into the imaginations of its readers.

What does drama mean?

In a nutshell, drama in writing means conflict. That is, in essence, the lead character in the story wanting something and having to deal with all obstacles – internal or external – that stop them from getting it. In stories, conflict might entail some kind of interaction with another person, or with a situation. But it might equally take the form of thoughts, feelings, interior struggles, reactions and responses to situations. Conflict doesn’t mean ‘huge fight scene’ or ‘allout row’ (though it can do!). Although your story’s arc will involve overcoming the obstacles to resolving a situation (the major conflict), along the way it will involve micro-conflicts and mini-dramas that arise from the events driving the story through its ups and downs to the final resolution. If nothing happened, there would be no story, and conflict/drama is another way of saying that things happen!

There are dramatic techniques in writing that you can use to bring the elements of conflict in your story to life, so in this step we’re going to walk you through them, with prompts and exercises so that you can try them for yourself and see how they might work in the context of your story.

To start with…

Let’s take a basis premise: Jo has lost the front door key and there’s no-one at home to open the door.

Now, think of how you could build drama into this situation in the following set-ups:

• The person Jo calls to resolve the situation can’t help.

• Someone is following Jo with a knife.

• There’s no-one Jo can call for help.

• Jo urgently has to get into the house because there’s someone inside who needs help.

• Jo hasn’t been to the house for ten years and a pressing reason has driven them back.

• Jo’s had a big night out, is the worse for wear and urgently needs to go to the toilet.

In each case, imagine what the situation might feel like from Jo’s perspective (first person) and what it might look like from an outside point of view (third person).