Developing story is the process of taking an initial idea and expanding it into a full narrative that resonates with its intended audience. It’s during this stage that writers often hit a wall, known as writer’s block, which can keep them from ever getting their ideas down on paper. Fortunately, there are exercises that can help them work through this period.
The first step in developing story involves identifying the protagonist and antagonist. Define these characters in a way that makes the audience empathize with them and understand their motivations. This helps build tension as the conflict between the protagonist and antagonist escalates.
Setting is a critical element in developing story, as it creates the world that your characters inhabit. Great worldbuilders like Lord of the Rings and Hunger Games create rich, realistic settings that draw readers into their stories. Creating a realistic setting requires a lot of research, but the time spent on this will pay off in the long run.
Rising action is a necessary part of the developing story, as it provides obstacles for your protagonist to overcome and deepens character relationships. This phase builds towards the climax, which is a pivotal point that raises the stakes and intensifies the conflict between protagonist and antagonist.
Developing story requires independent developer stories so that they can be worked on in the proper order in a project backlog and also easily be tested against actual data. This can be accomplished by decomposing developer stories into smaller units that are easier to code and test. For example, a developer story for landing customer extracts can be decomposed into a set of developer stories for each level of the data transform.
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