As a writer you want to create something original — something that draws the reader in, holds them by the collar and sets them down right at the end out of breath and changed. You want to impress with unique ideas and creative prowess.

However, you can’t just dazzle a reader with your prose. Writing a successful fiction novel requires you to follow a few broad guidelines. Before you exceed your reader’s expectations you need to first meet them. After all, while the process of writing a book may be a deeply personal thing, the end result is fundamentally about satisfying your reader with a great story.

Here are five elements every fiction novel needs in order to succeed.

1. A great hook

The start of your story is vital and often incredibly challenging to get just right. The first scene or chapter needs to tread a fine line between easing your reader into the story, introducing key characters, and establishing conflict as quickly as possible.

The hook — or inciting incident — needs to tell readers why they should read on. It should make them curious and get them asking important questions that you can feed them answers to slowly over the rest of the story.

So how do you write a good inciting incident?

Set the tone. Is it gothic horror? Fast-paced action? Mystery? Should the reader feel excited, scared, or angry?

Introduce your main character and make the reader care about them. You can do this by making your character’s motivations and goals clear from the very beginning.

Raise questions. If you’re writing fantasy, you might display a little of the magic without an explanation. If it’s a murder mystery, you need to make the reader ask why this person was murdered.

The hook is a make-or-break point and is the first thing you need to get right if you want a reader to read on.

2. An interesting protagonist

Novels are about people. Everything else is dressing. The main character or characters drive the story. They need to be believable; their actions, motivations and goals should make sense, be consistent, and evolve over the course of the story. The reader doesn’t have to like the protagonist, but they do need to understand them.

The reader also needs a reason to care. No one will finish your book if they don’t care whether the protagonist succeeds or fails.

Writing the main character requires giving them a clear purpose or goal. Having something for them to work towards — and establishing a risk of failure — allows you to build tension, create conflict, and enable character growth as they overcome obstacles.

Writing Desk tip: Use the Story Plotter to map your protagonist’s arc across chapters. When you can see where they start and where they need to end up, the moments of growth and failure become much easier to place intentionally.

3. An antagonist

Tension in a story is built through conflict. Your main character needs a goal, but if there’s nothing standing in the way of that goal they’ll simply achieve it. There’ll be no character growth, no conflict, and probably quite a short story.

Enter the antagonist. They should be believable, consistent, and have their own motivations — just like the protagonist. The antagonist doesn’t have to be evil, doesn’t have to be the protagonist’s mortal enemy, and doesn’t even need to be a person. What they do need is to create obstacles and conflict that the protagonist must overcome.

What matters most: your main character doesn’t have an easy time reaching their goal, and you give as much thought and detail to your antagonist as you have to your protagonist.

4. Conflicts to overcome

Conflict brings tension to the story, creates trouble for your protagonist, leads to character growth, and makes your plot more engaging.

Over the course of the story, your protagonist should overcome — or fail to overcome — multiple points of conflict, with the stakes getting higher and more intense as the story builds and they get closer to their goal.

There are several types of conflict. Internal conflict takes place within the mind of a character — a fear of failure, anger toward a family member. External conflict is what happens based on outside forces — a tragic incident, a fight with another character. Your story will likely include both.

There should always be an element of conflict in your story to keep the reader engaged.

5. A satisfying resolution

There’s nothing worse than putting down a book that was otherwise great and being disappointed by the ending.

A satisfying ending needs to wrap up all the important plot points and conflicts and answer the reader’s burning questions. You might want to leave room for a sequel — in which case some elements can remain open — but most of the conflict and questions you introduced should be resolved in a way that makes sense.

Hopefully your protagonist has gotten closer to achieving their end goal and undergone some character growth since the beginning. It’s okay to leave your readers wanting more, but if you don’t manage to resolve the majority of it, you’ll leave them frustrated.

Final Words

Writing is a deeply personal and often lonely activity. You need to let the creative juices flow and let the characters drive the story. You may well end up somewhere you never expected.

However, ultimately you’re writing for an audience. This is why the editing process is so important. Let the writing be for you, but make the editing process for the reader.

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