So … you have your story idea, someone who has a problem he must struggle to solve, and you know how you want your story to end. What else is involved in a story plan? Are you ready to begin writing?

Probably not. I believe that more stories fail because writers don’t spend enough time making a plan before they begin to write than for any other reason. So what else is there to know?

Your character needs a history. If she is born the day she walks onto your page, she isn’t going to be very interesting. Everybody loves a newborn baby, but not many people want to spend a lot of time sitting around watching one. Newborns haven’t developed into interesting people yet. They have no history.

What kind of history does your character need? Everything that happened to him from the day he was born until the day your story starts?

Well, you could gather that much history, but it would take you a long, long time to do it, and then you would find that most of what you gathered wasn’t useful in writing your story. What will be useful? The history of your character’s story problem.

Let me use one of my stories, A Bear Named Trouble, to demonstrate the kind of history you will need. This story has two main characters, because it develops from two different story problems, the problem of an adolescent brown bear whose mother has run him off and the problem of a young boy, Jonathan, who will encounter the bear and eventually help save him.

But there is one more piece to a story plan. I recommend that you have an ending in mind before you begin to write.

Really? But doesn’t the ending just come to you in a flash of inspiration as you are writing? Maybe. Maybe not.

And if it doesn’t, what are you going to have in front of you for all your writing? A problem without a solution. In other words, a situation … and, once more, a situation is not a story.

I have heard some writers say, “If I knew the ending, I would never write the story. I write the story to find out how it will end.” And such a loose process may work for some. But when one of my writing students tells me that she is writing a story in order to discover the ending, I feel cautious. I may even feel a bit skeptical. Simply writing and writing and writing in order to find out what is in your head strikes me as a journey fraught with peril. The chances of discovering that what you have in front of you isn’t a story at all are high. It’s a risk you may not want to take.

The bear doesn’t need much history, but he still needs some. Here is Trouble’s history. He has always lived with his mother. And when the story opens, for reasons he doesn’t understand, his mother sends him away and refuses to let him come back to her.

Jonathan’s history is somewhat more complex. His father is a keeper at the Alaska Zoo, and Jonathan, who is ten years old, has moved to Anchorage with his dad, leaving his mother and little sister behind in Minnesota. His mother is a teacher and has to finish out her teaching year before the family can be reunited. That is one important fact.

Another is that, because Jonathan’s sister is bound to a wheel chair, Jonathan has developed a game in which he imagines himself inside various animals. Then he describes for his sister the way it feels to fly or to move in other kinds of ways. And the final thing to know about Jonathan is that he is lonely. He misses his mother and his sister. He spends lots of time at the zoo, imagining himself inside various animals, and he has, especially, developed a relationship with a tame goose named Mama Goose.

Every one of these facts will affect the choices Jonathan will make in the story. Because he is fascinated by animals—and because he is lonely—he will set out to attract and even to pursue the adolescent brown bear when he shows up at Jonathan’s house. Jonathan knows better. His father has taught him about respecting bears. But his loneliness and his desire to be “inside” this young bear are stronger than his discretion, and so he sets out to build a relationship with Trouble … until Trouble encounters his beloved Mama Goose.

Do you see how the story is spun out who Jonathan is? If Trouble had shown up at another boy’s house, he probably would have responded very differently. It is Jonathan’s history that gives him the specific response he has. It is Jonathan’s history that makes him a particular boy, not just any boy encountering a bear. And it is his history that provides the foundation for his story.

And that is what your main character needs … a history that relates directly to the struggle that will form his story. What has happened to your character before now that will frame his response to the story problem? If you are writing about a boy being bullied, has he ever been bullied before? Is he big for his age, but just not a fighter? Why doesn’t he want to fight? Or is he small and he’s tried to fight the bully before and always lost? Or is he perfectly capable of fighting, but he’s made a promise to his father that he won’t? Why has he made such a promise? What has happened in the past for his father to have asked him to make such a promise? Is your character afraid of his father, or is he afraid of disappointing him?

Keep asking questions until you understand exactly who your character is and how he is apt to react in the face of the story problem you have set up. The history you develop doing that will make your story rich and interesting. Knowing that history will also make it possible for you to keep writing once you begin.

You need to be filled up before you can pour yourself out in a story, and part of that filling up—an important part—is understanding who your characters are through their histories.