Fiction Writing - Elements of Fiction

Just as a painter uses color and line to create a painting, an author uses the elements of fiction to create a story:

The elements of fiction are: character, plot, setting, theme, and style. Of these five elements, character is the who, plot is the what, setting is the where and when, and style is the how of a story.

A character is any person, personal, identity, or entity whose existence originates from a fictional work or performance.

A plot, or storyline, is the rendering and ordering of the events and actions of a story, particularly towards the achievement of some particular artistic or emotional effect.

Setting is the time and location in which a story takes place.

Theme is the broad idea, message, or lesson of a story.

Style includes the multitude of choices fiction writers make, consciously or subconsciously, as they create a story. They encompass the big-picture, strategic choices such as point of view and narrator, but they also include the nitty-gritty, tactical choices of grammar, punctuation, word usage, sentence and paragraph length and structure, tone, the use of imagery, chapter selection, titles, and on and on. In the process of writing a story, these choices meld to become the writer's voice, his or her own unique style.