CONCEPTIVE TECHNIQUE
(1) Find your story, a fiction exhibiting personality in conflict with its environment, with another personality, or with itself.
(2) Realize precisely what constitutes the plot—what opposition between what forces of personality or nature is the influence which gives fictional significance to the sequence of incidents or events that have first come to mind as the story.
(3) Realize the characters, major and minor; that is, discover just what attributes of theirs must be developed by direct statement or by inference from action in order to give the plot an adequate, concrete, specific presentment.
(4) Having grasped the plot, the essence of the story, and all its implications, and having realized the individual people who alone can present it convincingly, scrutinize closely the events of the story, as they first were conceived, to discover whether their rearrangement or entire change may not result in a combination presenting the plot more adequately and more forcefully than the combination that first suggested the plot.
(5) Having blocked out the fiction thus, consider and determine from whose viewpoint it may best be told.
CONSTRUCTIVE TECHNIQUE
(1) Arrange the significant events of the story in sequence with a due but not forced regard to the necessities of climax, that is, increasing tensity of the plot-struggle.
(2) Consider how best to link together the major happenings, and endeavor to devise and manipulate the minor events so that they may serve a double purpose, first, to lead from major event to major event, second, to develop the characters; remember that a story is a physical presentment of a spiritual thing, the plot-struggle, and that personality should function in the small as well as in the great events.
(3) Determine precisely the ending toward which to work, and let it coincide with the termination of the plot-struggle.