Structure

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Sample idea:

A journey makes a good structure for a story. Your beginning and end points are given to you and you can divide the intermediate points into roughly equal sections. You'll need to come up with a journey, a reason for making it, and some characters. Of course a chronological record of the trip isn't going to be terribly interesting, so you'll need obstacles and hazards too. Let's say your hero and a friend are biking from Land's End to John O'Groats for charity. We have a journey, a reason and the characters. Now we need hazards: punctures, accidents, hotels that aren't expecting them, double-bookings, haunted hotel rooms, unfriendly locals, over-friendly locals, hangovers, police raids, attacks and muggings, stolen bikes, stolen money, a message from home saying someone is ill, they might get caught up in a robbery or a police chase, a crook might hijack one of the bikes as a getaway vehicle, and so on. Several times they come close to giving up but somehow find the resolve to carry on. But no doubt their lives will never be quite the same again. Think about the journeys that interest you, and what might happen along the way. Perhaps you could find a few people who have actually made such a journey and combine their hair-raising experiences into a single story.

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