The start of a story requires three elements which begin with the letter “P.” Give me a Person in a Place with an intriguing Problem, as soon as you can, and I’m in.  Until these three elements are clearly in place, your story will stumble around going nowhere.  Though even then, you don’t really have a story.  Only when you add the fourth “P”—a Plan—does your story begin to take shape.

Why?  Because no one really cares about your beaten-down, introspective, whiney, sensitive—albeit fully drawn, provocative, nuanced, and eccentric—little guy with a problem until we find out what the guy plans to do about it.

Still, even at this point—often three or four chapters into the book—you have no story.  Not yet.  What we, as readers, need now is to see the character put the Plan into action, i.e., to launch the Quest. Then, and only then, do you have the primordial stew of a story.

—John H. Ritter