In principle, everything is important in its own right, but a story is a marvelous failure to encapsulate that entirety. One outright abandons many things to highlight what becomes a narrative. Plotting is essentially organizing characters that do certain actions in certain backgrounds that have certain repercussions. There are, as a result, five crucial components:-

1. Characters 
2. Actions
3. Backgrounds 
4. Situations 
5. Descriptions

With these alone one can quite efficiently create plot outlines combinatorially. Before implementing the same, let us understand what the individual components entail; our entire exposition would circle around explaining and instantiating that, but we shall begin by a short-hand version of it. Each of the five mentioned above are a collection of answers to fundamental questions which we summarize as – ‘Who/What?’, ‘How?’, and ‘Why?’. For instance, ‘Characters’ contain the following information: (a) Who are they? (b) How are they?, and (c) Why are they? In other words, apart from rudimentary introductions, it also contains information about their emotional states, and purpose. Similarly, one is expected to understand – ‘Actions’, ‘Backgrounds’, and ‘Situations’. The last aspect of a plot – ‘Descriptions’ – plays the role of fillers, crucial nevertheless. It presents the story with (a) competence, (b) concepts, and (c) culture. 

We claim that to visualize any event in its totality we only need the five aforementioned components: we need to know who all were related to the incident (characters), how did they respond (actions), where did it all happen (background), and what were the cause and effect of their actions, or what were some other relevant events  (situations). These together set up the first four components of the plot to be. The fifth component, expository in nature, helps shape the quality of the narrative. Competence of characters often narrows down the genre. It could restrain a normal story into a superhero fiction, an action thriller, a horror, a science fiction, a fantasy, and so on. Add to that concepts like, platonic relationship, time travel, anarchy, whose exploration in the narrative further characterizes the genre, and more importantly voices a theme. And finally, culture adds authenticity to both competence and concept exploration. For instance, try thinking about religions of a futuristic human race where time-travel is a possibility: all sins can literally be reversed and therefore atoned for absolutely; one can go back in time to visit one’s favorite messiahs. The wildness of such religions would speak for the fact that humans have incorporated time-travel deep into their way of being. We said before that each of the five components of a plot are answers to three simple questions – at this stage it should be pointed out that some of those questions can have the same answers: ‘Why did he do what he did?’ and ‘How did he feel?’ could share explanations. Also, some of the questions or answers can be self-evident or contradictory because of certain answers to some other questions, or can be deemed irrelevant. As Hitchcock once famously said – “Where logic ends, drama begins”. 

Although whatever is said might seem to have an undertone of being trivial, the utility of it surfaces only when seen in action. Therefore, let us use the terminology introduced so far to build a plot, layer by layer – each layer comprises answers to What/Who? How? and Why? questions for Character, Action, Background, and Situation, separately. 

Layer 1:- (What/Who?)

(Character) – A rich King. 

(Action) – Murdered his own minister.

(Background) – In a church.

(Situation) – As the prince was being baptized.

Layer 2:- (How?)

(Character) – The King felt vengeful.

(Action) – He was not actively partaking in his minister’s murder. But while it was happening, he was reciting ‘I renounce the Satan’ prayer, as a part of the baptization.

(Background) – No one saw it happen.

(Situation) – King’s men taller than the minister surrounded him, took him to the crowd, gagged him, hid his face, and choked him to death.

Layer 3:- (Why?)

(Character) – The King felt betrayed because the minister had been conspiring against him.

(Action) – He wanted to show him how puny he was by killing him in the face of god.

(Background) – The church was chosen (meticulously) as a spot for the murder because the prince was to be baptized there. 

(Situation) – The men were merely following orders. 

This might sound familiar for certain aspects of it are ripped off of Mario Puzo’s The Godfather. But the plot above is just a place-holder, the emotion one wants to draw from an incident informs the specifics of components in each layer above. If you want suspense, then make the minister escape the King’s assassination plan, or best, make one find that the minister had already been murdered. If you want a thriller, then show that certain men who are mixing amongst the crowd (meant to be for the minister) could potentially be coming for the King. If you want a tragedy, then maybe the setting is the baptization of the minister’s son. One could also rearrange the order of the components to change the flavor of the narrative: reveal the situation first to create shock, then follow it up by the King’s character to supplement the shock with motive – more about this later. Figuratively speaking, these components get hold of a sufficient amount of branches to rattle the whole tree of narrative. 

Ideas for stories come to us in different forms, it may be a scene, an archetypal emotion, a dialogue, or even a single line of thought. When these inspirational starting points are expanded into stories, one often runs into the trouble of making it one-dimensional. There are many stories in the action thriller genre where bad guys are to be taken on face-value, their inner motivations are never revealed, and it’s often unbearable when they are! Mildly better are those films where such psychological inclinations are done well, but in those, the super-villain employs people to partake in his evil ploy, and only god knows why they do what they do. Such inadequacies create a repulsive sense of disbelief towards whatever the story is set out to achieve. Indulge me while I belabor the point with two concrete instances:- 

1.  A place where character motivations play a major role is in a Whodunnit. Whodunnits are not about crazy plot twists or mind bending explainers; it’s about characters! Without characters penned to be utterly transparent, the product would be bland. The audience must be made to think that they know all the characters in the story inside out. Why someone did something is menacingly more captivating than how, case in point: Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, A Tell-Tale Heart, etc. 
2.  To give another instance, I must share the problem I have with sci-fi films: characters (not in any way scientifically oriented) so casually speak stuff like – “one has to inject portal A into portal B to create a semi-stable time loop”, or even utter the word “time-travel”. The feeling of awe, wonder, and alienation one should feel is never mirrored in the story. It’s almost as if one must accept the sci-fi things immediately and understand the plot by not asking too many questions; for if one questions a sci-fi film deeply, one is basically asking scientific questions, and stories are a wrong place to look for answers. 

So motivations and emotional states of the characters are important layers of a story. This brings us to a point of utility of the formalism introduced: while expanding ideas to fully formed stories, the components introduced add necessary strands of drama to it. To instantiate that, consider our test plot: Suppose that the culture of the kingdom is aggressively peace oriented, to the extent that it would be detrimental to the King’s claim to power if his hands were found bloody. Assassinating his minister would then be a delicate decision, for the conspiracy that he had unraveled could be in place merely to provoke violence. Alternatively, if the King himself believes in non-violence, and if the efficacy of that concept were to be expounded in the narrative, then it would change everything.  

Having somewhat explained the five components and its relevance to plotting, let me revert our attention back to constructing plots. With our toy plot, we saw how to come up with an outline layer by layer. We also saw how to tweak details at different levels to serve different emotional goals. Now we shall look at another way, a bit combinatorial in nature. It begins with a presupposition that a plot is a sequence of things that are characterized by one of the five components. Therefore, to create an outline one creates a list like so: Character, Background, Situation, and Character, and then tries to fill in details in such a way that when seen in the prescribed sequence, they form one’s desired narrative. In the case above, it could be something like: A soldier – was in a battlefield – and a flank of enemy soldiers were advancing towards him – leading that flank, the soldier found was his own brother. One could complain that the plots for stories exposed so far are terribly short. Indeed. I’m avoiding elaborate plots to keep things simple, but certainly a longer list could encapsulate an epic. The reader can involve himself with such delicacies. This combinatorial way of doing things encourages an archetypal form of sculpting. Let us illustrate it with two ways of approaching it:-

1. There are apparently seven common plot archetypes: Overcoming the Monster, Rags to Riches, The Quest, Voyage and Return, Comedy, Tragedy, and Rebirth. We would not expand upon it here, one can find excellent resources on these elsewhere. Let me pick one to illustrate our ways of doing things, say, Overcoming the Monster. As is perhaps evident from the title, the plot would be about a hero who would after extensive suffering take down a significantly more powerful rival. Implicit in this archetype are things like – establishing hero’s motives, actions that crosses villain’s path, conflicts between the hero and the villain, and finally hero emerging victorious. Therefore, it would demand a particular type of listicle, perhaps something like – Situation (minor trouble), Character (Hero’s introduction), Action (Hero evades minor trouble), Situation (that puts the Hero in a head-on collision with the Villain), Character (Villain’s introduction), Description (Villain’s unparalleled competence), and so on, ending with, Action (Hero kills Villain). One can subvert this cliche by experimenting with strangely ordered listicles and force oneself to stick to a fixed archetype, in the hope of reinventing it. For instance, in our case, consider something like – Situation, Description, Situation, Description, Character, Situation, Action, Character, and Description. If you notice, there is no scope for a villain’s introduction before an action accounting for his doom. Yet one can breathe life into it as follows: A woman enters a house and finds a baby’s cradle drenched in blood, standing next to it was a bloodied mongoose – few words about the competence of a general mongoose followed – she gets into a battle with the mongoose – her competence as a wounded and enraged human being is revealed – she is introduced as the mother of the child (only now) – she found that the mongoose barely fought – she killed the mongoose and in the process found a huge cobra in the corner, dead – the cobra as a super-villain is revealed – the competence of the cobra that had haunted the village for decades followed. This reinterpretation of the classic archetype could be called – Tragedy of The Good Monster, or something like that. Feel free to try a few on your own.
2. It would be better to work on a plot-outline with no archetypal reference points. Come up with a listicle, something like, Character, Character, Description, Situation, and Action, fill in the details partially, but wildly. For instance, the two characters are two random people, say A and B. The situation is that A is thinking about something, and finally the action is that A kills B abruptly. If one were Dostoevsky, one would write in the place of Description – A’s acute inclination to reason nihilism and the need for sociopathic behavior to the people around him. This ‘fill in the blanks’ way of constructing plot could work if one understands the emotional journey of one’s narrative, so that one is fully equipped to fill in appropriately. 

This concludes our discussion on constructing plot outlines. I wish to leave the readers by recommending to employ a combination of methods discussed here, elsewhere, and putting to use whatever works!