BUILDING BLOCKS

OF FICTION

English B
Higher Level
Guiding question

What are the essential

ingredients of fiction?
 What makes a story interesting?

We want to see how a problem, or

conflict, is resolved.

About everyday situations, such as choosing

friends at school.
About fantastically unreal situations, such as
being stranded on a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger in
the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

These situations are intriguing for

readers because they call for resolution.
What will happen next?

A strong plot will keep you on the

edge of your seat or turning pages.

We call the series of events in a

story the plot.
 Activity 1.1 Getting started – fiction & storytelling
Do you find any truth in these statements?

Explain why you feel each of these quotes may or may not
be true by referring to your own experience of reading
fiction.

a. ‘Truth is stranger than fiction.’ Mark Twain

b. 'Life imitates art far more than art imitates life.' Oscar Wilde
c. 'Every man's work, whether it be literature, or music or
pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait
of himself.‘ Samuel Butler
d. 'Surely the job of fiction is to actually tell the truth. It's a
paradox that's at the heart of any kind of story-telling.‘ Jeremy
Northam
e. 'Fiction's about what it is to be a human being.' David Foster
Wallace
 Plot

The series of
events in a
story
Activity 1.2
Freytag’s Pyramid
 Look at the photographs a-d below. With a classmate, describe the kinds of
conflict that you see in these images. Feel free to make up your own stories!
Make brief notes to summarise your story for each image

CONFLICTS
are the
problems that
characters
encounter in
their struggle to
achieve an aim.
Look back to previous activity (Act. 1.3)
Classify your stories for the images into one or more of
these types of conflict.

Individual vs Individual vs
individual society

Individual vs The Individual

circumstances vs themself