After you’ve come up with your premise it’s time to start thinking about your plot. What’s going to happen in your story? Since it’s only the very beginning and you’ve just started writing, you don’t have to go in depth just yet. Just think about it, maybe jot down a few ideas. If you want to be organized, create a flow chart. Here’s the basic setup of the flow chart I used:

Setup + Rising Action + Climax + Falling Action = Resolution

(Sorry, this looked much better on my Google Docs because I was able to put arrows between the words instead of plus and equal signs, but hopefully you get the gist.)

Remember, all you are doing is setting up the basic plot and tossing around ideas for what you want to have happen. There is no need to go any deeper at this point. I will explain the specifics of plot structure/arc in a later article. As you are jotting down ideas you might want to keep in mind your main character and what their external (physical, outside of themselves) conflict is going to be. Often people view plot arc and character arc as separate things, when in reality they effect and build off of one another. Which means they directly correlate to each other. So keep that in mind when you are developing your basic plot structure/arc.