When I was in the U.S. Navy, one thing that was constantly drummed into us was Fire Safety. Think about it: when you are on a ship in the middle of the ocean, the last thing you want is to have a fire threatening your life, where you effectively have no place to run, and then to make things worse you have to pump water into the ship to put out the fire… effectively sinking the ship if you don’t remove the water!

Fire requires three things: Fuel, Heat and Oxygen. Take away any one of those and the fire will stop.  Taken together, they are called the Fire Triangle.

Good fiction (and for that matter, creative nonfiction) also has three basics in order to work properly: Plotting, Characterization, and Good Writing. Yes, we can take some of these and break them down further (dialogue, description, conflict, etc.), but those fall within the basic three.

You can’t develop good, convincing dialogue without both good characterization and good writing technique. Conflict is useless unless the characters behave in a believable way when confronted with the conflict.

You cannot abandon any one of these things when writing, or your story will fall apart. Certainly differences in types of writing may cause you to emphasize one thing more than the other, but they are all necessary.

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