When lecturing on plot, New York Times best-selling author Brandon Sanderson often breaks structure down into three parts: promise, progress, and payoff. These fit beginning, middle, and end, respectively.

While I find this approach too simplistic for what I need to write a great story (hey, I’m not Brandon Sanderson!), it is an excellent foundation to build on. Without these things in place, your story will always be lacking. Without these things in place, you’ll run into problems that will lead to bored (or even annoyed) readers.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about how these principles not only apply to the story as a whole, but how they are useful for smaller structural units as well.