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Once you’ve come up with a list of meaningful plot points that should happen in your story, the Acts structure (generally three, but could be strengthened by turning it into five) is a proven method to organize those plot points in a way that makes the story more cohesive, and usually building up in tension.

The following questions should allow you to develop the goals in your story, as well as the conflict that will make it harder for the characters to achieve their goals.

• What is the overall goal by the main character in the story?
• The goal should be the product of their sacred flaw. What they decide they want has to come from the flawed core of their character.
• How is the protagonist’s goal a need, an emotional must for the character?
• What is the concrete goal each important character in your story has, and how do they conflict?
• Describe when and how your hero becomes obsessed with winning. Put another way, is there a moment when your hero decides to do almost anything to win?
• Can you start using a “wrong solution” approach? It gives heroes a reason to get moving so that they can learn and grow on the job. While it may seem cooler to have heroes know what to do right away, or at least withhold judgement until they have all the facts, you will often find the audience actually likes them better if you first send them charging off in the wrong direction.
• Micro-Goal to Macro-Goal. This is a simpler form of false goal. Frodo sets out to merely return the ring to Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings. In Star Wars, Luke goes from wanting to fix his runaway droid to wanting to blow up the Death Star. John McClane in Die Hard spends the first half of the movie just trying to call the cops before he realizes he’ll have to take on a terrorist cell single-handledly. These false goals make character motivations far more believable.
• What is the plan, the set of guidelines, or strategies, the hero will use to overcome the opponent and reach the goal? How is it specificially focused toward defeating the opponent and reaching the goal?
• What opposition do you throw at your main character and how do you keep telling them no?
• How, by competing for the same goal, are the protagonist and antagonist forced to come into direct conflict throughout the story?
• How does the protagonist face the villain along the way? Specify.
• Brainstorm all the possible obstacles you could throw in, to make the story as interesting as possible.
• What is the conflict between each of your main characters?
• If you have multiple protagonists, can you make them antagonists of each other?
• How do you place the protagonist’s values in conflict?
• In what way is your central conflict embodying your theme? How does the conflict force your protagonist to make thematic choices in the novel, with the hardest choice at the climax?
• How are you pushing your characters to the edge?
• Has everything that can go wrong indeed gone wrong? Don’t be nice, even a little bit. Throw social conventions out of the window. Does your plot continually force your protagonist to rise to the occasion?
• Make sure things are constantly going wrong in your story to keep it exciting.
• How can you complicate things so much that it seemingly becomes impossible for your protagonist to reach his goal?
• Audiences get bored if the hero doesn’t have to improvise. Try to go through the plot points figuring out plenty of ways it could fail.
• Can you make it feel like the protagonist is trying to juggle several balls at once and he is just barely keeping them from dropping every time? This is a great time to push the protagonist almost to the point of breaking before bringing them back in for a final and much awaited victory.
• Your antagonist shouldn’t go with everything going their way either. Let both of them face challenges, twists and turns along the way. The more they are affected by curveballs and unexpected experiences, the more realistic the story will be. Make the protagonist slip up and result in an almost-victory instead of a true victory, and let the antagonist fail at the most inconvenient of times for them. This keeps your readers on their toes and unsure about what is going to happen, when.
• How does the conflict force the protagonist to take action, whether it’s to rationalize it away or actually change?
• What is excellent about this challenge? What’s cool, awesome, and exciting about being in this situation? How can your protagonist be creative? How can your protagonist exceed her own expectations, and even your own?
• Are there catalytic moments of transformation?