Writing.Com General Discussion

Building on what Edgework said, and adding a clarification. Most of us are writers working on our own projects, so most of the advice you're getting is how we'd approach the project if it was ours. If you're looking for somebody to write your story for you, you may want to clarify that.

back to what I'd do if I was you, but knew what I knew:

Figure out who the protagonists could be (key individuals) from your real story. Probably you and maybe one or two others (not everybody). These are the people from whose point of view you're telling the story AND go through a story arc.

Transform those "real" people into fictional characters. You are not the hero in this story, you are the person who inspired this story. Draw that line. Shift things around so the characters are not recognizable from the actual people. Swap genders, hobbies, whatever inspires you.

Figure out who the bad guy is, not just a faceless army. Why does THIS guy want to go after the protagonists as individuals or as a group of people (the reason for the war, plus a bit more personal). it may be tempting to make him a caricature of evil, but you may want to try humanizing him and seeing what might legitimately motivate him based on some past wrong done to him or teachings or something.

Now you've got the raw materials for a story. 3 acts. Beginning, middle, end.

Beginning is protagonists started their normal day when political turmoil turned scary. They tried to hide, or stay, or fight (perhaps each protag tried something different and thus the story is their arcs of dealing with this conflict their own way). The bad guy shows up and takes it personal to hunt the protags down. Things get worse.

Middle. The protags had to delay or prolong their plans, they've been on the run or hiding, they've got this one shot to make their original plan work, so they take it. It fails. Perhaps betrayal, or that dogged pursuit by the villain thwarts them. it's bad.

End: this is the climax, the protagonists need to work together, and do something different (aka Learn the Lesson), and they find the one possibility for success. They make their move, it's fraught with danger, and the villain shows up in the final showdown (maybe it's chasing them in a boat as they try to cross a body To water to safety. There's shooting, and grappling, and finally the heroes win and reach safety. A denouement scene reunited with some other survivors and a memory to those who were lost.

The End.

That's a generic rendition of a typical story, slightly tweaked to your situation as I imagine might apply from news stories I'd read on the subject. You would need to take that and expand upon it, fill in real and fictional details. Apply some artistic license. Make the heroes fail or things get worse until the End.

In my mind, the goal is to convey the general sense of the war/conflict, and the plight and motivations of the people accurately. It's the details of the specific events that need to be organized into traditional story structure for it to work as fiction.