Articles about techniques you can use to make your story better.
The rate at which your plot moves forwards is referred to as the “pace” of your story. If your story has too slow a pace, it can be boring, whereas if the pace is too fast then it’s unclear what’s happening and why. You need to find a balance between moving forwards at the right pace, whilst still taking time to explain what is happening and why.
The stories that stick with you, make you think long and hard after they’re over, will often blur those lines between good and evil, and show the rich complexity of life. I’ll be explaining how and why we blur those lines in stories.
Writing prompts are a great resource, and I regularly give them on my Creative Writing For Kids videos on YouTube because of it. A writing prompt can be used to grow your story from a tiny seed into a full grown tree, as long as you know how to use them well.
Show don’t tell is a piece of writing advice that is regularly given to writers, but without development it can be hard to understand. I previously wrote about showing not telling your character’s environment and actions, but for this I’ll be focusing on what show don’t tell means in relation to your characters emotions and feelings.
One of the key ingredients to a successful story is for your characters to be well motivated. Your Protagonist, your main character, wants something and is motivated enough to after it, and you write that journey. But the conflict lock is what turns it from some random events into a real story.
Your story “continuity” is making sure that from one scene to another, nothing changes about the people or the environment they’re in, that wasn’t intended to change and tracked by the writer. In film and TV errors, continuity errors can happen due to wardrobes changing suddenly, placement of props on the set, or weather, but I’ll be focusing specifically on the written word because as a writer the story continuity is your responsibility to control.
When you’re writing a story, usually you use with first or third person. First person refers to the Protagonist as I, and third person refers to the Protagonist as He or She. I’m going to be explaining the use of a POV (Point Of View) Character in third person, and how you can use them for connecting your reader to the other characters in the scene and the setting they’re in, without overloading your audience with unnecessary detail.
If your book is too dialogue heavy, it can read like a script. You don’t get to know the environment your characters are in, or connect with their interiority in a way that you can relate to their emotions. However, if your book is too prose heavy, it can make it hard to get to know the characters because so much of how we ground ourselves in our characters is in how they communicate with each other. So, it’s important to strike a good prose to dialogue ratio.
Sometimes as part of your story, you’ll have information that needs to be delivered in order for the story to make sense. This could be rules of magical lore within your Universe, details of a quest your character goes on, world building about the environment they live in if you’re writing in high fantasy or sci fi, or politics of the time such as a war they’ve been engaged in or who is in charge. But, ultimately, either your audience, or both your character and your audience, need information to be delivered to them in order for you to tell your story.
A plot twist is a sudden change in your story that your audience don’t see coming, such as a reveal that one of the goodies is actually a baddie. Your plot twist can be written in a way that pulls your audience into your story and makes them want more because it’s a really unexpected moment that’s exciting to read, or it can boot them out. And you never want to boot your audience out.