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What Makes a Good Story? Love. Hate. Trouble. Misery. Damaged families. Terrible neighbors. Problems. Danger. Put your main character in danger and keep him there and you’ll be in a successful company.
Think this is nonsense? Consider these books that became movies or television, or vice versa: Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, The Game of Thrones, The Martian, Star Wars, Star Trek and others. Those stories maintain tension. They keep you wondering what will happen next. And that keeps your interest. And that keeps you reading, watching, or listening.
No matter what you write, tell stories about people. People read about, and care about, other people. Keep your good guy likeable and your bad guy nasty.
Create characters that readers care about. Characters (other than minor characters) fall into one of four categories:
• Friends who do good things for the protagonist
• Friends who do bad things to the protagonist
• Enemies who do bad things to the protagonist
• Enemies who do good things to the protagonist
Everything is a character: the environment, vehicles, animals, setting, space ships, towns, buildings. Treat every aspect of your story as a character. Write out the characteristics of people, vehicles, town names, streets, so you won’t have someone with blue eyes in chapter one and with brown eyes in chapter ten. Mistakes like those will cause readers to abandon your book. So, do the research and create a character sheet for a person, place, or thing.
Write about people. It doesn’t matter if they’re cartoon characters, bunnies, or robots. The story is about what they want and what they’re willing to do to get it, how they deal with and solve problems, interact with each other, their environment, and how they care for each other – or don’t.
Setting must be appropriate for the story and interesting for the reader. Treat your setting like a character and research it extensively. This is true if writing about an actual place or making a fictional setting.
Your protagonist and antagonist must complement each other. When one is superior to the other, your story is dull because there’s no tension. Readers are not interested in hopeless situations or stories where there is nothing at stake.
Here’s an example: Your protagonist has his back to a crocodile-infested river as a pride of lions is closing it. So, what do you do? Have a passing helicopter save him. Allow him to be rescued by space aliens?
Keep your solutions within the realm of reality and avoid deus ex machina (ghost in the machine) from Greek plays where a god arrived on stage to solve the problem.
If you write science fiction, read science fiction. Look for situations where you can add to the literature. Writing from the same point of view as others have done is a waste of time and energy. Look at things from a new perspective. Be interesting, revolutionary, controversial, and you’ll attract readers. And sales.
Wayne A. English is locally, nationally, and internationally published and the recipient of the Reader’s House Magazine Award of Literary Excellence. See Wayne’s publications at WayneAEnglish.com.