What makes a good story?

So in the midst of all this crap I've posted, whoever might be reading this is probably thinking to themselves, "what does this woman need to impress her?" It's surprisingly not a lot. If you're reading this for tips on how not to write, good on you! There's a bunch you'll find. Now, here's a few tips on how to write, what will grab my interest and impress me.

1. A good opening

Nothing makes me turn away from a story more than if the opening is flat, lame, typical, or boring. Some typical openings can be done well, but more often than not they are crap. The really bad ones draw me in because I have a sadistic want to see just how hilariously bad the prose gets, but for the most part I will not read your story if it does not draw me in. I will scan through it, give you a few remarks that most likely involve the two sentences I did read, and I'll be on my way.

A good opening is something that's going to grab a person's attention. And not in a negative way. Not in a way that has been done over and over. Some over-done openings are:

a) Crying: "Her shoulders hunched forward as she sobbed bitterly."

b) Graveyards: "He stood at the tombstone, fists clenched and arms shaking."

c) Storms: "Lightning flashed the cross the sky in a mournful display, displaying the darkness of the world."

d) Death: "What is death?" (that opening sentence kills me inside every time I see it. And I see it a lot.)

e) Sucky life: "Life is nothing but a dark void."

f) battlefield: "Death spread out before me, mangle bodies spread across the ground."

g) Running: "His feet pounded across the ground as he ran desperately from the ominous figure."

h) Suicidal: "I don't want to live anymore."


Don't get me wrong. Done right, in an original way, emotion, or context, any of these intros can be a good intro. My own novel starts off with a thunder storm... but it's not for depressing effect. The point of it is that it's annoying the shit out of my MC. That is something you don't expect when someone talks about a thunder storm, therefore making it a more original opening.

Besides an original and interesting opening, you want something someone WANTS to read. That means special attention to grammar and sentence structure. For the first three or four sentences you want to have nit-picked over every sentence, clause, idea, and WORD. Pick your wording carefully and be sure that you haven't made any mistakes. If I see an opening that is well-worded and interesting to read, I am overly happy and I can proceed as if I was actually reading a story... not nit-picking at someone's hunk of prose. That's how you can tell if I like what you've written; I will read it through first, and then I will go back and critique. If I don't like it, I crit as I read. And THEN I just get more and more annoyed as I go along.

If I really don't like it, I put it on this blog.



2. A moving story line.

This is the next important thing. If you have a great intro but your story line is crap, well that intro only got the reader so far. This means that your story has a point. Everything you say must have some sort of meaning, everything you say must in some way help the story. If suddenly you go off rambling about something that we neither need to know or care about, you've lost the reader.

This also means that you should not stop at random times to give us an info dump. Describing an entire person's appearance in one paragraph (describing hair and eye color, clothes, height, etc, etc all in one go...) is tedious and halting to the story. Same with history-dumping. We don't need to know the MC's life story all in one go. Keep it moving forward and throw in details here and there.

For example, instead of this:
"She wore a floor-length black dress, gold earrings, and a beautiful silver necklace. Her hair was brown and her eyes were green, and she looked to be about twenty years old."

Try this:
"As she approached me, a floor-length dress whipped at her feet, its black folds seeming to absorb the light. I found myself lost for words as she extended her hand in greeting, bearing into my soul with her intense green eyes, sparkling like the golden earrings at her lobes. We exchanged greetings briefly before she launched into active conversation that seemed to occupy the lives of women her age."

And so on and so forth, just adding the details as you go along in the story. This keeps the story moving and creates more of an image.



3. Show, don't tell.

I can't stress this enough. I don't want to know point-for-point what is happening, I want to SEE, HEAR, SMELL, FEEL point-for-point what is happening. Pay attention to all of the senses and use careful wording, painting a picture in the reader's mind.

Instead of:

"He crossed the street and entered the store"

Try:

"He hurried across the busy streets and ducked into the coffee shop."

Much more descriptive, better word choice, and it paints a better, more personal image. That's all I have to say on that.



5. Spell check.

MS Word spell checks, Firefox spell checks... there is NO REASON to not spell check! It's not rocket science, and that is why this point is short. If you are too lazy to check your spelling, I will be too lazy to read your story.



6. Proof read.

A little harder than spell checking, but also not rocket science. Type up your prose, and then (this is important) leave it alone for a day or two. Come back to it. Read it over and make edits to any mistakes you see. Change up some wording to make your story appeal to you more, and see if you like it from a different perspective than if you had just written it.

Go over it with a fine-toothed comb, pick out any grammar problems you see and ask yourself if someone else would enjoy it. If you do this much, I am OVERLY impressed and would be more than happy to help you out the rest of the way. I don't expect everyone to be a grammar nut, and if you actually tried to proof read I can tell and would be more than willing to point out where you're still having trouble and give you a proper explanation on certain grammatical rules.



7. Read up on cliches

It sounds dumb, but if you Google cliches, you get plenty of sites that will help you figure out if your story is original or if you're just doing something a million other people have done. If you're not following a bunch of cliches your story is pretty much better.

They even have genre-specific cliche lists there. Type in "fantasy cliches" and you get a bunch of good stuff on what not to do.








Well! I hope this was helpful, get out there and write!