Making a Good Story · 6:23pm Jan 26th, 2020

Greetings everyone!
I’m sure many of you have noticed the “How to make a good story?” threads popping up from time to time in many groups and blogs of FIMFiction. While it is impossible to fully answer that question in a meaningful way, certain aspects of a good story can be elaborated on.

The first thing you need to comprehend is learning how a story works. What its components are and how can they be used, and why. Imagine them like lego bricks of various shapes and colours. You can put them together any way you can. If you do so with little thought, the result will be an abstract colourful shape that looks kinda cool, but that’s it... and unless you are a fan of modern art, it’s actually quite meh. Now, if you build with an idea and purpose in your mind, you can create whatever you want. A vehicle? A figurine? A house? A physical representation of your love of nachos? Truly anything you can think of.

Now, let’s take a closer look at some of these ‘bricks’, their use, and possible downfalls.

First, technical aspects—grammar, spelling, punctuation, formatting and so on. These are special in a way as they essentially cannot make a story good all by themselves, but they can ever so easily send it to the ‘bad’ territory. Now, think of these aspects in the context of a movie or a video game, consider them to be sounds and visuals. Good grammar, spelling et cetera basically allow you a clear, detailed image of what is going on, with you being able to hear even the faintest whisper without having to strain your ears. However, reading a story riddled with typos and errors is like watching something on a cracked fuzzy screen with nothing but rustling and crackling as a background noise. To summarize, technical aspects of good quality allow you to communicate the story to the reader smoothly.

I’ll not go into details about fixing some basic grammatical errors as I have already discussed such topic in The Writer's Group before. If interested, you can either look them up in the forums or use one of these links to my blogs where the guides have been preserved:
Link
Link

And of course, your best bet is getting a good editor or proofreader to help you catch these errors.

Second, and possibly more important, are story mechanics—mainly atmosphere, pacing, and conflict, but characters and the plot itself can also fall into this category.

Starting with the plot, you should first decide what and why you want to write. In other words, deciding that you want to write about six pastel horses going to retrieve some magical artifact is not enough. Why do you want to write it? Because you know you’ll have fun writing it. That’s an important aspect that should never be missing. However, the other answer is that you want the story to make some point, convey a message, or make the readers think, cry or laugh. In general, it is better if a story has some direction in which it progresses. In case of the MLP episodes, the plot is usually driven towards a moral. And it might just as well be a final joke following a gradual build-up in comedy stories. While you are not obliged to give your story a direction (and sometimes might choose not to), it is generally better to do so even in stories that are generally regarded as mere clop or pointless fluff. Makes them stand out from the rest.

Once you have decided what the direction of your story’s gonna be, you should also work on the driving force that will push your plot in said direction. This driving force is called conflict. However, don’t imagine it just in the sense of a soap opera melodrama. Well-known dramatic conflicts aside, it is also quite easy to picture what might be the conflict of adventure and mystery stories.

However, I have found that some people have a hard time believing that even a slice of life can contain conflict. It can and it should, as well as any other story, for it is the conflict that maintains interest. Now, imagine yourself as a little unicorn filly. You have been reckless and by accident broke your sister’s prized tea service. Should you admit you broke it or are you going to run out to town and secretly try to find a replacement? An ordinary and relatable thing that may happen to anyone, yet it still provides room for interest, excitement, and original solutions. That’s conflict for you. On a side note, a story can contain more than one conflict. If the other conflict is truly apparent, it’s called a side arc, but oftentimes it can be there just to give the story another dimension and make it more realistic.

Now, if you know what and why you want to write, it is time to start putting the words on paper. Your job is quite simple now. All you have to do is communicate your idea clearly and maintain the audience’s attention and interest. The former is mostly a matter of grammar and your wording. The latter is mostly achieved by working with atmosphere and pacing, which are mostly interdependent.

Pacing is probably the easier out of these two to understand—it’s basically the pace at which your story moves forward. The pace of a single scene can easily be modulated by the amount of included detail and by the general length of sentences. More details and longer sentences in general account for slower pace, less details and shorter sentences quicken the pace. A good thing to remember is that gradually quickening the pace helps you build up tension, which is exceptionally useful if you need to write an action-packed scene. Remember to keep the pace moderately fast though as to still provide any details essential for the moment. A breakneck pace is not suited for such moments, despite what many people seem to believe.

The concept of atmosphere might be harder to grasp. Well-done atmosphere feels realistic and allows the readers to get immersed in the story, experiencing all that’s going on along with the characters. It’s a sophisticated manipulation of mind, to put it bluntly... in fact just like the whole art of writing.

Describing how the scene looks using other senses than just sight, focusing on the body language and facial expressions of characters, not repeating words too often, and finding just the right balance between the amount of dialogues and descriptions are just a few pieces of the puzzle that is a good atmosphere. Tension mentioned above is also a part of atmosphere. Including images and links to music videos in your stories is not a good way of creating atmosphere. The links may eventually stop working, cannot carry over to other story formats (e.g. .epub), and they just act as distractions. Furthermore, they make you seem as a poor author that cannot create a proper atmosphere by using nothing more than his or her skill.

Closely tied to atmosphere and descriptions is also the infamous ‘rule’ of “Show, don’t tell” that gets thrown around far more often than it should. First, it is not really a rule, for both showing and telling have a rightful place in a story, but it so happens that people tend to tell a bit too much, while showing too much is almost nonexistent. First, it is necessary to understand what the terms of showing and telling refer to. Telling is merely summarizing what has happened. Showing is living through the events that telling would summarize.

A little morbid example: There is a newspaper article that reads ‘Three Hundred Casualties after The Golden Gate Bridge Collapses’. Typical telling, it merely states what happened and what the outcome is. There is no emotion in it. Now imagine you are living through and describing the last few minutes of one of those three hundred dead people. That’s showing. (A few showing tips are included in the paragraph on atmosphere.) A rather good rule of thumb is that important and impactful story events should be shown while the less important information can be skimmed by telling, and thus you can direct the reader’s focus where you need it to be.

A minor side note on focus: Keep in mind that overly detailed data that are just casually mentioned may draw unwanted attention and seem unnatural. As long as your character is not a robot or a maniac obsessed with time, there is no reason in letting them state that they paced down a corridor for exactly three minutes and forty seconds. A few minutes is enough.

A final piece of advice to remember: Do not get overly emotionally invested in your creations. If there is a part of your story that just doesn’t work, no matter how many hours you spent on it and how epic you find it to be, send it to the chopping block. (Meaning you should just cut it from the story, no need to totally destroy it.) This rule also applies to characters, who are nothing more than tools to tell the story. Just a bit of tough love to emphasize how important this is.

Lastly, I’m sure many of you have heard this more than once, but the best way of learning how to properly handle any kind of aspect of a story is practicing and, mainly, reading lots of varied fiction, ideally of higher quality. Try to learn from the successes and mistakes of others and derive your style from what you have seen them do and what suits you the best.

PS: Please bear in mind this guide is by far not exhaustive. For example I haven’t even touched upon the proper way of opening your story or avoiding exposition.

(This thread has been originally posted in The Writer's Group and Struggling Authors. Reposting here now with slight delay for safekeeping.)