Story

There are plenty of schools of thought for plotting and executing a story, and my way won’t be the same as yours.  But a good story is a good story, and for that, there are a few universal requirements:

• A good balance of action/dialogue and narrative.
• Conflict built-in to keep the story moving forward.
• Dynamic and sympathetic characters to hold the reader’s interest.

Story is not to be confused with voice.  While story is what you put down on the page and in what order, voice is how you say it.  Now let’s go over the above requirements in a little more detail. 

Balancing Action and Narrative – Showing vs. Telling  

Show, don’t tell.  You’ve probably heard it before.  My fellow critters and I even abbreviate it to SDT because we are all guilty of it.  Sometimes you need to pick up and move a story forward quickly by filling in the reader with what’s happened to get them caught up.  To do this, we TELL them, rather than sketching out a scene for every moment they’ve missed.  But other times we do it simply out of laziness or a lack of imagination.  Odds are if you have more than a page where nothing is really HAPPENING right at that moment, you’re telling.  Anything you can tell, you can show, but the choice comes down to whether something is worth showing or not.  You want action and tension in EVERY page of your manuscript or you’re giving the reader an opportunity to get bored and stop.  The ratio of showing to telling you use is determined by the type of story, so know what’s typical of your market, and train yourself to identify telling both in your own and in other people’s writing. 

Building-In Conflict

That tension I was saying has to be on every page?  It won’t exist without conflict.  Conflict is the only reason anyone is reading your story.  No one wants to read about a princess who lived in a castle happily, met her prince charming, and then continued to live happily with said prince.  Yawn.  There is a reason the camera fades out after the Happily Ever After – the Ever After part is usually pretty boring.  Readers want a journey, hopefully one frought with conflict that keeps them guessing and holds them hostage until the final resolution.  Unfortunately, conflict isn’t as simple as our princess not knowing what dress to wear to the ball or arguing with her maid over whether to put her hair up or down.  Real conflict is not contrived or frivolous, it’s high-stakes and imminent.  The best sort of conflict is built-in.  By that I mean it is inherent in the setting or situation and really doesn’t need much to set it off – think barrel of gun powder.  Now all you need is a match.  Example: making your hero and heroine come from different sides of the fence.  Grease would have been a very short movie if Sandy had been like Rizzo, or if Danny had been Mr. Popular Jock.  But the conflict resulting from their two different worlds clashing carried the whole story.  So, create your setting like a cellar full of powder kegs, create a scenario where a lit match waits around every corner, and make sure your characters are at odds – with each other, the setting, or the scenario – right from the beginning.  That’s called building-in conflict.     

Rounding Out Characters

Did you ever go out on a date with someone “good on paper”?  Someone who met all your criteria, but you just didn’t feel a spark?  That is what it’s like for a reader when they encounter a character who fulfills their role in the story just fine, but isn’t interesting or dynamic or has just been done before.