Seven Effective Steps To Writing Better Stories

Writing better stories is the dream of every writer. Writing in itself isn’t an easy task, and writing a good story is even more difficult. See some tips below that have specially been written by Writing Elites to help you write better stories.

1. Pick A Pen And Write

Yes. The first step to writing better stories is to pick up a pen and write. This is actually your first draft. Make sure you write this in the shortest time possible. Write whatever comes to mind and explore your imaginations with a pen and paper. Don’t worry about the outline or any other thing. You should worry about putting all your imagination on paper. Write as much as you can imagine. Writing your first draft is actually a process of discovery where you keep discovering new ideas as you write. All you should care about is writing what comes to your mind. As you begin to write, you would always have something to write next, so just keep writing.

2. Develop Your Characters

After you have finished writing your draft, the next step is to develop your characters. As you write, you will for sure already have people in your story. Now is the time to develop them. Know your protagonist and make them behave like one. Know your hero, antagonist, and villain. Assign them tasks that would make them fulfill their role, and ensure they do so properly.

3. Create Powerful Dialogues

To create the best dialogues, you would need to do a lot of rewriting. Rewritten dialogues usually come out better than the dialogues used in your first draft. This is probably one good reason you wrote a draft in the first place. Another powerful tool in creating the best dialogues is understanding your characters. Yes, you created them but you need to understand them. All your characters should have different behavioral qualities that describe them. Knowing these sets of behavior would let you know what such a person would say. It is important to note that two characters of yours cannot have the same behavior. When you write dialogue, reread what you wrote to ensure it really sounds like the character speaking. If it does not, then you would need to rewrite the piece.

4. Add Suspense To Your Work

One good way to add suspense to your piece of writing is by restricting the amount of information you are passing to the reader and allowing them to discover this info themselves. If you give your readers more info than necessary, then they will not continue reading your piece since they already know or can predict the outcome. You could also put the fate of your protagonist in doubt. You could place your protagonist in a mysterious situation while making someone else in your story wonder if the protagonist is going to come out successful. By doing this, you make your readers wonder for themselves whether he would succeed or not thereby creating suspense. Using questions like “Will he survive? Is he going to make it?” are ways in which you can achieve this.

5. Speaker Tags

Most people might tell you not use anything other than ‘he said’, ‘she said’ and ‘he asked’ because tags like ‘he shouted suddenly’, ‘she asked fearfully’ et cetera are distracting to your readers and sometimes unnecessary. However, if you are cool with these speaker tags, you can splash them around your work.

6. Show. Don’t Tell

This is one of the rules of writing that you must follow. Creative writing involves you designing a mental picture in the mind of your readers with your stories, and this you must do. Most people do not really understand what this means. In creative writing, ‘show, don’t tell’ simply means you should paint a picture in the mind of your readers and not telling your readers what is happening. Instead of saying ‘she was sad’, you could say ‘the smile on her face turned upside down’. With this sentence, your readers would imagine the smile turning upside down and thus see her sad face.

7. Kill Somebody

Killing a good character is one way to make your readers feel emotional. But do not kill a character you would need in the future. If by some chance all your characters are needed and you find it difficult to kill somebody, then you should create and put one of your good characters in a grievous situation. It could be your protagonist or hero. Make the situation very bad so your readers think this character will die. Then just at the last moment, create some miraculous solution that saves your character from the mishap. This is one way to make your readers feel the same emotion without actually killing someone.

All these are tips to help you write a wonderful story. However, if you need a professional touch, then writing elites is at your service. Our team of professional writers would bring to life your dream book.