How To Write A Great Story – Plan And Organize Your Ideas

You have a few story ideas in your head and want to know how to write a great story.

Maybe you want to write romance stories, crime, detective, or science fiction.

But if you are new to creative writing and fiction, you should try to avoid a few typical pitfalls.

Let’s look at how you can get started.

How to write a great story

If you are an aspiring writer and plan to publish short stories or become a published author, you need to create a story that will hold a reader’s interest. 

Yes, you need good writing skills.

But two of the most common traps for new authors when they start fiction writing, are to narrate too much and to overuse the passive voice.

These two mistakes make it impossible to adopt the golden rule of fiction writing, which is show, don’t tell.

In other words, you must let your characters’ thoughts and actions show the reader what is happening.

Don’t fall into the trap of writing long passages of narration or using your selection of writing elements to tell the reader.

A reader doesn’t want explanations. They want to empathize, sympathize, and be drawn into the story by your characters.

It doesn’t matter what type of story you write. But if you want to write a great story, you need to start with good planning and building your story structure.

With preparation, you are less likely to suffer bouts of writer’s block, so the words will keep flowing.

Here are six easy-to-follow tips on how you can write a story to help your writing career.

1. Start gathering your story ideas

It doesn’t matter if you want to write a short story or a full-length novel. Your first task is to look for great ideas that you can turn into a powerful story.

Any form of creative writing and great storytelling starts with one excellent idea.

You can look for ideas or story starters by searching for writing prompts online. Or you can use one of the many websites that have automated story generators.

Typically, you should write your story idea into one or two sentences, as in the examples below.

Lorna is a young scullery maid from London who falls in love with her best friend. The two are separated when her friend is ordered by his father to go away to sea. Lorna spends years pining for her loss. Until, at forty and widowed, she travels to India.

Marie was happily married, she thought, until the day her husband got clumsy with an email address, and she received his message meant for his mistress. She doesn’t confront him about it but instead carefully plans her revenge.

You don’t necessarily need to use names. You can draft your rough notes by using nameless subjects.

The main character falls …, the other character finds … the evil character starts receiving …, after falling in love, she discovers…, a family member has a secret, … or … only to find out he was married.

No matter what genre or kinds of stories you want to write: sci-fi, crime, horror, or fantasy. You need to spend time finding the best possibilities.

Make a list of all your book or short story ideas. Now select the best, and you are almost ready to write.

Another decision you must make is what writing program you will use to write your book.

A good program will bring you all the tools you need in one place. A word processor isn’t always the best tool for writing a book.

Scrivener is the most popular writing software for fiction authors. But there are other free and premium writing programs that you might want to try.

2. Select and plan your plot

In his 2004 book, The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories, Christopher Booker explains that most stories follow one of only seven plot lines.

It is worth thinking about which one will suit your story the best.

Overcoming the Monster
The protagonist sets out to defeat an antagonistic force (often evil), which threatens the protagonist and/or the protagonist’s homeland.

Rags to Riches
The poor protagonist acquires power, wealth, and/or a mate, loses it all, and gains it back, growing as a person as a result.

The Quest
The protagonist and companions set out to acquire an important object or to get to a location. They face temptations and other obstacles along the way.

Voyage and Return
The protagonist goes to a strange land and, after overcoming the threats it poses to them, they return with experience.

Comedy
A light and humorous character with a happy or cheerful ending; a dramatic work in which the central motif is the triumph over adverse circumstances, resulting in a successful or happy conclusion.

Booker makes sure to stress that comedy is more than humor. It refers to a pattern where the conflict becomes more and more confusing but is at last made plain in a single clarifying event. The majority of romance films fall into this category.

Tragedy
The protagonist’s character flaw or great mistake is their undoing. Their unfortunate end evokes pity for their folly and the fall of a fundamentally good character.

Rebirth
An event forces the main character to change their ways and often become a better person.

Make sure you know which type of plot you plan to use before you start writing. It will help you stay focused on your storyline.

3. Draft your story outline

If you have taken a writing class, your instructor probably told you that the best stories begin with a plan or an outline.

You start with a story idea. But you need to fashion it into a logical progression with a beginning, middle, and end.

Choose your best idea from your story prompts. Then take it step by step to develop your idea. You can use bullet points, a list of notable events, or a series of short sentences. 

You can add character names, places, and perhaps descriptions as well.

Think about how your story will evolve and how you can create rising action, or tension,  that will lead to a climax. Most importantly, make sure you know how it will end.

You might read that some writers prefer to write without a plan and say that they let their characters drive the story.

It might work for some writers. But I’ve learned by trying this method that it is very easy to get lost. Or, more precisely, to lose the plot completely.

My experience was that I spent so much more time re-writing and repairing plot problems. A solid plan would have easily avoided all these issues. A great way to prepare a plan is to use the snowflake outline method.

Of all the writing tips I could give a new writer, it would be to plan well to write well.

Another way to extend and refine your outline for a novel is to think about writing a short story. It is an ideal way to include more details, write dialogue, and learn to get into your main character’s head.

Now you are almost ready to start writing your book.

4. Choose your point of view

If you don’t know what point of view (POV) is, you need to find out before you write a single word.

POV is a writer’s perspective or angle to let readers hear and see what happens. It indicates who is telling the story.

You can read about point of view in detail in this article. It lists all POVs that you can use in a story.

If you plan to write fiction, it almost always uses the third-person POV. In other words, he said, she said, they went, he looked, she wondered.

You will also almost always use the past tense, which is logically called the storytelling tense.

Deciding on your point of view will clarify who is telling your story and make writing much easier.

5. Work on the consistency of your writing voice

Writing voice can be used to describe an author’s writing style. But it also applies to the voice of characters.

Think of writing voice like how you talk. You don’t speak like everyone else, do you?

News anchors seem to sound the same on television because they talk the same.

Creating your unique writing voice is not difficult. But maintaining it throughout a long story can be a battle.

Look at the words you use in your narrative in particular. Then search for changes in your tone or formality.

Is your register changing from formal to informal without any good reason?  The key to managing your writing voice is to use a constant register.

Are you using full words, then changing to contractions, and then back again?

The same applies to your characters. Do your characters’ voices stay consistent in your dialogue?

It doesn’t matter if you are a short story writer or a fiction novelist. Good storytelling always uses a unique and consistent voice.

6. The passive is toast

As I noted at the start of this article, using the passive voice is where many new writers go wrong.

On occasions when I have reviewed or edited a story, the first thing I do is check for the overuse of the passive.

If I see it a few times on the first page or chapter, I send the manuscript back to the author with a note. “Feel free to edit out all the passive, then send it back to me.”

If I ever judge a writing contest, I would use the same formula. If I struck the passive early and often, I would stop reading and move on to the next entry.

The problem with using passive voice is that it is all about the author telling the story. It doesn’t allow for character development to show the reader what is happening.

It doesn’t matter if you are writing a high school essay or a full-length novel. The passive leaves too many questions unanswered and events and actions undescribed.

You should use the active voice as much as possible to help you in showing your character instead of telling your readers.

Look at this simple example.

Tom was trapped.

Who put him there? Why did they do it? Where is he trapped? How did he get in there? How big is the trap?

You can answer all of these questions when you use the active voice.

Early in the morning, the villains who had taken him from his home the night before lowered Tom into a cavity beneath the barn floor.

Darkness filled his tiny prison as they covered the entrance above his head with wooden beams. He heard the rumbling thunder of a storm approaching and the villains laughing at his fate.

I allow one exception to the rule because it can only be used in the passive form.

Tom was born in 1961.

Otherwise, always write in the active voice to develop your character’s life.

Summary

When I first started writing, I made all the mistakes described in this article—and many times over.

Learning how to write and write well takes time and practice. However, it can be a rapid learning curve if you always make your reader the most important person when writing your story.

Think about how readers feel when they read your writing.

The quote by Charles Dickens is true, and it is why it is so often quoted when talking about great fiction writing.

“Make them laugh, make them cry, make them wait.”

You will become a terrific writer when you can do these three things to create suspense.

Related reading: Keep Everything You Write And Never Delete Your Drafts