My Writing Guide

100 RANDOM STORYTELLING THOUGHTS AND TIPS, STARTING NOW by terribleminds

1. If you're bored, we're bored.

2. Characters at every level of the story want something — love, revenge, cake, whatever — and when we meet them we'd better soon know what that thing is. Especially if it's cake. We can all get behind a character who will kill for cake. I'd kill for cake. Wouldn't you?

3. Are the characters feeling safe? Good. Now make them feel unsafe.

4. Do something unexpected in the story. Yes, right now. If not now, then soon.

5. If the audience trusts you, dear storyteller, you done fucked up.

6. The best tension isn't the kind that comes from cheap tricks or lurid manipulation — though hey, those things are totally fine, shut up — but from the feeling the reader gets from believing that the entire story is on unstable ground. This is a kind of existential tension, the fear that the audience doesn't quite know the rules, hasn't sussed out the laws of this place. That is the tension of the reader who wisely distrusts you.

7. When you do something unexpected in the story, it has to work in the character and the context and the confines of the story you're already telling. It can't be out of fucking nowhere — a cat doesn't become a dog, but a dog can become a wolf, if you know what I mean. And if you don't know what I mean then *gesticulates wildly* there did my flailing hand movement convince you?

8. What I mean is, storytelling is magic. It's not the magic of sorcery — you're not a Druid summoning swamp-elves from the murk. You're a stage magician. Practiced in the art of illusion.

9. One of your greatest skills is misdirection. You seed the truth of the magic trick early on in the story. Then you convince the reader that the truth isn't the truth at all — until the time comes to reveal. And okay yes fine sometimes you are a Druid summoning swamp-elves out of the murk. Sometimes writing is sacrifice, not magic trick. Sometimes it's all of those things.

10. The story presents opportunities to pivot — to change the expectations. To change the overall shape of the thing even as you're drawing it. These opportunities come at, roughly, 33%, 50%, 66%, and sometimes 75% through the story. Mark interesting story shifts at these times to battle the dread beast known as the Mushy Middle. Which is basically a blob of pink, sluggy mucus that will gladly bog your story down like gum on a hot fucking sidewalk.

11. We don't give too much of a shit about Big Things in stories. THE IMPERIAL DRAGONSWANG HAS COMMANDED A DECREE THAT A SPACE RANGER MUST TRACK DOWN THE SOUZAPHONE OF UNHOLY SHITFIRE and yawn boo bored who gives a hot cup of soup about all that. We care about characters and their problems.

12. Love, hate, jealousy, life, death, betrayal, lies, revenge: these are the widgets, levers and flywheels that keep the story running, and that keep us coming back. Lubricate the gears with blood and tears.

13. You can do whatever you want in a story but you have to convince us why it works. You have to earn it. Every bit of a story has to dance for its dinner.

14. A problem with the end of the story is a problem with the start of your story.

15. Characters must earn their victories.

16. Characters must also earn their losses. These things do not happen in a vacuum.

17. If you want to know why your characters keep getting in the way of your plot, that's because it's the characters' job to get in the way of your plot. The solution to this is discard the plot and let the characters be the characters. We don't read books for plots. We think we do. But we're also dumb. Characters are everything in a story. "It had a great plot" is the sign of a story that's been over-engineered — like pancake batter you mixed too hard and now the resultant pancakes are as beaten down and lifeless as a pair of ratty underwear on a well-traveled highway.