The Daily Storyteller

The ending is one of the most important features of your story, but many stories fail to provide a decent (or even logical) ending. Here are some tips to avoiding that fate.

A short episode with a focus on looking at your story from a higher, more strategic perspective.

Everyone knows that a great story needs a great villain. In this episode you will learn how to make your antagonist as human and realistic as possible.

Ahh heroes, the main protagonists of our stories. Here are some useful techniques you can use right now to improve your hero.

A short summary of my best techniques for writing a page-turner, a novel that your readers refuse to put down.

The best stories move with a deliberate pace. Not every story has to move fast, but every part of the story must build to the crescendo of your ending. The most lasting part of your story is the impression it leaves in the audience well after they’ve read the last page or left the cinema. You can achieve this most powerful of effects through the use of subtext—it is always better to leave the juiciest details unsaid and leave your audience thinking.

Just as in real life, there is nothing more irritating than a character who acts like a wimp, giving up at the slightest difficulty, and doing nothing about the challenges that face them. Audiences relate to characters who are proactive. Make characters who act to create the plot, not the other way around. Great characters make your reader look up, not down. Leave your audience feeling more inspired than when they first pressed “play” on your story.

Dialogue is the best way to illustrate conflict. Friction between characters is vital to any story, and one of the best ways to show it is through dialogue rich with conflicting motivations. Dialogue is not a reporting device, it is a manifestation of that character’s state, and it must therefore rely on subtext. Use dialogue to encourage your audience to discern feelings and facts, not merely to explain facts or plot details.

The most common mistake writers make when describing a character or a place is to exhaustively list every detail about them in as literal a way as possible. Contrary to intuition, this actually fails to convey the most important details because it constrains the reader’s imagination. The best way to describe is to make your descriptions as brief and intuitive as possible. Give your audience a tidbit, and let them decide for themselves what the characters look like. That will help them to take ownership of the story and feel invested in its outcome. Unleash the raw cosmic power of your audience’s imagination.

Too much circulation makes the perceived value go down. The less of a good character you show in the story, the more valuable they are. Only give characters and scenes as much space in the story as necessary and no more. This is a common stumbling block for sequels—the storyteller or the commercial interests behind them mistakes the audience’s love for a character by giving too much away and diluting their once strong impact. Avoid this fate by resisting the urge to open Pandora’s box—it’ll only spoil your character’s air of mystery. Instead, you must work hard to build tension and potential energy all the way through your story, delivering the knock-out punch when the time comes.