An important part of being a successful storyteller/author is having a cohesive story. You need to be able to put it together in an orderly fashion, so being organized in your writing is essential.
Sit down and chart your story out before you start writing it. Create a timeline, keep notes, chart the story before you start writing it. This chart will change as the plot changes, but you must always organize first. Stories change, characters change, plots change as the story progresses and evolves. It's supposed to do that. A good story is like a living thing, it grows, it matures, it changes...it's like a child. But like every child it needs a certain amount of discipline and routine.
If you don't put the work in to organize your story, and keep track of your progress, your story will lose direction and focus. It will wander around the house like toddler mumbling to itself with no babysitter.
It takes you weeks, months, sometimes even years, to write a good story. But it only takes us hours to read it. I can get through a full paperback novel, 400+ pages, in 4 or 5 hours, at most. I'm not unique. So you may have written something months ago, and you have forgotten some of the details of it, but I read that and hour ago, and I remember every detail. Keep that in mind.
You need to keep good notes and facts about your story, keep track of what you've said. If you contradict yourself. We notice. We notice the slightest changes in facts, if you say your character has a certain ability, but they don't use their ability when they could, or when they need to. We notice. Or something happens early on in the book, but the character doesn't remember, or learn from it. We notice. We think, why is this character doing this dumbass shit when something similar happened to them earlier? Why aren't they smart enough to learn from their mistakes? We get annoyed by that, because it doesn't happen like that in real life. You put your hand on the stove and get burned, next time you're near the stove, you make sure it's not hot before touching it. Even toddlers remember that crap, unless you're character is just an idiot, and we don't like characters that are idiots. No one wants to read a stupid person.
Re-read and edit your work constantly. Make sure there are no discrepancies between old work and new work. (I'll be writing a chapter on this in more detail.)
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Advice from Readers
General FictionI'm a huge fan on Wattpad and other writer platforms, and I am a super-fast reader and I go through a lot of stories so I have a few pointers that I really feel some of you should know about. These are things that really, really, irritate me (and...
