Writing Tips and Reviews

Story Structure

Point A to B to C to D. Not hard. But what do new writers do? Point A to G to R to Z, if that made no sense to you, then it won't to anyone else. It's quite simple and most children learn this in school, every story has a beginning, middle and end. What goes in between is up to the writer.

Let's say it's a perfectly nice day out, then it rains, then it's sunny again. There was no indication it would rain beforehand, and there's no mention of it raining after it stopped. Characters in this situation should be questioning the weird weather or know about it from forecasts. Then an explanation for the weather should come later in the story.

Now let's see an example, character A is having a nice walk, then suddenly, everyone is killing each other, an entire page of bloodbath. The next page, the character is still walking. What's the problem? Well, there's no reason to why others are killing each other and there's no aftermath. Tales of Berseria does this, and does it good. There's a reasoning to why the villagers turned into daemons: the Scarlet Night. There's an explanation of what the Scarlet Night is even before it happens. There are warnings before it happens and when it does happen, it's not a surprise that it happened. Afterwards, the game revolves around what happened and Velvet makes her decisions with the event in mind. There are consequences to events.

Character arcs are also this way. Something pops up and a character is effected. They shouldn't ignore it or they try to and fail. The story becomes revolved around them for a time until they've learned to grow from their experience. This can take an entire chapter or be spread throughout story chapters.

The story itself should make sense, it should be properly set up accomplish what it needs to. If it can't do that, then that's the fault of the writer. If it's too short expand on it later or remake it, if it's too long then cut out the fluffy stuff. Moderate what you write and figure out what works best for you. But always write your story so that it tells a cohesive plot. Not a random garbled up mess that makes no sense. Even stories that seem to be random and take the character to places without a warning make sense. There's a reasoning behind it and the character thinks about it afterwards.