“I try to leave out the parts that readers skip.” - Elmore Leonard

Unless you’re writing for personal reasons focus on the reader. Dull writing will not be read.

If you want to make sleeping pills or neural inhibitors go work for a pharmaceutical company. If you want to write then engage your reader.

A great story stands on three legs: character development, plot, and setting. You should tailor the strength of these elements to the length of the story. Longer works need more development then shorter works. Each of these three elements should be equally strong otherwise your story will wobble on uneven legs.

The setting of a story consists of the time, place, circumstances the characters encounter, and small details of their environment. If you under develop your setting your story will appear generic and be very dull to read.

When initially developing the setting start by focusing on these four areas:

• The opening of your story should reveal the when and where the story takes place. ‘When’ would include the date or approximate date of the story.  ‘Where’ includes which city the story is set in. The plot should be affected and partially driven by the setting. A story set in during the winter in London should be different than one set in Jerusalem during the summer, even if the plot is similar in both works.
• Characters should be engaged in simultaneous things. This can include things like work, child care, falling in love, grocery shopping, or dance classes. This helps to complete the setting by providing the character with a believable and well round world to interact with. The activities the characters engage in, how well they perform, and how they react should reveal facets about the characters personalities to the readers.
• Change something about your characters setting so that is it fundamentally different from the world your readers live in. You can do this by either having your character live a different life than your reader or by changing something in your reader’s world such as melted polar icecaps, a nuclear holocaust, the collapse of world governments, or ban everyone from reading books.
• Suggest details of the setting rather than trying to explain details. For example, try saying it is winter by saying “he had to carefully navigate the icy snow covered roads.”  Suggesting is more powerful than explaining because it allows your reader to paint the setting in their minds eye based on their experiences. This creates a much more vivid setting for the reader than any author can create by trying to describe all of the details.

Would you like to know how well you have developed your setting? Submit your story to Review Fuse and let our writing community critique your work.

Jacob

What makes you keep reading a story? I keep reading a story if I am waiting for a conflict to be resolved, a mystery to be solved, or to see the fairytale ending. Without a clear well defined plot you cannot hook your readers and keep them reading. I have recently reviewed several works that did not have clear plots. These stories had a lot of adventure and conflict but at the end of the story I couldn’t identify what the plot was. Some of these works had 3 or 4 mini plots but not an overarching goal linking them together.

The plot is all the events in a story related to the achievements of the protagonist, primarily consisting of the conflicts the main character faces in opposition to the antagonist. The plot should have a clearly defined beginning, middle, and end. The beginning should give readers a chance to learn about the characters, the setting, and the problems/conflict that needs to resolve. The middle should contain the majority of the action and reveal why the problem cannot be easily solved. The end is where the protagonist finally resolves the problems or conflict.

You can start developing a great plot by developing a believable character with a problem that has to be solved by the character’s bravery and cleverness. Truly engaging works often have the main character try and fail several times before solving the problem or resolving the conflict.

Would you like to know how well you have developed your plot? Submit your story to Review Fuse and let our writing community critique your plot.

Jacob