Introduction

This course is intended to be an overview of the big picture things to consider when writing a story. Individual techniques, such as sentence-level mechanics, will be discussed in more detail in other courses.

Characters

Protagonist

Your protagonist, or main character, is the most important character in the story. Introduce and describe them early so we know who we’re reading about. Their motivations should be clear, well-established, and ideally relatable. Most importantly, make sure they have relevant flaws. Nobody wants to read about Mr Perfect’s power fantasy. Your protagonist is the one driving the story. It isn’t happening to them, it’s shaped by their choices.

Antagonist

What’s a good hero without a good villain? Your antagonist needs to provide a believable threat to your main character, or there is no tension. Remember that they are a person too, and possibly the protagonist of their own story. What do they want? What brings them into conflict with the protagonist?

Supporting Cast

Very few effective fantasy stories are told with only one good guy. With a supporting cast, your character has people to talk to, and the contrast of perspectives can be a much more effective way to show your readers who the characters really are than just internal dialogue. Consider characters whose skills complement the main characters’ and whose differing perspectives can provide additional conflict and tension in the story. Make sure they don’t all get along all the time, and difficult choices involving the hero’s best friends are the ones that bring out their strengths and weaknesses. Even the most minor of characters have something they want. In the DB, not every character in your story needs to have a character sheet, so don’t feel like you can’t have a supporting cast just because you only have one character slot

Setting

Physical Environment

Your readers understanding where the action is taking place is vital to them being able to visualise the story. Describing the physical environment around the characters should be done early on, but be sure to layer it in with action and dialogue; multiple paragraphs of pure description can easily get dull. You don’t need to describe every single thing in the scene, just enough for the reader to picture the important bits and for their imagination to fill in the rest. When characters move from one environment to the next, it’s critical to describe the new setting.

Political Climate

Equally important to your physical environment is the political climate surrounding your story, given many of our stories take place during some kind of war or conflict. Make sure the reader understands who they’re fighting and why, and what the stakes are for the character. Even if it’s already been described in official plot updates, covering it in your story gives you the chance to show what it means to your characters personally.

Plot

The Three-Act Structure

The three-act structure is one of the oldest structures in storytelling and can make a great foundation for your plot. The first act is mostly about establishing your characters, setting, and primary source of conflict. The inciting incident occurs here, in which the story is properly set into motion. The second act often involves the character going through a series of obstacles or fights, in which they develop critical skills for the third act, in which the climax of the story happens, the final fight in which they use all the skills they learned in the previous acts. Not every story needs to follow a three-act structure, but it can be a great starting point when planning your story.

Conflict - The Engine of Fiction

Conflict is what keeps your reader riveted. If everyone gets along the whole time, the story is boring. There are two types of conflict: Internal conflict is conflict that appears within the character’s own head, such as self-doubt, fear, or a moral dilemma, while external conflict involves an external source, such as with another character, organisation, or idea. It’s generally a good idea to explore multiple different sources of conflict in your story: in Star Wars, Luke Skywalker faces the internal conflicts of his fear of Vader and resisting the dark side, and the external conflicts of fighting Vader, the Empire, and all of his allies at various points in the saga.

A Common DB Pitfall: Although in the DB, we’re usually given a prompt when we write and that’s usually a mission, e.g. ‘Capture that ship’, don’t think you’re held to just writing about that. Don’t feel afraid to layer your personal stories on top. The real story is what the character goes through on the journey. Just make sure the prompt does happen within the story.

Structure

Title

I always like to put a title on my DB stories. While the competition I’m writing for often already has one, adding a title just adds a personal touch. It’s the very first thing the reader sees when they open the document, so I want it to be interesting. It can immediately set the tone, foreshadow a twist, or represent the theme of the story.

Chapters or No Chapters?

In the DB, most of our stories are short episodes written for competitions. For anything below 1000 words, you probably don’t need chapters. For longer stories that span multiple scenes, it can be helpful to break things up into smaller chunks. While chapter headings can be useful to foreshadow something or change the tone, going from one chapter to the next also gives the reader a sign that this is a good time to pause. They can also be great if you like to plan your stories in detail.

Planner v Pantser

Not everyone likes to plan in the same level of detail. Some writers (planners) will want every detail of the plot planned before they start. Others write ‘by the seat of their pants’ and let the characters drive the story as they write. There are plenty of successful novelists on either side of the spectrum, the only right approach is the one that works for you.

Prologues and Epilogues

Prologues and epilogues are not just the first and last chapters. They are things that happen prior to the start of the story or after it ends. Prologues can be great for backstory. If an important event sets up the story but you don’t want to get bogged down in pages of boring exposition to explain it to the reader, you can show it to them through a prologue. They can also be a good introduction to the protagonist’s plans. Epilogues are fairly simple, and they happen after the conflict has been resolved. While often lacking any real drama and serving more of an update on what the characters are doing afterwards, epilogues do have the potential to turn a whole story on its head, if we learn new critical information that shines new light on our characters’ choices.

Point of View

Third Person Limited (TPL)

Third-person limited is the default for most stories. Although the character is not directly telling the story, we still see things from their eyes and are blinded to things they cannot see. Most novels are written in third-person limited and it’s the easiest to get into as a beginner writer. We still keep our narrator’s voice, but we still get the drama and tension from not knowing everything.

Third Person Omniscient (TPO)

Third-person omniscient differs slightly from third-person limited in the information available to the narrator. While we will spend most of our time in the character’s head, we can jump out of that for a more birds-eye view of the scene where we know things our character doesn’t. We can also jump to a different character entirely as and when we choose. There’s a huge amount of flexibility, but some readers can find it jarring when the perspective jumps around too much.

First Person (FP)

In a first-person narrative, the story is being directly told to us by the character. This means we are constantly in their head, reading a story in their voice. First-person stories are great for developing a personal tone where there is a direct relationship between the character and the reader, but also make some bits of narration feel awkward and clunky. Impressive feats can come across as the character bragging, and descriptions of the character can be tricky to write in a way that seems natural.

Perspective

If writing in TPL or FP POVs, your story is being told from the perspective of a character in the story. When your protagonist meets someone, their reaction tells us a lot about both characters. What do they notice first? Are they awed or unimpressed? Very intelligent or manipulative characters often work better when they aren't the POV and the reader is not privy to the details in their head.

Show, Don't Tell

What Does It Mean?

Showing rather than telling is the golden rule of storytelling. It’s also very difficult to understand. In essence, it means giving the readers enough to deduce things for themselves. Rather than just telling them the information, you’re showing them details that enable them to deduce it. It’s about letting your readers take a more active role in the story.

Replace the Abstract with the Concrete

I originally thought ‘show, don’t tell’, just meant I was supposed to be vague. It’s quite the opposite. Replace abstract concepts with concrete details. Rather than telling the reader it was autumn, have the orange leaves crunch under the character’s foot. Don’t just say they were angry, or they looked angry, or they have an angry voice, but tell us the specific details that allow us to know they were angry. It can also be thought of as giving evidence. Ok, it’s cold. Prove it to me. What things are there that show me it’s cold?

Show Skills in Action

If I tell you my character is a super genius, you have no reason to believe that. I’m just telling you. If you want the reader to really believe it, you have to show them doing something clever. We’re never told Sherlock Holmes is clever. We’re shown him being clever over and over again.

Writing Combat

Blow-by-blows are Boring

You might have this really cool combo in your head that your character does, but describing it in excruciating detail adds nothing to your story. It can be fun in visual media, but never translates well to the written word, so play to the strengths of your medium. As a writer, you can directly show emotion and thoughts. You can connect character motivation to action and show progression through the scene. Think of your fight scene as having its own narrative flow, beginning, middle and end. A fight scene is more than just a series of descriptions of martial arts moves.

Keep It Fast-Paced

Too much description, whether of action or thoughts, slows down the fight scene too much. During action sequences, avoid unnecessary words as much as possible. Common advice is to keep the sentences short and avoid long, winding complex sentences in fight scenes (although even the latter can be made exciting). Any important details of the surrounding environment should already be made clear to the reader before the fight, allowing you to focus on the action.

Conclusions

The advice in this course is designed to help members of the DB write engaging stories during their time in the club. But the most important thing about writing is that you enjoy the process of doing it. When you write your stories in the club, feel free to take all of this advice, or none of it, but above all else, keep writing.