I have been critiquing other writers’ stories on Critique Circle for a few months now, and I’ve noticed a pattern, particularly among beginning writers.

Sometimes they fail to tell a story.

That sounds silly, right? How do you sit down to write a story only to fail to tell a story? I think it boils down to not knowing what a story is.

I was guilty of this when I began writing as a teenager. If your education was similar to mine, you were taught proper grammar and how to analyze the stories of others. While these are useful skills, they don’t really touch on the mechanics of story. As a young person reading the likes of Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje, I got the impression that their works were impressive because of the complex sentence structure and density of paragraphs. I completely glossed over story structure because I didn’t even know it was there.

You might learn how to tell a good story by analyzing the fiction of others, but it’s probably not the most efficient approach, because it’s working from the outside in. It’s akin to figuring out the internal workings of a combustion engine by taking a car for a spin around the block.

It’s no wonder us writers struggle with the concept of story.

So what is story, exactly? To answer, let’s first talk about what story is not.

It’s Not Fancy Prose

Big words and complex paragraphs don’t impress most fiction readers. If you think about your favourite book of all time, the first thing that comes to mind is probably the characters and what happened to them, not the words on the page. Occasionally a particularly poetic sentence from a mainstream novel will stick with me, but not often.

Do an experiment — take a favourite novel of yours off the shelf and turn to a random page. Read a paragraph. Note the complexity, or lack thereof, of the prose. You may be surprised to find that most best-selling novels use simple language with short sentence structure. I’ll bet you didn’t really notice when you originally read it, and that’s because the prose didn’t get in the way, it moved over and let the story take center stage.

Too many beginning writers, stuck because they don’t know how to construct a good story, fall back on trying to impress the reader with words. This most often takes the form of adverb and adjective overload, as in:

Dorothy sauntered seductively to the sofa, pausing dramatically to relish the splendiferous tapestry of her surroundings.

So basically, Dorothy walked to the sofa in a fancy room. Big whoop. If nothing particularly exciting ever happens involving Dorothy, the sofa, or the splendiferous tapestry — if this is merely stage direction, in other words — then treat it as such:

Dorothy walked over to the sofa, noting the lushness of her surroundings.

Simple. Clean. And out of the way, so something more interesting can happen.

Remember, big words and puffy sentences will not hide a weak story.

It’s Not Hyperactive Characters

Here’s another cover-up I see for lack of story — characters acting in exaggerated and unrealistic ways.

Bobby threw himself into the bucket seat of his Corvette, jammed the gas pedal to the floor, and blasted at top speed through downtown Toronto, rocketing through red lights like they weren't even there. He needed to get to the ice cream parlour before they closed. He couldn't live another second of his life without a scoop of his precious Mocha Chip.

Unless Bobby lives in some alternate reality, he couldn’t drive in this manner in downtown Toronto without having a major accident and/or getting himself arrested. Yet some writers, desperate to give their readers a thrill, and secretly aware that their storyline is lackluster or even missing in action, put their characters through ridiculous contortions that break the reader’s suspension of disbelief.

You cannot replace the excitement of a good story by making your characters act out. Give them a rest and let them behave more naturalistically.

It’s Not Your Personal Obsession

Hey, you might really be into collecting bugs. You might love spending countless hours identifying species, pinning them into a mahogany display in your basement, and presenting them under just the right lighting when your friends drop by to visit. It’s great that you’ve found something in this world that makes you truly happy.

Unless you have a hook, something that lets others see bugs in the same awe-inspiring light that you do — an absorbing story, in other words — your tale about that bug collector is likely to fall flat.

Most writers, myself included, rely on their personal interests to drive their writing. It can bring your fiction to life by imbuing it with a sense of authenticity it might otherwise lack. This is the epitome of that old adage: write what you know. But some writers believe their enthusiasm replaces story, and it doesn’t.

So What IS Story?

Story is what makes the reader care. It consists of the following elements, which you should have in any fiction your write:

Consistent, Realistic Characters

I think, despite opinions I’ve heard to the contrary, that all fiction is character driven to some extent. We human beings want to see other human beings overcome challenges that we aren’t sure we could beat. It gives us hope. And if you’re dying to counter by telling me Babe the Pig is your favourite protagonist of all time and he wasn’t human, well… yeah, he was. He was given a voice and a human personality to be more relatable. You might have sympathized with him if he’d been portrayed as a regular grunting, rooting pig, but not to the same extent as when you thought of him as human.

Be honest with your characters, even if they are pigs. Strive to make them believable within the context of their world based on what you know about human nature.

This will strengthen your story.

Conflict/Tension

Remember that novel I asked you to read a random paragraph from? Take it down again and read a scene or chapter, whichever is shortest. It doesn’t matter which one. Choose from the middle of the book if you want. Note the main character’s problem or concern in the section you read. I guarantee you they have one.

Successful novels always have either direct conflict — someone getting in a fight, for example — or tension — lovers breaking up — in every single scene, every chapter, and arcing through the entire book. To be effective, your fiction has to have conflict and/or tension weaved all through it. This is a golden rule.

Wait, you might say, I remember reading a novel in which the first chapter simply introduced the characters. There isn’t any conflict or tension in that.

I suggest you read it again. When you’re looking for it, I’m confident you’ll find something dramatic going on while the people are introduced. Incidentally, I’ve read amateur stories where characters are just standing around introducing themselves. It’s painful to read.

Conflict and tension don’t have to be over-the-top, but they are required, always. To add this crucial element to your story, before writing a scene, think about who the main character is, what he wants, and why. That is what the scene is about, and that is ALL the scene is about. Everything else is window dressing.

Failure

A story needs failure, because failure makes rounded individuals. I’ve learned far more through my personal failures than I ever have through my successes. Furthermore, success is kind of boring.

Please don’t write a story, for instance, about a couple who go to the park, witnesses a double rainbow, and go home together hand-in-hand. Yawn.

Professional romance novels can be sappy, in my humble opinion, but even they use failure as a hook. The couple can’t get together in chapter one and stay happy until the finale, because that’s a story flatline.

Like conflict and tension, failure — or success (our next topic) — need to be integrated into every scene, because that’s what ends the scene. Without it, the scene doesn’t really end. You may have read scenes like this that seem to leave you hanging, and not in a good way. This is a common mistake of the beginning writer.

Ultimate Success or Destruction

All successful stories have a memorable ending, and all the endings in all the bestselling novels in the world (okay I’m assuming; I haven’t checked them all) can be placed into one of two broad categories: the protagonist either succeeds or fails. If you don’t believe me, take that novel out again and re-read the last scene. I guarantee you the protagonist is either victorious or emotionally destroyed/deceased by the end.

Your story needs to have an ending, and that ending needs to cap the patterns of conflict/tension and repeated failures that led up to it. If you’ve done your job with the other aspects of story, your reader should feel closure. If you leave this aspect out they will probably feel nothing but contempt for you, the writer, for leading them down a path and then leaving them stranded.

So that’s it — that’s what story is. Even with these aspects in place, you (and I) still need to practice a lot before our stories really shine. But knowing what story is points you in the right direction. Otherwise, your story isn’t really a story at all.