Writing a good story can be tough—very tough. Coming up with interesting lines and characters is one thing, but giving a story tension and volume is what many writers continue to struggle with. The trick is to write something that is original but also relatable to the reader. After all, as a writer, your job is to turn simple text into a magical world that a reader gets lost in. This is only possible if you yourself learn to get lost in the writing process.
There are several formulas, such as the battle between good and evil or solving a mystery, where the common thread is already established. But this doesn’t necessarily make a story great. It is your style, context, and interpretation of tension and drama that give a story power and depth.
9 Effective Ways to Improve Your Storywriting: For Tension, Character Building, Style, and Depth:
1. Let someone die.
The death of a character provides an opening for a deeper layer of tension, emotion, thrill, or adventure. It amounts to letting something disappear, which is crucial to the course of the story and to the reader. Think of house keys suddenly disappearing, a family member dying, or a friend having an accident.
Adding a serious twist to your story creates suspense and the feeling that something needs to be resolved or talked out. Capitalizing on feelings such as loss, hatred, jealousy, or suspicion also creates familiarity for the reader.
- Release something in your story that will be dear to your readers: a friend or pet of the protagonist who dies, a job the protagonist loses, etc.
- Give an unexpected twist: a character calls because an accident has just happened.
- Have someone die: Not only in thrillers do people die. Tragic events, as crude as they may seem, are ways to keep your story sensational.
- Let someone get into trouble: stupid choices and problems leave you gasping for a possible solution. You can delay this one for a very long time to create suspense.
2. The One Step Further Technique
This technique is great to use for building suspense or curiosity. This is because an element in your story can be intense but also vague, leaving the reader screaming for an explanation.
Examples:
- “A married woman finds two wine glasses on the kitchen counter when she comes home at night.
- ‘The police won’t reveal anything about the whereabouts of the kidnapped child to his father. Is something being withheld?’
- ‘When I talk about my newly bought house, my girlfriend gets remarkably quiet. Jealousy, or does she know something about the house?’
Engage in confrontation in your story, trying in your own way to resolve an unanswered feeling for the reader. This is not just something for thrillers and books where people cheat and there is a case to be solved. The feeling of curiosity is one of the biggest reasons people find a story interesting and want to keep reading.
Allow a reader to bond with a character or situation, where you then challenge it.
3. Combine real events with contrived ones.
Best-selling books are often a mixture of personal events and their fantasy worlds. This combination provides new perspectives that could potentially be interesting for suspense or recognition among readers.
- See in your own life what people you really disliked or which ones were peculiar or nice. This allows you to give fictional characters even more depth.
- Certain funny or scary situations. Because you lived through these events yourself, it is much more believable if you just think them up and then write them down.
- Your own view of things. The closer you stay to your own worldview, the easier it is to find inspiration for writing. Think of things you think are important in life.
4. Creating Depth
No one likes stories that are flat and feel like crucial information is missing. As a writer, you may be used to just working from A to B and giving the underlying context less value than the highlights in storytelling. Yet explanations, detail, and deeper layers provide the body that gives a story quality.
If you really want depth, you will have to ask questions about your own story as a writer. Answering those questions will add depth to anything you write.
You can ask these questions of a character, but also of a place, relationship, argument, or object. Of course, it is up to you to decide how important a subject is and how much depth it may be given. The books of J.R.R. Tolkien and Donna Tartt, among others, are known for their deep character developments and thematic complexity, which have often earned them bestsellers.
Other ways to create depth:
- Depth is created by the reader. By writing everything down immediately, there won’t be much left for the imagination. Sometimes the deliberate omission of a statement is good to let the reader form their own idea. You can clarify these later in your story.
- Write down new events and outcomes of tension in detail; these moments often hold the reader’s attention the most. The trick is not to jump to the discharge too quickly, but to let that depth develop in the tension buildup.
- Depict a character’s or element’s environment as clearly as possible. To give a reader the best possible picture of a character, it is crucial to make the environment gradually clear in detail. This also applies to important places and objects; readers then want to know all about them.
5. Build interesting characters
A story worth telling always has something unusual. Often, this unusual thing lurks in a character; he or she is detached, fearful of the future, quirky, or experiences something amazing or intense.
Consistency in character: that a person changes is a must; someone overcomes fears or gains new insights. Yet it is important that a character remain recognizable throughout the story.
Create a character palette:
- Before you begin your story, always create a small timeline of a character’s personality and what he or she has gone through.
- Character’s arc of change: outline a timeline in which events should have some effect on a character.
- Internal conflicts: what is the character running into? Jealousy, sadness, being shy, or not feeling understood. This makes a character interesting and relatable to the reader.
- Motivations and interests: what does the character desire or seek? This is critical to the direction the story takes.
This “character palette” is not necessarily meant to be a set rule from which you cannot deviate. It helps you better shape your character and make them come across as believable as possible.
6. Building tension? Write toward something.
Tension is not just something used in thrillers and mystery-storytelling. It is about creating excitement and eagerly wanting to know the outcome. Tension also has to do with the feeling that something can go wrong or that clarity must be created.
- Confrontations and conflicts
- A discovery
- Unexpected twists and turns
- Time pressure
- difficult situations
- Increase in uncertainty
A buildup of tension is done by writing down emotions and situations clearly: ‘As she walked up the stairs, she felt her heart pounding in her throat. She knew she was right all along.’
or
‘Just as the crowds in the shopping street increased, the suspect started walking faster and faster.’
7. Importance of style
A writing style is different from a story style, which determines the direction and context of your writing. Each style gives a different meaning to character development, tension, and storytelling.
NOTE: styles always overlap and are not something you have to adhere to as a writer. Using a ‘genre’ helps give your story direction and coherence
- Psychological style (novels, analysis, and drama): your story is very much on a relational and thought level. This means that the thought processes and emotions of characters are the main thread in your story. Often, such stories are full of flashbacks, relationships, drama, loss, and expressions of feeling.
- Action style (fantasy, sci-fi, and crime): In this type of story, actions and reactions dominate. This is often characterized by a clear separation of good and evil. Defeating forces and the relations of strength and power cause action and reaction.
- Enigmatic style (Thriller, Crime, and Mystery): Extensive explanation and solving cases and secrets are the focus of this style. The characters are always at the service of a case or mystery that gets all the attention. The whole story is a suspenseful build-up full of discoveries that come to one or more climaxes.
8. Internal monologue
Giving space to a protagonist’s thoughts is the best way to create plot points and moments of reflection. Besides action (he does this or says that), a monologue is a reaction (I remember this or process that).
Emotional involvement
You can do this through an internal monologue, where instead of telling about a character as a third person, you get inside the character. At certain moments, you can have a person reflect on what happened and how he or she deals with future events.
- ‘I knew immediately that this was the moment where I had to make a choice. Him or me.’
- When I think back to that time in Canada, a strange feeling of dread creeps up on me. ‘
These are the moments in the story where you really get to know a character as a reader. It makes the run-through less flat and gives a human depth that can only be achieved through inner conflicts and emotions.
9. Use examples from other books
There are several “formulas” for a good story. There are many best-sellers that adhere to them, but they often also seem like rip-offs of previous books in that genre. Originality lies in breaking this habit and giving your story unexpected twists.
Therefore, use situations or guidelines from spring stories you already love, many of which also prompted you to write stories of your own.
Final Thoughts
Don’t think of these as tricks, but as a way to make your story resonate more with yourself and your readers. Writing is a craft that takes many hours and dedication. If you keep seeking inspiration and putting yourself out there, the best stories will emerge.
If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.
