A Guide To Making Successful Stories

To make a successful story, you need a lot of major and minor things.

Major Things
1. Characters
2. Setting(s)
3. Plot
4. Description. And lots of it.

Characters.
Characters are one of the four most important things in a story; because the story revolves around them! It's impossible to have a story without any characters. They can be people, animals, even bacteria! (though, I'm not sure how many people would like to read about that.)

To have a decent character, you need to plan out everything about them.

• What they look like (even if your story has no pictures, you still need to be able to describe them.)
• Their personality; Will they be nice, mean, careless or whatever! Their actions will impact the story. Mixed personalities works out sometimes, but if you are just beginning to write, then I'd say just to pick one.
• Male or female. ...Yeah.
• History/background. What happened in their childhood/ earlier part of their life? If you're writing a story where it starts at the character's birth, this is unneeded, as you'll be telling about his/her life as the story goes on.
  

Setting(s).
Where are your characters? In a city, farmland, desert, Mars? You need to be able to clearly tell the reader where these people are, in some way.

Of course, during the story, your characters may go to a different setting, but that's pretty good! Most people (and you might as well) will get tired of being in the same old place page after page after page. But don't move the setting too fast.

Plot.
After you get your people and places, all you need is the thing that makes the story worth reading. In the plot, it basically goes from normal-begin conflict-main conflict-resolving conflict-normal once again/still conflict, just a lot less if you're going to leave a cliffhanger and make a sequel.

Description
Description is very key to writing a story. Everywhere in your story, you need to describe it, like I said with the other parts earlier. People, places, things. Use a lot of adjectives and adverbs.

Example:
Instead of "The man walked to me."
Write something like "The scary man swiftly ran towards me."

Adjectives are key.

Minor Things

• Spelling
• Punctuation
• Correct nouns and verbs
• Complete sentences

All very simple things for basic writing that you should know.

I hope I helped you!

~Eli

Nice Guide Eli, gonna sticky this

Good vocabulary, prose, and suspense-play is very important too.
Good guide Eli :spin:

Thank you all very much.
SOTM: Vocabulary is key! I'll add that either now or tomorrow.