Wattpad 101: Your guide to the world of Wattpad

How to Write an Interesting Story

It might seem like a silly thing to talk about, but some authors likely struggle to make their story interesting. Mixing a pathological need to describe things in detail, introduce all the characters, and creating a story that people care about, many people end up with a story that is flat out boring to read. Naturally, a boring story is a failed story.

There is no such thing as a "key" to success. My idea of interesting isn't necessarily the next guys' idea of interesting. However, if you're struggling to keep your story interesting or you find people abandoning your story before it "gets interesting", it might be because you're missing something. In general, stories should be interesting throughout. And you might make excuses that you're trying to introduce new characters, an environment, or foreshadow, but in the end it depends on your capacity to write to keep things interesting.

If you don't find the scene interesting, how can you expect your readers to find the scene interesting? And that is the rub. You need to keep a book interesting, regardless of the scene. It really shouldn't have "boring" parts. Once again, interest is relative, and someone might find a fantasy or romance boring compared to someone else just because of personal tastes. Still, at the end of the day, a good book is a book someone wants to read.

Now, there are a billion ways to "make a book interesting", especially depending on your target audience. If your target are teenage boys, they'll probably love girls declaring their love for them, moments of being overpowered and dominating, and arses getting their comeuppance. If you're writing a romance, sweet beautiful scenes where the protagonist hold each other on the beach and whisper sweet nothings all into the night might be the ticket. However, here are a few examples of things that will probably help your story be more interesting, regardless of the genre.

Make Characters Pop With Personality

This might seem contradictory, especially after I've complained about the FIS character. After all, the FIS character occurs when you're desperate to put extreme emotion to every little action they do. Obviously, I'm not talking about that.

What I'm talking about has a better example, and that is the difference between a theater actor and a movie actor. As you know, a movie can set the mood many ways. If someone is crying, they can close up on the tear. They can let you listen to a whimper, or play background music that is sad and somber. Theater can't really do that. In a theater, you have to always project your voice, even at a distance, and even if you can squeeze out a tear, most of your audience will not be able to see that.

Many theater actors fail to cross over to movies and vice versa because the way you act is just that much different. When writing books, you sometimes need that same level of clarity. For someone who's always telling you to be subtle in your writing, I know this sounds like a contradiction, so I'm hoping I can explain it properly here.

Let's use another example. Star Trek, Lord of the Rings, Babylon 5, all of these science fiction and fantasy stories have other species other than humans. These species are almost always a culture that exists from humanity, or a personality of humans, cranked up to an extreme. You have Klingons who are warriors that take after Vikings. You have money-centric races like the dwarves, and religious races too. Every species has its own "quirk".

There is a reason for this, by the way. It comes from how our brains work. We label and group things. If Klingons had as much diversity as humans did within their group, not only would it be difficult to build a narrative around that, it'd be difficult for us to identify with them at all!

Anyone who's been in enough fights on the internet know that basically everything is polarized. You're either a democrat who believes everything a democrat believes, or a republican who believes everything the republicans believe. Pro-life or pro-choice. Evolution or Creationism. Athiesm, or Indoctrination in a religion. The world simply doesn't work in these extremes, yet we, humans, are constantly labeling each other and ourselves in these extremes, even when the truth for 95% of people fall somewhere in the middle.