What do you think are the basic ingredients of a story?
The characters telling the story must be believable and compelling. The plot and action must move at a steady pace and not get bogged down in rhetorical flourishes, or irrelevant asides and digressions. Back stories can be effective if they contain clues to the outcome or to the motivation of the main characters, but not if they lead the reader down some blind philosophical path.
The basic ingredient in a story most often lacking is a premise or theme.
I think the most important thing to remember is you will have to make the leadcharacter´s life a living hell. Also I tend to make the leadcharacters flawless. This is something you should never do in my opinion.
Good characters that the reader gets to know. If these characters seem real rather than shallow, their development and problems they face keep the reader interested.
A fast paced plot but one that is realistic. (This is even important in science fiction)
Something that is not anticipated by the reader.
To be a dreamer that is the person do good work on writer a story
My main ingredient is the response of the Muslim religion to western pressure to educate the Muslim women and thus stop these women from making fundamentalists of their children and threatening the very existence of the Muslim religion. The Muslims have no management structure and are acting in a very scattered and individual manner, often creating organizations headed by people with the extremist characteristic such as Osama bin Laden who mistakenly thinks that flying planes into western buildings in the west will terrorize the west into stopping encouraging the education of Muslim women and thus ensure the continuation of power of the Muslim clergy.
I devote a good part of the book to illustrating how religion uses culture locking techniques to ensure that most of their population are fundamentalists created by their mothers and the dreadful problems that are making the culture locking religions fight for survival often by violent means. That is my basic ingredient.
What has worked for all writers and their readers. I'm not trying to re-invent the wheel here.
I don't
authenticity and openness
The same ingredients that make magic carpets. Both are used for transportation to other worlds.
A rational story line, interesting characters and a good ending. I think I have a rational storyline and maybe a few good characters...lol, there are actually about 300 in the book. If the story is a biography/autobiography accuracy, dates and people can be very important as well as adding verbosity or literal coloring. If it's fiction, well, unlike the real world, it has to make sense, something that did not happen with my life.
A good plot together with believable characters that find their identities as the storyline develops. The writing skills to hold the attention of the reader are also necessary.
As much as possible real facts and places.
in case of a true story, I try to do as much research as possble, otherwise I let my imagination play around.
Plot is key. Having the basic story worked out from beginning to end is important for me. Going back and looking for inconsistencies after making an adjustment is not fun.
Characters are very important, I like to have a dynamic between central characters. A common goal but varying personalities, for example.
For my novel "Canyon" I deliberately created a weak character that puts the group in danger just so I could kill him off later. |
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