The Three Important Things
W hat does it take to have a good novel? As much as we would like to know the answer to that, it isn’t always an easy thing to answer. There’s lot of subjectivity. A lot of people talk about the rules of writing, but there’s always an exception that people point to and wonder why that particular author was able to get by with it. So what I would like to address today are three things that must be handled well in every story, without exception, in order for the story to be good. These three aren’t checkbox items that you have or you don’t but rather things that as you handle them better your story improves. The best stories handle them very well and the worst stories handle them poorly. A Likeable Protagonist We’ve all run into stories with a protagonist we had trouble connecting with. Maybe we didn’t out and out dislike the guy, but we didn’t care what happened to him. It’s like the story of the woman who had fifteen kids. One of them fell in a tar pit and the children came running to ...