Ask HN: How do I learn how to tell a good story?
I am sorry in advance if this is going to be too rambly or not at all what you are looking for, but the subject of story-telling has been very close to me lately as over the last year I&#x27;ve started publishing fiction.<p>This depends largely on your end goal. But if your goal is to get people (as in a large group of people) to want to hear (or read, in my case) more, I believe the safest bet is to write&#x2F;storytell &quot;to market&quot;.<p>My goal was to write stories that make people want to read them enough to pay for them. There are very well defined genres in our stories, and common tropes that resonate with large groups of people. Some genres of stories are much more strict than others in terms of their story arcs, but all genres have overarching structures and tropes that tend to draw readers in. I will use the romance genre as an example.<p>Romance can be a very strict genre. First, the arc of a romance story (note: not a _love_ story, a _romance_ story that specifically fits in the _romance_ genre) tends to be very formulaic. Most romance readers expect to see a certain type of meeting of the main characters, a point of high tension between the characters, a point where the characters are somehow forced into each other&#x27;s proximity, a &quot;maybe there&#x27;s something here&quot; point, etc etc until the most important part: the Happily Ever After (or at least the Happy For Now). If you publish a story in the romance genre and there is no HEA&#x2F;HFN, your reviews will tank and people will likely not move on to read more of your stories. Now, you might think having to follow a certain structure sounds _boring_; you might think you will end up writing the same thing over and over. But there are millions of romance readers out there reading millions of romance books, and a huge variety of plots, characters, themes, etc within them. Yes, there is a structure, but creatively you will never run out of new stories to tell despite that structure - the only limit is our own imagination.<p>* So Step One to learn how to tell a good _romance_ story that will get _romance_ readers to read and pay for your story, a good starting step is to learn about these popular romance formulas. There are craft books that can help, and plenty of accessible top seller charts where we can read and learn from successful examples.<p>Next, there are the different sub-genres of romance: science fiction romance, contemporary romance, paranormal romance, and so many more. They, too, follow certain patterns unique to their genres within the overall romance formula. For example, science fiction romance can get quite dark and this is usually acceptable for&#x2F;expected by sci fi romance readers. Small town romance might lean to something lighter and more &quot;comforting&quot;, etc.<p>* So after picking your main genre, Step Two is to read and learn more about what sells in the sub-genre of the story you&#x27;re telling.<p>And then you have tropes. Certain tropes are more common to certain genres, but they can be mixed and matched within genres. Following the romance example, you could have a sci fi romance in which the female main character is abducted by aliens and forced to live on an alien world with the evil alien overlord whom she tries to kill, but they fall in love instead. The alien abduction trope is very popular, as is the enemies-to-lovers trope.<p>You might have a road trip romance story where the heroine is forced to take a trip back to her old hometown and meets her old crush there. Their feelings for each other develop over the course of her stay. The childhood-crush-to-lovers trope is also very popular. And within each trope, readers of that trope have certain _expectations_.<p>* Step Three is to read successful works within the trope and figure out what these expectations are.<p>As we can see, all of these steps have one thing in common: you have to read. To know how to write a good story that people want to read, we need to read good stories that people want to read; think about what makes them good; analyze them.<p>And then we need to write&#x2F;tell. We need to write _a lot_ of bad stories before the good ones start coming out. There&#x27;s no way around it: our stories are going to suck, but there&#x27;s no way to get to the good ones until we get all of the bad ones out. The more stories we write&#x2F;tell, the better our stories are going to get.<p>I would also argue that _publishing_ or otherwise presenting the stories to an audience is a prerequisite as well. If we just write things that never sees the light of day, we can&#x27;t measure its performance. If we are writing&#x2F;telling into a vacuum, we might at some point just start repeating the same mistakes no matter how much we practice. Only with measurable feedback and seeing if people are actually interested can we actually tell what&#x27;s working.