Making a Story Good

I’ve been working on making my stories better. I’ve been writing the third book in my time travel series that began with Resonance and Dissonance. The thing I’ve found with good stories is that they deal with characters. I’ve been surprised by the amount of pages read on my books this month through Amazon Kindle. Things are picking up.

I’ve been reading and studying a bit about story structure, and how a lot of good stories have the main external conflict, but there are also underlying conflicts the protagonist goes through. Thinking about my own life, I see some of that. I have external stressors, work projects in my day job, interactions with coworkers and supervisors, etc., but I also have internal conflicts, in some ways. I’ve been working to change my responses to stressful situations. I’ve really worked at staying calmer.

In the same way a protagonist in a story must overcome themselves, I am working to be more aware of how my actions affect those around me. When I’m given stressful tasks, or challenged on my approach, rather than let myself get defensive, I take a second to determine what I really want out of it. Arguments, or defensiveness don’t really help. They make it worse.

So, as I write every day, working to make the characters and stories better, I’m also working to better myself. I can’t change what other people do or how they act, but I can change how I react. I can change my approach. Sometimes, that makes all the difference.

In some of the best stories, the protagonist eventually transitions from reacting to events around them to being proactive. without that transition and taking charge of their thoughts and feelings, they would never succeed. I want to make my story the best it can be.

I’ve written almost twenty-five chapters of my next book. I carried on in the outline I started for Resonance and, Dissonance. I plan to have this third book done by January or earlier. Some of the items that were hinted at in the first two books, like the end of the Machina, will come to the forefront in this third book. Wyatt, the protagonist, will face his toughest challenges, yet.

Check out my other books.

My fantasy, A Map, a Mage, and a Sacrifice, was a fun book to write. It is set in a world with limited technology, but where sacrifice is a necessary element to magical power. The greater the pain and suffering, the greater the magical power generated. The few mages in power use voluntary sacrifice of the citizens to generate power they use to protect and defend the empire. But their rule may be coming to a close.

If you’re looking for a science fiction story, try my book The Promise of Dust, which takes place in a cloud city floating in the atmosphere of Venus. Or Progenitor’s Legacy: Deceit, which takes place many years in the future on a tidally locked world that orbits a red dwarf and has been reached by humanity in their search for the alien progenitors who seeded the galaxy with nano machines.

If a young adult science fiction is more to your liking, check out my series This New Earth, that starts with Demons of a Dead World and Secrets of a Dead World.

If you are looking for a young adult fantasy, check out my book The Threads Unbound.