A better story

How to write a good storyline?

Writing is easy, everyone knows how to write. Or at least that's what I usually hear when I tell people about my work. But in reality, all great writers are formed through hard work and passion for writing.  

To write you need to follow some universal writing techniques and tips to improve your storywriting. Today we will talk about the first five steps: thinking, dumping, 5Ws, targetting and simplifying.

1. Organize your thoughts

For the writers out there who start directly with a pen and paper, this will lead you nowhere. The first step to improve your writing skills is to organize your thoughts in a logical way. When we think of an event or a story to narrate we often get this shower of ideas coming all at once, and we find it hard to start writing and transforming all these ideas into words. It's normal, take a breath and start organizing your ideas and thoughts by choosing your end goal, how you want this story to affect your audience? what message you want to deliver? Once you lock these answers, start thinking of the best way to fulfill your goal.
Don't get frustrated if you got the "writer's block", it's totally normal, because you are facing a shower of ideas that will trap you if you cannot organise them.
Once you organise your ideas, you can move to the next step and take your pen and paper.

2. Writing Dump 

This step is based on dumping all your ideas on a paper, start writing your ideas and thoughts, don't stop to correct your typos, mistakes, etc. just type till your brain runs out of ideas.

Bad ideas does not exist in writing, when I write everything down, I usually like leaving what I wrote for some time like one or two days, then I come back to check everything I wrote. 

This method will help you have all your ideas written in front of you, so you can choose which ideas are priority to achieve your final goal and what to change and what to remove. 

3. The 5Ws   

For the third step start thinking of the 5Ws questions, for some of you who does not know the 5Ws, it's who? where? when? why? what?  

These questions will help you outline your story, once you have your messy paper that you created in step two you can start by answering these questions and outlining your story. 

You have the global 5Ws and the local 5Ws, the global ones are about the whole story:

• Who is your protagonist?
• where is the story happening?
• When is the story happening?
• what is happening in the story? (global event)
• Why your writing this story? (global goal/end goal)

You can read more about the 5Ws method here.

4. Target your audience 

Being aware of your audience is a very important step that a lot of writers forget. Well, if you are writing for yourself or to dump your own message don't pay a lot of attention for this. Therefore, if you are writing a blog, article or a story to publish, it is always good to know your audience, which leads to choosing the right words, a good plot and get your audience to know that you are paying attention to them.

5. Simplify your words        

“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.” as Jack Kerouac said once. 

Leaving your audience with complex block of texts and words will make them feel insecure or weary. Replace your adverbs with verbs, use simple words, get rid of unnecessary adjectives and words etc.

Readers should be empowered by your words not the opposite, that's why the simple words choice is important while writing, unstead of losing the readers with a block of texts and unnecessary words you can catch them with some punchy sentences.  

Now you can write better

Now that you know the first five steps, you can start writing better, unleash your writing skills and your creativity, start training yourself by following these exercises:

• Write everyday 
• Proofreading 
• Read out loud
• Transform your ideas to bullet points 
• Read more