What makes a great story? Lessons from judging the Amazon Kindle Storyteller Award 2023

Holy allsorts, I’ve been judging this prestigious prize!

It’s an interesting assignment to read a bunch of books and not have to fix them. So I’m writing this post in celebration, to consider exactly what a good storyteller does.

Actually, you already know what a good storyteller does. They gobble your hours and insist you stay for one more scene, even if you’re past your bedtime or about to miss your Tube stop.

How are they doing that?

It’s all about details. These details.  

1 Keeping the pace

A story runs on change. There’s the change between beginning and end. And there are changes all the way through. That engine of change is how you keep a reader’s curiosity.

Sometimes these changes are small. Perhaps a whiff of tension at the end of a scene. Sometimes they’re massive wrenches that catapult the story into a new gear.

Readers know when the pace is right. Readers also know when it falters. Sometimes the writer rushes a key moment the reader would like to dwell on. More often, they take too long over something. The reader feels the text has somehow got stuck and lost their engagement. Common examples are visual description or conversations between characters – quite often they’re passages the writer likes, but aren’t nearly so meaningful to the reader.

Why aren’t they meaningful to the reader? It’s because of the pace that’s been established from the start. This pace of change – new twists of microtension, new big leaps.

The story establishes its own narrative rhythm and the reader expects you to keep it up.

Does this mean you need fast developments all the time? Not at all. Be slow and painstaking if that suits you, but establish it from the beginning. The problem is if you change this pace abruptly – by having aimless passages, for instance. Then the reader will feel you’ve lost control of the narrative purpose.

A good storyteller knows how they’re setting the reader’s expectations of change.  

2 Understanding what promises they make about tone, style and psychological connection

We’ve seen that the beginning sets a pace for the reader.

It also makes other promises – about the types of characters, types of dilemmas, the tone of the writing, the story’s curiosities. A good storyteller understands what promises they make with these early scenes.

I’ve seen many manuscripts that begin in one register and then change, in a way that feels inconsistent. So they’ll focus on a character’s psychological and emotional turmoil, then abandon those kinds of observations in later scenes. The reader who enjoyed that level of connection will feel frustrated. What happened to the book they were enjoying?

A good storyteller knows what promises they make with tone, style and psychological connection.

3 Knowing what details their particular reader will enjoy

A good storyteller knows the kinds of details and twists their readers appreciate.

This brings us to questions of genre.

Genres are all about emphasis. Crime has one kind of emphasis; cosy murder has another.

What about literary writing? That’s about emphasis too – literary writers will hit notes that resonate with the human experience, with questions as much as answers.

A good storyteller knows what their readers want.  

4 Knowing how they are directing the reader’s attention

A lot of storytelling is about making the reader notice things. Sometimes, this is in sneaky ways, so the reader doesn’t realise we’re planting seeds.

In this respect, storytelling is a magic trick. We show the reader a thing, they think they know why, but actually they don’t – until we bring it back to surprising and delighting effect.

5 Always playing fair with the reader

We hide things, we misdirect. But we always play fair. And we never overplay our authorly control.

The reader knows we can do anything we like. So we must do our best to make them forget this.

We must play fair.  

A good storyteller never contrives a plot event for the sake of narrative convenience. Coincidence is an obvious example – coincidences to start a story are great, coincidences later on can seem forced, especially if they provide a significant moment in the plot.

While many storytellers know to avoid coincidence, there are many smaller ways to commit this sin of unfair play. And they’re just as disruptive to the reader’s enjoyment.

Recently I was critiquing a manuscript where characters concealed important things from the reader in order to create suspense. A character noticed something that disturbed her, and then said, a few chapters later, ‘I hadn’t had time to think about it until now’.

It was unnatural for her to do this, for several reasons.

First, the author had established a close intimate connection between character and reader. If the character thought or felt a thing, they told the reader. So if they didn’t, the omission was obvious.

Second, it wasn’t believable. Consider any moment in your life when you had a shock or disturbing moment. What did you do? Did you say to yourself ‘I won’t have time to think about this now, I’ll think about it later?’ Of course you didn’t. It boiled over in your mind, whether you had time for it or not.

What happened in the writer’s head was this: it wasn’t convenient for the character to share these thoughts for story reasons. She tried to fudge it by saying ‘I didn’t have time to think about it until now’ but that doesn’t excuse her. It doesn’t make the reader believe it – and belief is everything in a story.

A good storyteller never does anything that seems unnatural and contrived, and particularly not if it’s transparently done for the sake of plot mechanics. A good storyteller always plays fair.

6 Knowing how to give back story and world information without being obvious

A storyteller needs to give a lot of information. About the world, the characters, what went on before the reader was let in. The clunky way is to make the characters puppets for the author’s explanations. The characters have conversations that are clearly just about the setup, and not plausibly about their dilemmas and problems in that world.

A good storyteller will slip this information in, in a way that isn’t obvious.

7 Creating characters who are distinct from each other

We’ve talked about belief in story events. Another important point is belief in the characters as people. Each is their own person and not a stereotype.

But some writers create their own stereotypes because they have a limited set of characters they can ‘do’. Nasty characters are nasty in the same kind of way. Nice characters are nice in the same kind of way.

This doesn’t ring true for the reader. They notice these similarities and it breaks the spell.

8 Knowing what storyworld elements must be established from the beginning

Here’s another vital function of the beginning. It sets up the rules of the world.

I’ve critiqued novels that seemed to be set in our ‘normal’ reality, with ‘normal’ rules, then, several chapters in, they introduce a paranormal or fantasy element.

This is very jarring. The reader has calibrated their understanding of what can happen, and especially how to think about the mysteries and questions of the story. But that’s all upended if they find the paranormal seems to operate in the world, or magic exists, where previously there was no hint. Obviously it’s fine to do this if the discovery is part of the characters’ journey, though it should still be foreshadowed in some way. But you definitely can’t spring it on the reader a few chapters in, as though you forgot to mention it.

If magic exists, if the paranormal exists, the reader should experience this from the start.

9 Being careful with facts and editing details

We’ve established that credibility is essential to good storytelling.

This principle continues to the smallest detail. A wrong detail can throw all your plot events into doubt. It’s always worth doing research. If you’re writing anything that’s not in your direct personal experience, check the hell out of it. Actually, check it even if you have done it because it’s surprising what we mis-assume. No, you can’t summit Mount Everest in February, and you don’t harvest carrots then either, at least in the northern hemisphere.

The internet is there for you. Look it up.

Someone in your readership will know the detail you didn’t check, and if you get it wrong, it spoils their trust in you.

If you’re not a detail person, a good editor can save your bacon. They are often general knowledge goldmines, and they know the kind of information you might blithely type without checking.  

A good storyteller checks everything so that silly errors don’t kick the reader out of the illusion.  

10 Convinces us the plot matters

A good storyteller will convince us that everything matters. A plot is about mess and trouble, so there must be reasons why the characters don’t just shrug and move on.

Often the author feels the situation matters, but hasn’t made the reader feel it too. Sometimes they need to go deeper into the characters’ histories and psychology. Perhaps they are their own worst enemy. Sometimes the writer needs to add external pressures – a time limit, or other people who might be affected.  

A great story makes us feel we’re seeing something that is important to the people who are embroiled in it, and that it causes them real difficulty, and they cannot avoid it. Make the reader feel all that.   

The bottom line: never break the spell

All readers know you made the story up. The job of the storyteller is to be so enthralling and persuasive that the reader entirely forgets this.

A story is a spell, and a good storyteller never breaks the spell.

There’s a lot more about writing in my Nail Your Novel books – find them here. If you’re curious about my own work, find novels here and my travel memoir here. And if you’re curious about what’s going on at my own writing desk, here’s my latest newsletter. You can subscribe to future updates here.