Stories Everywhere

Stories in books, stories in FRP's, stories in games... Our life is full of stories and we do like exploring them. This is a known fact. But, have you ever wanted to create a story by yourself? If so, you've come to right place.

Make it Believable

In general, if you want your stories to be liked by others, you have to make them believe the stories are real. If you look at real examples, A Song by Ice and Fire is one of the famous examples of this fact. We can see the author of the series, George R.R. Martin, especially weaves a believable story. He took examples from the real world, adjusted them and created a fresh believable one. But, how the heck he did this? Do use of historical fact works? If you ask this by simple means, I would say no. There are lots of details to be considered. Not in a professional way, but we will talk about them.

Key thing is, using historical facts alone is not enough. If you want your story to be believable, there are 2 main categories which you need to consider. Those are;

• Creating/using a believable universe with lots of cause and effect illusion.
• Designing realistic, believable characters.

Difference of Real, Realistic and Believable

Before starting out, we need to clarify the difference between real, realistic and believable. As you can see, I used "realistic" and "believable" at above, but not "real". The reason behind this is people doesn't like ordinary things, which is most of our real life. We want to find different but similar stories when we read them. So, we have to make our story real enough to make it believable, but also different enough to make it likeable. Our goal is neither realism or romanticism, instead, it is an illusion between them. We shouldn't bring them a story about a peasant working all the day, but also we shouldn't bring gods fighting each other. There is a middle point, which is what we are going to use.

Preparing a Universe

As I stated above, we need to create or use a universe. But not all universes fit in those terms. Some universes are too fantastic to write a story, some are too realistic. If you have selected your universe, you can skip this part, but if you didn't, we have to create a universe. Before creating the universe we want, we need to prepare it. First of all, what kind of story do you have in mind? We can simply start with those questions:

• What will be the era of your story?
• Is your universe something like ours or different? eg: The Elder Scrolls planes, Middle Earth Arda
• Is there 1 dimension or more?
• Will your story be space science-fiction, or low-fantasy medieval/steampunk etc.?
• What are the main powers of the universe (eg: light and dark)? You can simply go dualism here, but I suggest something new.
• What are the gods of the universe, are there any? If so, are the gods bound to the universe (demi-gods like Thor) or not (Islam/Christianity/Judaism gods)?
• Is magic is possible in the universe? If so, what is main power behind the magic?
• Where will your story progress? More than 1 plane/planet or on a small island. You can select everything. (NOTE: Selecting huge would increase the work you have to do.)
• How many intelligent species do you want to use? (Nationalities don't count.) Using too much makes it less believable. Usually, 1-3 is enough.

Those are the main questions for planning your universe. You can increase the size of the questions, it depends on you. After answering those, you'll pretty have a sketch of the universe. Don't make haste to think, if you want to write a good story, you need to think a lot. After we prepare the universe, we can start to build it. But that's for another time.

Thanks for reading.