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I have tried to write a couple of stories, but all of them sounded like a two-year-old wrote them (no offence to two-year-olds).

My grammar and spelling are pretty good, but the big problem is that my plots sound super dumb.

Please help in any way you can.

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  • Well, most of all start gaining experience in one way or another. Can I ask why do you want to write a story on a matter you are not experienced? Dec 27, 2016 at 14:00
  • How can your plots sound stupid? I bet their great. The tactic to make them sound less stupid is to eliminate any plot holes. Dec 27, 2016 at 15:44

2 Answers 2

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If you don't have an idea for a story, you can retell an existing one. There are a few ways to do this. One is to take a song that tells a story (a lot of folk songs and ballads are small stories) and rewrite it as a short story. Obviously this will require you to flesh the story out with additional detail and atmosphere, all of which is good practice.

You can also retell a folktale or myth. You can do this in various ways:

  • a straight retelling
  • retelling an adult tale for children
  • retelling a children's tale for adults
  • changing the setting or time period
  • changing the ending from comic to tragic or tragic to comic

I wrote a number of stories based on the Child Ballads (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_Ballads) that ended up getting published. The best of them, a work I am still proud of, was a retelling in the modern day that changed the ending from comic to tragic.

In the end, there are no new stories. We are all just retelling the old tales to suit new tastes. (Nice, because it means we will never run out of stuff to write.) The art and the artifice are all in the telling. So there is no shame in looking to old tellings for inspiration for new tellings. After all, it worked for Shakespeare.

Obviously, don't do anything that infringes anyone's copyrights. And remember, the art is in the telling. You are borrowing old bones, but you are giving them new flesh, and the new flesh should be all yours.

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Reading is a huge writing-improvement technique. Read a lot. Pay attention to how your favorite writers handle plot, character, dialog, everything. Try things out that you've seen. Copy stuff. Make it your own. And keep reading.

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