Writing a story whether long story or short story requires you to hone your writing skills. To write a long story, you need to tap into your creativity and wakeup your creative writing skill.

Writing a long story means you have idea of how to write a story. However, my previous post on how to plan a captivating story can guide you on writing a story.

Today we will learn how to successfully achieve a long story. Let’s get right into it.

Choose a Good Story Idea

Come up with story ideas that requires a good length. The idea required for sustaining a long story will not be the same as in a short story.

Plan the Story Well

Spend time to plan the story well. Plan such that the events progresses gradually from lesser events to the big ones. And the big events to progress with lesser ones. While making plans, research on similar genres and see what format is applied in the templates to guide you.

Create Outlines

Create outlines so you don’t wander off your plan. You can apply the basic outline of exposition, rising, action, climax, falling action, and denouement. Working with this outline alone can help you achieve a longer story. After this, look for gaps or spaces where you can add more events/contents. 

Create Multiple Plots

Having multiple plots going on at the same time can help build up your volume. A character could have a lot of life challenges to battle with, …a lady with business set backs, a complicated marital problem and a fraud blackmail court case.

You can have all three as different subplots, and one of them as the main plot. This helps to create tension and suspense with a nudge for the reader to read on.

Create Backstory

Create a retrospect as to the past of a main character, the things that she experienced that lead to the present situation in the main plot. How she made acquaintance with a certain stranger, who turned out to be amazingly charming and irresistible and their relationship went haywire making her entrust him her business secrets….which lead to the present.

Add Dialogue

Use dialogue to add more content, it could be about the main character or the secondary characters having a discussion that throws light into the past events that led to the future. 

Create More Conflicts and Challenges

Include more story arcs. Add more conflicts. Look out for places where things seem to work out for the protagonist quite easily and add a little more twist of events to complicate things. Let success be a bit more delayed for the characters. Create more challenges and difficulties towards accomplishing their goals before it all works out.

You can also change relationships of characters like in the high school drama series Gossip Girl to lengthen your story.

Add More Content to the Story You Have Written

Look for loop holes to add more in-between. Add more events to the story. Check what you have written, are the descriptions too straight to the point? Are you taking out time to set the scenes in a way your readers can picture themselves in it? Are you describing the emotions and reactions of your characters throughout the story? Don’t forget to involve all the senses…do both telling and showing.  

Add more descriptions for recommended word count. Long story requires about 90,000 to 120,000 words to rank as a long story.

Be a little more detailed in creating the pictures for your readers, but not too detailed to bore them.

Have More Main Characters

Create more than one main character and assign each one its goals to accomplish and challenges to overcome. At the end you would have the stories linked together as one.

Create Complexities for the Character

You can have a character in a dilemma, who eventually figures out a most likely suiting option, strives to achieve it and after a wasted time realizes it was a wrong choice, then starts back afresh from the scratch. Make it more difficult for the characters to achieve their goals. Let none of the characters accomplish their goals at first attempts. 

Introduce Unforeseen Actions

Do this when a climax seems to almost be there, introduce a surprise twist of events. But don’t over repeat this so as not to loose your readers.

Write it as Different Short Stories

Write like 3 different short stories, since each short story requires about 50,000 words, then unify the stories and close it really nice.

Don’t Focus on the Length

Don’t Focus on the Length, plan and then write away. Write, write, write and then write some more. One chapter at a time, one scene at a time, one plot at a time. Just keep writing, before you know it, you would have attained the required volume.

Revise

Go through your work later, it could be days, weeks or months…you would see a lot of things you would want edited…added, removed, restructured. You would be amazed at how much improvement and extra words your work can gain through a revision. 

Conclusion

Also know that not all of us are made for long stories. If you’ve tried your possible best with the above methods and even more from other writers and none seems to work out for you, then it’s really okay to stick with your short stories. There’s nothing bad with that. Just focus at being the best you can in your niche.

If you got value from this blog post, kindly share your thoughts in the comment box below.