As many of you know, I’m taking a step back from my leadership roles in the club (Praetor to Voice and Professor of Writing) both of which I’ve held for about 3-4 years. My intention as Professor of Writing was to regularly deliver storytelling guidance, which I never really kept up with. But I’ve worked a lot on my storytelling technique over the last 10 years or so, when I was fairly poor at writing. I improved a lot and thought I’d summarise some of the things I learned, in the hope they might help others too. They helped me place better in GJWs, people started enjoying reading my work more, and most importantly, I enjoyed writing more.

There’s a lot of great advice on YouTube

Single-handedly, the biggest thing that helped me improve was listening to people that know what they’re talking about. YouTube is a goldmine for advice from best-selling novelists. Some of the most useful I found for me were Jerry Jenkins, particularly his writing dialogue video (https://www.youtube.com/@NovelistJerryJenkins) Brandon Sanderson, particularly good on writing fight scenes (https://www.youtube.com/@BrandSanderson). Others that have helped me a lot include Diane Callahan (https://www.youtube.com/@QuotidianWriter) and Hello Future Me (https://www.youtube.com/@HelloFutureMe). Listen to enough and the YouTube algorithm will bless you with more, they also tend to be great videos to have in the background.

You don’t have to follow them to the letter to be a good writer, and in fact, you probably shouldn’t, there should always be some amount of you in there. But thinking critically about how the best in the field form their ideas and put them into print helped me to understand the strengths and weaknesses in how I was doing things.

Character Motivation and Goal

Some very DB-specific advice here as in this club, we don’t have the freedom to choose what we write. In GJWs, there’s always a wider plot we have no control over, but have to write in. Yet, character motivation is such a huge part of storytelling. I quite often see people having issues in writing in some conflicts because their character wouldn’t care. And ‘I JUST KILL ENEMIES OF MY CLAN RAWR’ doesn’t tend to be a great motivation for your PoV character, it’s not relatable or grounded. One of the best decisions I made that really catapulted my story was that Zentru’la’s long term goal was to avenge his daughter’s death, for which he blamed Rath Oligard. The thing that worked well here is that it was entirely unachievable in a single story, but tied into everything. Whether we were fighting the collective or not, everything was about building a force that could take them on so he could avenge his daughter. It all went back to her.

If you’re struggling to find reasons for your character to fight, try and set them up with a long term, personal goal which you can work into the DB macro-plot. It helps you ground yourself in the story, and makes your character actions more believable.

Conflict is the Engine of Fiction

This is a phrase I heard a lot when listening to experts. The conflicts between characters is what drives your plot. With most of our stories, the main conflict is the enemy your clan is fighting, but watching a guy smash through redshirt NPCs isn’t really a story. Setting up a strong antagonist that has skills your character isn’t suited to deal with adds stakes and tension.

But even more engaging is conflict between the protagonists. If you’ve built a cast of characters to write with, the conflict between them can be some of the most engaging to read. Will the team pull through or rip itself to pieces? If you’re designing a cast, give them reasons to disagree, different points of view, different preferences for solving problems. Storytelling is not an RPG. You don’t need tank, healer, DPS. You can have a cast that basically have the same skillset if you want. But if they have conflicting worldviews, that’s going to carry your story. Some of my best work came from stories in which my characters disagreed the most.

Anyway, that’s it from me. Writing in this club over the last 10 years has helped me grow as a writer, and I wanted to share the things that have helped me improve.