I read more than 300 stories on substack
And I have something to say about your writing
Normally for a clickbait title like this you’d scroll down to the bottom to check if I’m selling a class. I’m not, I promise. Though, if you can afford it, I’d appreciate it if you bought this author a coffee. No pressure, a free subscription is just as valuable.
I’m not here to “write about writing,” anyway. Any internet parrot could do that, all one has to do is regurgitate stuff they find in a google search and exude confidence. No, I want to talk about storytelling. Perhaps I can convince you there’s a difference.
What elevates good writing to great writing? “Good” writing has most of the following: technical ability, artful prose, interesting characters, and a cohesive plot. The vast majority of people I looked at are quite competent at these or come close to mastery. These, interestingly, seem to be the low hanging fruits. Or perhaps the average stacker just gets a lot of help with these. I want to talk about the thing I see the least.
But before I go over what I’ve noticed from writers here, I would like to give a little background so you know where I’m coming from:
I am the author of DREAD Reviews. Anyone who has read it probably knows I don’t follow many rules - they hardly look like “reviews,” it’s more of list of good reads next to a comedic rant. There is consistency in the chaos, though - more than once a week, I scour the stacks looking for anything that catches my interest. I then post 14 of them alongside my snarky, irrelevant, and irreverent take (half the time I even stay on topic). Someone I mention might have 6 subscribers, or 50,000. You could be a Christian Fundamentalist, a Marxist, a high school student, a castellan born six centuries past your time, or heck, you could have Confederate flags in your profile or a long futuristic list of alien-sounding pronouns. I don’t care or discriminate, I’m just looking for your story. Chances are high if you’re seeing this I have visited your profile page at some point (probably more than once). I’ve released 9 issues of DREAD so far.
99% of you I found a post or a note in your activity history that made me think: “This could be interesting.” Almost none of you are boring. That said, I’m quite stubborn and handy with a scroll wheel, so you might still be bad at generating gripping titles. I have no comment on this at this time - I bookmarked something you wrote regardless after reading a paragraph or two.
In just a few short months I’m estimating I now have over a thousand bookmarks that I’ve not had the opportunity to follow up on. I’ve barely touched the majority of what caught my eye. I’m just one random dude on the internet and there are a lot of you. I have no system other than just diving into my bookmarks and clicking something and giving it a read. This random clicking tends to favor whatever is the most recent, and while I like to stay current, I don’t have any rule against including something months or years old.
Of that 1/3 of bookmarks I actually looked at, I estimate about 1/3 kept my interest long enough for me to get halfway through. If your article was under 2500 words I was more likely to push on. If it was over 5000 words it had to grip me early for me to continue. Handy with a scroll wheel here.
That narrows it down to about 300 stories that I’ve read start to finish. As stated before, DREAD has 9 issues so far, which means 126 of them excited me enough to talk about in a newsletter. Sometimes I wrote a sentence or two. And sometimes my commentary was twice the length of the thing you wrote.
Of those 126 I’d say about 100 were “Good.” Good is good, there’s nothing wrong with good, that’s why it’s called good.
But fewer than two dozen were GREAT.
I looked into why. While these are highly subjective words I use, I did identify one solidly objective trend that landed a story in the category of great.
For lack of a better term I will just call this item that differentiated greatness: storytelling (maybe you have a better word and can share it in the comments).
What do I mean by storytelling?
A problem I find common when seeking content for DREAD is how many writers treat genre like a flavor or a setting. A window dressing. There’s nothing inherently wrong with doing this, but it’s what separates “good” from “great!.” What differentiates “entertaining” from “wow!”
“It’s sci fi romance because people fall love on a space ship.” Wow. Well, it can be good, but it can never be great sci fi in my opinion - it’s just romance with futuristic eye candy.
“Guys fighting, but instead of chemical propellant in their guns its…. lasers!” Good. Never quite great.
“The industrial revolution, but instead of tycoons or carpetbaggers, it’s geomancy or necromancy in a fantasy setting!” Ok, we’re getting closer to great now.
“WWII aerial dogfights and samurai duels, except in space! Oh, and also weird shamanic mysticism, dudes who glow blue and keep advising people when they die, magical powers to move objects from afar based on a power dynamic that symbolizes the duality of man's inner struggle between good and evil!” Ok, now we’re talking. We just described a little bit of Star Wars.
“A western, except there’s robots.” Nope. “Ok, but the robots are the verge of sentience.” Better, but still not enough. “Oh, also, their sentience is the side effect of a program investigating the potential for robots to host human consciousness, granting immortality. But in pursuing this, humanity has accidentally created a new race. Instead of ascendancy the robots are going to shut us out!” Now we’re talking! This is West World. Hey - the first few seasons were great.
If you’re following so far, you might say something like “you’re just describing book club fiction.” Yes, I think you caught me. I believe this phenomenon of using genre as window dressing is what gave birth to annoying and excessive super- and sub-genre terms. Speculative ficiton. Steampunk, cyberpunk, punkpunk. Space Opera. I’m sad that we even had to invent the terms “book club” or “upmarket” fiction to begin with.
So much of the fiction I found read like biographies that never happened. Sure, the window dressing of space or wild west or steampunk can grant some level of escapism and this why I don’t say it’s “bad.” It’s just “good.” But in my opinion, if you’re going to write, why not use your imagination to make your story deep and awesome? Compared to the herculean task of actually writing, drumming up a few ideas to make it bend the mind a bit should be easy in comparison.
It doesn’t require originality to do this.
Here’s some popular examples people flock to because they feel a bigger guarantee to get this speculative effect we’re talking about:
Cyberpunk is just sci-fi, correct? But when a book is labeled as cyberpunk we expect (and normally receive) a commentary on a whole range of deep subjects. Authoritarian corporatocracy, the societal impacts of melding machine and man, conflict with AI, a lack of augmentations making you a third class citizen - just to name a few. Sure, plenty of cyberpunk is going to have “gunfights, but the participants are cyborgs!” but I feel safe saying most people writing cyberpunk have something bigger they want to tell.
Consider Blade Runner and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep - they aren’t just detectives IN SPACE! No, both the book and the movies have the reader question what it means to be a person. “You want to hear about my mother? I’ll tell you about my mother!!!”
Star Trek. Hokey, I know, but it regularly asks deep questions and provides fascinating encounters which demand being on a ship and going to interesting places. It can be corny and one can disagree with the writers’ conclusions, but entertaining food for thought is almost guaranteed in every episode: what makes one society more “advanced” than another? Is it their technology, or something more? What happens when you interfere too much with a primitive society? How should we behave towards beings wiser and more powerful than us? What will they do with us? How do lovers of peace and justice maintain their integrity in wartime? Just to name a few.
Call me elitist but, I feel all writing should be speculative and investigate the impact of something not currently happening but easy to imagine happening. Or, at a bare minimum, provoke deep and philosophical discussion. Your religious genre has got be more than “my character is a respected priest and quotes the good book.” C’mon, man, that’s just sauce, give me a steak to put it on - give me divine questions, test this guy’s faith, redeem him from damnation, give me something awesome and dangerous!
Romance? I want to see boundaries tested. What really is love? How far or low or high can it go? Resolve a love triangle in a way more unique than “in the end, they chose the right one.” Or be dangerous, walk the blurry line between consent and coercion, just how fuzzy can you make it? Throw your reader for a loop somehow, make people argue about it!
And if you’re doing military I want something more epic than just cool visuals or a litany of horrors. We all know war is hell, go deeper than that, go inside the brains of those fighting. Show me the mind’s breaking point - why did this do them in but not that? Show me what values a soldier brings with them that allow them to prevail against hardship where others quit or break down. Show me how participants extract meaning from the madness (or succumb to insanity). Demonstrate the brutal arithmetic of victory, or convince me that heart and soul can make the difference. Or show me the genius of a commander, have them make surprising and brilliant decisions that would make Clauswitz and Sun Tzu blush with pride. Convince me you really understand not just battle, but war!
This rant could go on but you get the idea.
As indicated earlier, this is not a comment on originality. I believe that all stories have already been told. For every storyteller currently alive, 15 storytellers have lived full lifetimes and died at old ages before you drew your first breath. Just take a theme one of our ancestors have already laid out - from the Odyssey and the Iliad to Leviathan Wakes (Expanse). Take the questions your predecessors have already posed and adapt them to your own work. This is what real originality is - taking a time old question, choosing a cast of characters to subject it to, then mix the words and sequence of events differently. You stand at a different perspective, you have more history behind you and a closer peak into the future, but ultimately your story has already been told a thousand times. So don’t worry about looking to the past for ideas to put in your work. Seek to be deep, introspective, and meaningful. This is what makes one’s story truly interesting, even if it’s got weaker technical qualities or limited prose. Amidst the flood of writers writing about writing, don’t forget the most important part - storytelling!
Solid pep-talk! Go deep or go home, is my takeaway.
only accept opinions from people who have a stake in your writing. ignore this blather.
_skin in the game_. that's the acid test.
none of this 'me critic, hear me roar.'