: Re: How do you know when there's something missing in your story? You always hear about what has to be removed. Usually unnecessary stuff that doens't contribute to the plot. How about the opposite?

@Pierce369

Vote Up Vote Down

There are two approaches. What SF already pointed out is the most easy, the unstructured one. In any case, for many reasons, you should give your story to someone to read and give you quality feedback. I've also had good experience reading it (aloud) to someone and immediately writing down whatever they say or ask. But that requires special people and circumstances.

The structured approach works if you start your work like that. Do you have an inventory of all your locations, characters and storylines? If so, you can check them for completeness. If you maintain these meta-data well, they will provide not just the outline, but a good review of them also will tell you any holes. For this, make a short checklist of what matters to you. Do you need closure for characters (as was mentioned already), do all your characters and locations have to be linked to each other? Do you want a physical appearance description for every character (sometimes you want to leave it up to the imagination), etc.

Basically: To know if something is missing, you first need to know what should be there.

(0)

Login to post a comment!