I'm new to story writing, well I started in the third grade actually, but I'm still a newbie to the formats. Also to this website! My english teacher ( im in the 9th grade) suggested this website to me since she knows i looove to write!^_^ If anyone can help me, I need some suggestions on story formats. Please, I'm always looking for a crtique's eye! I've written tons of stories and poem's but I was never really sure how they were "constructed". THANKYOU!:)

Do you mean genre classifications or how you should present your text?

After all it's a trial and error. Test what best suits you can gets you the most readers. It really depends on that particular story. E.g. if you think it should be newspaper or newsletter format somewhere do so. Have to speak in context to know.

1.] Double-space your paragraphs. You see how I'm putting an extra line between this paragraph and the previous one? Doing this in a story makes it so that your story doesn't seem so cluttered and condensed, and it becomes much easier on the eyes for the reader. On that note, you can use tab if you want (a five-space indent at the beginning of every paragraph), but I'm not even sure if that transfers into the HTML when you upload it, and most people don't bother with that, anyway. It's actually pretty rare to see a tabbed paragraph in a fiction, so don't worry about that.

2.] For all that is good and brilliant, use punctuation, please. It doesn't look like you have much of a problem with that, from what I can see in your post, but I've noticed that a lot of novice writers seem to forget the basics when writing their story. I don't know why. Maybe they're in a rush to get it done, or maybe they never paid much attention in English class, but punctuation is key. It determines how the reader interprets your fiction, so make sure you do your best to punctuate correctly. A few minor mistakes here and there are alright--after all, no one's perfect--but when it comes to the point where it seems as though you have no concept of punctuation whatsoever (such as lack of periods at the end of sentences, or the absence of commas in obvious places), it really begins to affect the quality of the fiction, and makes it less enjoyable. But to be frank, a lot of readers (those who don't write themselves, if I'm assuming correctly) don't seem to notice the difference or just don't care period.

3.] Spelling and grammar. These are very important, and this kind of also goes along with what I said about punctuation. Make sure that you're spelling words correctly (this is what spell-check is for, and if you don't have a word-processor with that capability, there are probably numerous java thingies--whatever you call them--on the internet that can do it for you. Just type in "spell-check" in google and I'm sure you'll get the results you're looking for). Try your best to use proper grammar, too, but you don't have to be perfect. Honestly, the technicalities of grammar are things that few people truly understand or even bother with, so you don't need to worry about getting certain, specific things down (like for instance, conflicts between passive and active voice, which if you ask me, aren't really as big of a deal as Microsoft Word makes them seem). Just make sure you keep your verb tenses in check, your punctuation where it's supposed to be (that includes within quotations), subject-verb agreement--other simple stuff like that, and you should be fine.

4.] Continuity. Plot bunnies are a bitch. That's just the facts of life. Every author has their issues with them at least once or twice, trust me. It might help to make an outline of your stories/chapters before actually writing/typing them, or if you're a write-as-you-go author, try and keep track of important developments or background information about characters so that you don't get things mixed up. You'd be amazed how easy it is to forget something as simple as a character's age or eye-color, and that makes quite an impression on readers. That's speaking from personal experience. You don't want to confuse them.

5.] Keep it interesting. An explanatory chapter that delves into the background of a character or place or whatever every now and then is alright, but try not to make it too long-winded, because it could cause readers to lose interest pretty quickly. A good way to counter that is to give explanations in descriptions and follow those paragraphs with a bit of light dialogue that gives the reader a break from reading blocks of text. It gives their eyes some time to rest so that they can be more receptive to reading another long paragraph should it come up.

6.] On a final note, and this is also kind of going off of what I said above, don't make your paragraphs hideously long. Nobody wants to read a huge block of text. It's headache-inducing and extremely boring. I'd try to make your paragraphs of varying lengths so that they're not so robotic, but so that they flow naturally, and also cater to the reader's attention span, short or long.

I hope this helped a bit, even if it might have been a lot to read. Good luck on your writing!

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