While knowing your audience, choosing your genre and making your characters relatable are very important, there are some other factors that can either make or break your impact on the audience. Although authors who are new at fiction writing may think that writing such a story would be easy, making the story impactful and grabbing the interest of your readers is not as easy as imagined. The below-mentioned guidelines can be exceptionally helpful, especially if the new author is trying to make a connection with their readers.

Make Your Antagonist Believable

We only hate Othello and Lord Voldemort because they are believable. Shakespeare and J. K. Rowling added credibility to these characters; they made them larger than life and breathed life into them. These characteristics make them real and believable, which makes them scary to read about. Now, not every villain can be as epic as these, but they can be believable. Just like a protagonist, the antagonist has to evolve as well. The villain too has to have emotions, fears, wants and desires that make them who you want them to be. Your story affects your villain just as much as your protagonist. A static character is a dead character, regardless of the fact if they are right or wrong.

Be Descriptive, but Don’t Go Overboard

One of the biggest mistakes that new authors make while writing fiction is that they over-explain situations rather than show the reader. Imagery and descriptions are very important, especially when you want to make an effect on the reader. Transporting the reader into the story and making them live what the characters are going through, this is what the author needs to aim to achieve. The best way to do this is by giving the reader a blow-by-blow of the event rather than just saying that a certain thing happened to the characters. Paint a picture rather than just say it.

Don’t Forget Your Main Plot

While adding subplots is great for your story, it is not good for you or your reader if you get lost in the subplots and forget what the actual plot was. It happens so many times; the author tries to pull a trick out of their hats, they add more layers to the story and keep it building until the actual storyline is buried far too deep. This leads to a disappointed reader, one that just does not even understand what is happening. A complicated plot is great, but making it too complicated can be the thing that will leach the life out of your story.

Give Your Scenes and Characters Time

You might come to a point where you want to just wrap the story up and bring it to an end; you should never cheat your characters or the scenes like this. Inadvertently, you will be cheating your readers out of a great story and yourself of success. Let things play out; the end might be messy, but that is what the reader expects. They might be reading fiction, but they need it to be believable and nothing in life is tied up neatly or rushed.