How Do Authors Make Their Stories Come Alive?

Let’s explore three primary ways to make fiction come alive and feel real.

Photo by Lê Tân on Unsplash

I have done a lot of reading over the years. Books are one of my greatest loves.

It doesn’t matter what form they take. Paperback, hardcover, Kindle, audiobook, or other — I love books and stories about fantastic worlds and unique characters.

To some degree, this is escapism. When I sit down to read sci-fi or fantasy, I am leaving the world I know to enter into one of some other author’s imagination. It can be a really engaging, very exciting trip, too.

There are various ways in which authors make their stories come alive. But it’s not some weird mystery that cannot be analyzed and examined. Today, we’re going to explore three of the means to this end -

Some authors are better at one of these means than the others. A combination of all three makes a story even more powerful. And there are other methods I am not going to explore in-depth here that get to the same end.

The power of character

There are iconic literary characters throughout the history of fiction. No matter the time period, some characters stand out and can be made to feel as real as any person you actually…