3 Elements for How to Make Your Story Feel Human?

The one question writers need the answer of right now to make their unique tale truly unique by adding inside of it a bit of themselves and their own life, to create a story that’s not static, not unchanged, but is rather forever touching horizons and breaking ceilings.

How to make your story feel human? What makes us human? Before we ask what makes a story human, this is the question we gotta ask. What exactly is it that gives us that edge, that emotional drive, that humanness.?

Let’s try to find out the answer in this storytelling guide.

How to Make Your Story Feel Human?

#1 Change.

What do you mean by a dynamic story? It’s one that isn’t as linear as one might expect a structured story to act? Dynamic? It’s one that’s forever under change, under development, under growth. Under creation itself.

The writer, having written the story, does not complete it, but rather leaves it off in between, on the last page, and the story continues to change and grow with every person who turns the last page, then.

It’s a kind of story that does not leave its readers the same as it had found them. The readers face a change along with the characters in the story. The readers feel like things happening to the characters are happening to them too.

This is the kind of story that changes the kinds of people its readers are.

#2 Feelings.

You can’t write a good story without feelings. That seems pretty obvious, right? But are we giving stories the real feelings and emotional elements that they deserve?

The story should deal with feelings? Even if its genre is not necessarily about human relationships and their intra relationship. Why are we giving such predominance to feelings? Because—they are at the core of human experience, they define everything. We feel everything, we feel angry or we feel sad or happy or elated or beautiful or lovely or lonely. We feel it all and if you’re going to tell me feelings are not that important, I’m sorry but I already begged to differ.

If you need to know more of what I’m actually talking about, to make sure I’m not babbling about some obscure stuff, here is my recommendation to you: Virginia Woolf’s essay titled “Modern Fiction”. What is it about? It’s exactly about modern fiction, and surprisingly her ideas have still not been outdated even after all these decades and immense developments in the field of writing.

What is at stake? What are the feelings of the people? Tell us and we’ll think about caring for your story as much as we do for real life.

#3 Flaws.

Human beings have flaws. That’s a big portion of what actually makes us human. We make mistakes. We own up to those mistakes. I wouldn’t just go ahead to say that your story should have flaws for it to be human, because flaws are the one thing we, as storytellers, hugely seek to avoid; since so many of critical eyes are expected to be set on our work, we almost lose our minds making sure everything fits and is plausible and fact-checked.

But what I would say is that stories need to have this acknowledgment of human flaws; they need to admit that their characters are bound to folly and that their narrations are bound to folly too.

If stories can portray not just the flaws of their characters, but the bigger, wider flaws, in the human interactions, in the ideologies, in history, in imaginations, in civilization itself, and if the stories can do this while still keeping intact their narrative flow and their characterization and plot structure—these stories would make one hell of a ride.

79: A Story of Humanness

My debut novel, 79, is a story about a man. And time.

It’s a story about changing years and a changing body and trying to reconnect with one’s family.

Romaldo Ennith is a rich old man. He’s got a beautiful (empty) house and a family that visits once of twice every year. What kicks off our story is Romaldo noticing a stranger in his house one day, just a couple weeks before his 80th birthday—a stranger that no one else can see.

This stranger, who introduces himself as Time, tells him that Romaldo has just 12 days to live.

Talk about the perfect (awful) birthday surprise.

Romaldo has to fight his past, fight death, fight his own family, and live these last 12 days of his life with everything he has.

Or does he end up losing a race with time?

79 will be out March’26. Read more about it: “कालः सर्वं विरोपयति।” Time Heals Everything.