How to Write Better Stories

Do you want to know how to write better stories? One way to achieve this is to explore many levels of complexity that may exist within your narrative. By diving into different levels you can breathe life into your story. Through this process you can advance your world one little component at a time. It is important to note that much of the narrative research you will do may never be entered directly into the storyline, but your thorough knowledge will inadvertently seep into your storytelling.

Stories feel real when the worlds inside them behave like living, breathing ecosystems. Societies are built from laws, hierarchies, incentives, contradictions, and consequences. When you introduce even one functional system into your world you give your characters something to push against, navigate through, or be shaped by. Systems help add multiple different elements like conflict, stakes, social tension, and narrative direction.

One such component in Blueprints of Destruction is the structure of Life Rights, a framework defining freedom, law, and survival itself.

How to Write Better Stories with Complex Systems

One of the best ways to elevate your writing is to elaborate your worldbuilding. Real world examples of societies and cultures are intricate by their very nature. The best way to create believability is to mimic reality. One of the most effective ways to do this is to create sophisticated systems in your own world in order to more easily mirror the ones you can observe.

The Concept of Life Rights

The concept of Life Rights in Qualx is a way that Frank and Lucy installed one such system in their story, full of nuance and multifaceted components, to create plausible story design elements. In exploring and developing how laws and society influence storytelling, PhranqenLu was able to lay the foundations of their world's environment.

From a writers perspective, Life Rights are more than just worldbuilding. They are levers to influence motivation, danger, social mobility, and even affect moral dilemmas. Through Life Rights, Frank and Lucy weren't just inventing laws, but rather they were defining the invisible forces that shape the psychology and daily lives of those inside of Qualx.

Good systems don't restrict stories, they generate them by offering unique confines that the character must negotiate.

Life rights are a good example of one way to write better stories because it is such a complicated social order. Within life rights there are varying classes of protection. Those with life rights are able to see the world from a different viewpoint than those without them. Social strata is strictly defined through law; both the written form and the unspoken undercurrent.

Establishing exactly what Life Rights are and how they function is a very important step in understanding both Qualx as a whole, as well as the individuals living within it. Through Life Rights, the groundwork of believability is laid for both the broader setting and the characters on an individual level.

How to Write Better Stories with Functional Systems

Life rights offer various risks and protections for those that possess them. There are nuances to the way it shapes how each character moves through their world. As a system, Life Rights help to explain levels of protection, ways to barter, and where a character falls in the social hierarchy of Qualx.

Well developed social systems help solidify how characters interact with each other so that you, as the author, can more readily establish how your characters are going to act and react in different scenarios. More evolved systems aide in adding nuance to character interactions so that they go beyond simple transactions. It adds an ebb and flow of power dynamics and social acceptability.

Before diving deeper into life rights, it helps to see the early, rough-draft thinking behind the system. The following Storystorm notes show the initial skeleton of potential rights, duties, methods of gaining citizenship, and early conceptual questions.

The following excerpt is a set of notes taken down by Frank and Lucy in Storystorm, (with obviously much more legible notes typed out):

Life Rights demonstrate how even a single system can send ripples across an entire world. They determine who is protected, who is vulnerable, who may ascend through the castes, and who teeters perilously at the edge of falling. They shape economies, relationships, marriage, justice, crime, ambition, and even survival. A system similar to Life Rights doesn't just make the world feel believable, it gives the reader something concrete to ponder as they traverse your world.