It's me. I'm the child. I've kind of just been thinking about it and I thought I'd put some things about writing stories that I've learned over the years. I've been writing since I was somewhere around eight(8) or nine(9) years old. I'm not telling you how long it's been since then since I don't want to put my age on here, but I'll tell you I am much older than that now.  But anyways, let's begin!

Emotions
An important thing to look at is how you write how characters are feeling. If you want someone to feel immersed in your story, it helps to really describe the emotions a character is experiencing. If I say: 

' He was sad, but tried to hold it back as not to embarrass himself. '

you don't really get much out of that. It's about show, not tell. So, instead, you could try something like this:

' He took a shaky breath, his eyes stinging as he blinked back the tears threatened to crawl down his face as best he could. A lump was forming in his throat, making it impossible to respond. His arms were shaking. Why were they shaking? He wrapped them around himself to try and get them to stop, his chest still stuttering as more uneven breaths came. God, he probably looked like an idiot, curling into himself like this. Why wasn't he saying anything? Say something! '

Don't you feel more when you read that? I didn't even use the word 'sad' or 'anxious' once. You know so much more about how the character thinks and reacts to things and, based off of how it's written, you can infer someone has told them some terrible news, or maybe reminded them of a sadder memory, causing them to be super upset. The character also clearly doesn't want to seem upset while around whoever they're talking to. You can't infer this from the previous example, even though both examples tell you the same thing. 

Show not tell is one of the most important principles in a ton of different creative medias, and writing is definitely one of them. Describing how a character feels can make it easier for the reader to feel the emotions the character is feeling. Telling a reader how the character is supposed to feel and, subsequently, how they're supposed to feel doesn't give much depth to your stories or characters. 

How do you do this? Well, how do you feel when you feel a certain emotion? Focus on the reaction. How does your face look? Is your nose scrunched up, your eyebrows up or down, your mouth tense, your forehead creased? What are your hands doing? How about the rest of your body? How do you feel in your stomach or throat? Is your mouth dry? Are your eyes wide or pupils dilated? Is there bags under your eyes? Are your ears ringing? 

All of these questions can help to understand and write out an emotion. You don't have to check all of these off, as not every emotion needs all of these to be described, but it's good to look over them. If your character is upset, panicking, angry, sad, happy, excited, sick, fond, tired, terrified, falling for someone, day dreaming, or anything else, it's good to do more than just say that. 

Sensory Details
A lot of the time, people forget to describe what a character feels sense-wise. Everyone knows the five senses: Smell, touch, sight, taste, and hearing. It's good to try and incorporate those into your story. Senses are like a simple way of doing what describing emotions does. It helps to immerse the reader. 

If your characters are out on a beach, describe the beach's special properties sense-wise. 

' The wet sand clung to her skin, the parts that had dried feeling irritably but not unbearably scratchy. Salty sea air filled her nose as she took a deep, delighted breath. The whooshing of wind was drowned out every couple of seconds as waves crashed heavily against the nearby rocks. She could almost taste the ice cream they used to get when they were little kids. The tasty treat would've melted down her fingers as she and her friends ran across the sand, chasing birds and each other. The sun warmed her skin as she walked, and she could see it reflecting off the ocean in bright bits of white. '

You don't need to have all of that. One sense will probably be enough, but since it's an example of all the sensory details, I thought I'd just put as many as I could think of without making it awkward. Often times, if you're trying to reach a word count or if your story feels short, you are missing sensory details. They can also help with setting a mood and/or tone for your writing.

Setting
Forgetting to describe where a character is or what a character looks like is a little more common than you think. Sensory details are apart of this, but generally explaining what a place looks like will do good to paint a picture in the reader's mind. Don't just say their in a house. Describe what else there is. Furniture, placement of characters, etcetera. I know this doesn't seem like something we need to be reminded of, but especially during action, I know I'll forget to talk about the surroundings of a character. If a character is running away and goes into an alleyway, what is in that alleyway? I know I've made this mistake more than I realized, so just try to think about it.

However! There is a tin line between enough and too much. You don't want to go overboard with descriptions. If I have three paragraphs of just a character or objects's appearance, it could lead the reader to thinking the character or object is more important than they actually are, or the reader could get bored of just reading description. You need to know when enough is enough. This is why having test/beta readers is always a great idea. Having someone to alert you when something is too much or too little will always be amazingly helpful. But otherwise, you'll just have to decide for yourself.

And, by the way, this line of too much and too little exists in almost everything I'm talking about here. You will always have to be careful with details and descriptions, but they're very important. They have to be there. So, play with them for a little bit. Most of the time, you can't just not have them. That means you'll have to practice and learn for yourself what is or isn't enough.

Dialog
Writing dialog can be tricky. There are many things you have to keep track of. So, first, lets start with the formatting. Whenever a different character speaks, it should be in a new paragraph. 

' "Hey!" he called, running up to his friend. "How've you been?"

"Oh, I'm alright. How about you?" they said.

"Great. Oh! Do you want to go to the movies later this week?" 

"Ooh, that sound like fun! Sure." '

This way you don't have huge blocks of just dialog in one paragraph. It can look off at first, but trust me, that's genuinely how it's supposed to be. 

Now, on to punctuation. When a character says something, you will put your first double quotation mark, then a comma the dialog sentence, followed by your second double quotation mark, a dialog tag, and a period to end the whole sentence.

' "I can't right now," he said. '

This is one sentence of dialog. The only exception to putting a comma in the double quotation marks is either an exclamation point(!), a question mark(?), an em dash(—), or, if there isn't a dialog tag at all, a period. However, apparently in British English (I'm American so don't quote me on this) dialog is written with single quotation marks and the period goes outside of the quotation marks. (AKA: 'I can't right now', he said.) Just something I found interesting that I thought some of you might want to chew on for a little bit. 

However, it's common that you'll have a dialog tag in the middle of two dialog sentences from a single character. There are three different versions of punctuation for this. If the dialog tag is between two full sentences the character is saying, a period will go after the dialog tag and the next dialog sentence will be capitalized at the beginning.

' "No," she said. "I don't want to." '

This is the two sentences 'No.' and 'I don't want to.'

If the dialog tag is in the middle of a single sentence, then a comma will go after the dialog tag and the next dialog sentence will be lowercase.

' "Yeah," they said, "it's obvious." ' 

This is the single sentence 'Yeah, it's obvious.'

And finally, if the dialog tag only belongs to the second dialog sentence, then you will put a period at the end of the first dialog sentence, the dialog tag will be capitalized with a comma at the end, and the second dialog sentence will be capitalized.

'Wait." His voice was soft as he spoke, "I'm sorry." '

'Wait.' is on it's own with no dialog tag. The dialog tag is attached to 'I'm sorry.'

Often times people will confuse dialog tags with action beats. Said, spoke, shouted, whispered, etcetera are all parts of dialog tags (obviously there will be a character name or pronoun that goes along with those to complete the dialog tags). However, if it is a noise like laughing, whimpering, coughing, sighing, etcetera, that is not a usable dialog tag. 

' "You're so funny, you goofball," she giggled. '

Try laughing those words while saying them. There's a good chance that it's not what you want it to be, and instead the character should laugh after they say something. It's incorrect. There are two ways to fix this.

First of all, you can make it an action beat instead of a dialog tag. You do this by putting a period to finish the dialog sentence and then make a new sentence. The dialog sentence does not have a dialog tag now, but that's alright.

' "You're so funny, you goofball." She giggled. '

The second option is to add more to the dialog tag.

' "You're so funny, you goofball," she said, giggling. '

 It's important that when you're writing you make sure not to put an action beat to long between dialog conversations, since the reader might forget what the conversation was about or what the last words were. It's also important not to make the dialog go on for too long without having any action beats to tell you what the characters are doing. You need to know how to balance it out.

Another thing people tend to make mistakes with is putting too many adverbs. An adverb is basically anything that ends with 'ly'. Sadly, tiredly, happily, etcetera. This once again goes back to show, not tell, as well as necessity. If someone is crying, do you really think you need to put 'said sadly'? It's already obvious that the character is sad, you don't need to hammer it in. The time when adverbs would be most accepted it if the tone is different from what the words would have you assume.

' "I'm going to kill you," he said jokingly. '

If I didn't put 'jokingly', you wouldn't know that it was a tease, probably between two friends who are messing with each other. However, if this is in the context that someone is actually going to kill someone, there is no adverb needed. Don't put 'menacingly' or 'terrifyingly'. The reader already knows.

However, this isn't always the case. Have you ever read a Harry Potter book? Pick one up and read a page of dialog. I'm sure you'll notice a lot of unneeded adverbs. Harry Potter is obviously super successful, so really this is technically just a suggestion. Most professional writers would agree with what I'm saying, though.

Also, when writing a character, they should have their own unique voice. Everybody talks differently from one another, whether that be because of accents or mannerisms. It can be as simple as greetings. Hi, hey, hello, hiya, what's up, etcetera can all be unique to a specific person and how they speak. The reader should be able to guess which character is talking if they don't have a dialog tag simply based off of how they talk, especially in fan fiction. Pay attention to how people talk. And also, make sure it sounds like a naturally flowing conversation. Read your dialog aloud to yourself or with a friend to see if it sounds like an actual conversation people would have.

Dashes & Hyphens
I just wanted to quickly talk about em dashes or m dashes real quick before I leave off. An em dash looks like this: —. It's called an em dash because it's as long as an M. In google docs, if you put three hyphens(---), usually it will auto correct to an em dash (Make sure it's three hyphens). Em dashes can be used in place of parenthesis, commas, colons, and semicolons. It's also used when someone interrupts themselves to say something else or when the text breaks away to insert a thought, and then can be used to return back to the original statement.

' There was a time—long ago, before things had gotten so horrible— when she was happy. '

 Em dashes can also be used in dialog to show an abrupt ending to whoever is speaking's words.

' "Wait!" they shouted. "You can't! There's too much smoke—" their words cut off, turned into a fit of coughing. '

A lot of beginning writers who don't know what em dashes are aren't given the privilege of knowing how to use them, so I thought I'd explain so that you know another amazing option. I use em dashes constantly—a little too constantly. But they're fun, so you should mess with them and try to incorporate them into your writing. When using them, make sure there's no space between the em dash and the words it's interrupting. 

There are also en dashes or n dashes. They're called this because they're the length of an N. They look like this: –. In google docs, if you put two hyphens(--) it will usually auto correct to an en dash. En dashes are used to show range between numbers.

' 2020–2022 was quite a strange time. '

It's less helpful that em dashes when writing stories, but it's good to know about.

Then there are hyphens. Hyphens look like this: -. They are used to connect words together. 

' The thinga-ma-bob was quite strange, though helpful indeed. '

They are also used to indicate stuttering in dialog.

' "W- well, listen. I'm s- sorry, but I really c- can't," he sniffled. '

And that's about everything I have for you guys! I just wanted to write all of this down for you guys to help anybody who needs it, and for myself to look back at. I hope this helps any beginning writers to flesh out their stories and make them more interesting or better written. 

This has been Tips For Story Writing... From a Child. :)