Based on the article, "3 Secrets to Great Storytelling, " there are 3 ways to be a master at it. The first is that cause and effect is key. As a fiction writer, you want the reader to always be engaged in your story. When writing a story, you want your words and actions of the characters to flow naturally throughout. If your reader is having to constantly guess what is going to happen next, you break that engagement your reader has in the story. Whereas if you lead into the actions with a cause and then explain the effect, the readers can flow throughout the entire thing. Think about it this way: If you've written a scene in which you could theoretically connect the events with the word "because, " then you can typically improve the scene by structuring it so that you could instead connect the events with the word "so. ".
The next "secret " is that if it isn't believable, it doesn't belong. The narrative world is shattered when an action, even when it's impossible, becomes unbelievable. Readers read a book to believe the story and to immerse themselves in the story and to LOVE the story. If you're writing a story where the world is without gravity, although this is inevitably impossible in the first place, you can make it believable by making the character's hair stand up or the clothes to pull away from their bodies; but the moment that character successfully takes a drink out of a cup, that trust is broken between the writer and reader because that information is false. If there is no gravity, you can't take a drink out of a cup without the coffee floating away! Even in creating the attitudes of your characters, you need to think this out carefully. If you have a character who is made out in the beginning and middle of the book to be extremely sweet and always nice and helpful, and somewhere towards the end your character lashes out and randomly screams at someone, the image of that character is ruined for your readers and they will quit caring about your story.
