There’s no denying it.

Your latest story stinks.  It’s rotten.  A monkey could have written something more coherent.

Maybe you thought it was great while you were writing it, but after some cooling-off time you recognized its sub-mediocrity.

Worse: perhaps someone else read your story and told you it was fit for compost.

Where did you go wrong?  Why is your writing odoriferous, and how can you fix it?

Imagine you’re trying to describe a book to someone, but all you can think of is, “It’s one of those books where nothing happens.”

There’s a trend these days–in both short stories and novels–to write down a rambling road without a plot in mind.

That isn’t to say works can’t be more introspective than plot-based.  Sometimes the ‘happenings’ occur within a character, rather than externally. However, if you didn’t have a clear course of action mapped out before you began writing, your story might stink because its plot is poopy.

Think diapers.

There’s also a possibility that your plot is no good because:

• It’s just plain b