This is a list of opinions. My top three will be different from yours. But these three are important to me, and they are all things I sometimes see writers neglecting. Some of the points I’ll make are obvious. But obvious means overlooked, so I’ll mention them anyhow.

Give us a well-written story arc.

If I had to pick just one piece of advice, it would be this: In your stories, introduce us to complex characters who experience the extraordinary and will never be the same again.

I know that’s a mouthful, but that’s because it has a lot of implications.

Introduce us to the characters. Don’t just tell us about them. We want to see the characters live. We want to get to know them. We want you to poke them with situations, and we want to see them react, like subjects of an experiment, so that we can understand what makes them tick.

Complex characters excite us. Real people are rarely simple, anyhow. They have quirks and habits. They think without acting and act without thinking. They say one thing and do another. They have passions and impulses and great loves. When it comes to characters, we want people we can believe actually exist.

Extraordinary events are the only kind that can precipitate changes. Our hero needs to reach rock bottom before he can see the error of his ways. He needs to face an insurmountable obstacle before he can show his genius by overcoming it. He must undergo a devastating loss before he breaks down and shows us his true feelings.

Thus, he changes and will never be the same again. The critical moment leaves a lasting impression on our hero, and vicariously on us as well.

Grab our attention, and never let go.

There is room in a story for the boring parts. But first you have to establish momentum. We must be so engrossed in the story that the boring parts are no longer boring, because they apply directly to the story. We’ve been sucked in too far to notice. Beginning writers frequently have trouble with this, and published authors sometimes too.

A story is like a huge boulder. At first, you have to push long and hard in order to get it moving. But once it’s rolling, you can lay back, giving attention to other areas, just nudging the boulder from time to time to keep it going, or giving it another big push to pick up the intensity.

Give us superhuman heroes.

This does not mean perfect heroes. We do want flawed, believable heroes we can identify with. We want our heroes to make mistakes. We want them to be complex, a mixture of saint and sinner. We want them to be human.

But we also want them to be superhuman. We want them to overcome extraordinary obstacles. We do not want the gods of Olympus to disappear the obstacle for our hero. We do not want the hero to chicken out.

In the pilot miniseries for the new Battlestar Galactica, at one point, the Cylons were bearing down on the fleet, were going to destroy the last remnant of humans. Commander Adama made the hard choice, as it were, and decided that his ship, and any other ship that could jump to safety, would do so, leaving the helpless ships behind to be destroyed. I was sick to my stomach. I’d rather watch old Star Trek episodes; at least Captain Kirk always found a way to win.

Do I always want a happy ending? Not necessarily, as I loved the classic film Waterloo Bridge, which has a sad, shocking ending (though to be fair, Myra was not overcome by an external foe, but by an internal one). But I also hated A Streetcar Named Desire. Didn’t you want Blanch to snap, at a critical juncture, through insanity finding superhuman strength, and overpower Stanley, maybe throw him from the second-story window?

(Maybe I’m just in love with Vivien Leigh?)

Back to the new Battlestar. I know giving up is sometimes the most realistic way out. But in a good story, we don’t want realism; we want hyper-realism. And we don’t want heroes; we want superheroes.