I wrote a while ago about a certain kind of cleverness that pervades literature, especially literature written by graduates of creative writing courses who've been taught that technical skill is all you need. Essentially, it's the written form of mooning people out of a Boeing 747 window - flashy but pointless, and ultimately still just made of butt cheeks.

There's another kind of cleverness that's perhaps more accidental, and if there's a writer who isn't guilty of it at one time or another, I'll eat my hat. And it's not so bad - it's certainly not the mark of a horrible habit you have to unlearn, like literary cleverness. It's perhaps even merely a byproduct of overenthusiasm - eating cookie dough instead of baking cookies. But it ploughs straight through any hope for a good story. It's more obvious in science fiction and fantasy, though it happens across the genres. The writer starts with a brilliant flash of 'what if...' and they scurry away to write their story.

The problem comes when they didn't think beyond the what-if. The story exists purely to communicate their nifty idea (or, depending on the genre: their angst, revenge, wish fulfillment or fantasy) without exploring it further to develop a point. They haven't written a story, they've written a nifty idea as an anecdote. All writers are guilty of this at some point. It takes time and practise to internalise the bones of how stories work, and until you have that down you're liable to forget bits, just as when you're learning anything else.

I have a short story that I wrote as a teen, and then rewrote and reattempted several times and finally banished to the filing cabinet. I was entranced by a documentary I saw of people in comas dreaming symbolically of their illness, an illness that they could not consciously be aware of. A woman who was made comatose and quadraplegic by a car accident dreamed of a hall of statues. She awoke to find herself unable to move, and her psych-docs theorised that the dreams had been her brain processing and preparing itself for the change. I found the concept that the brain could interpret, understand and process information about such injuries without conscious input fascinating. I wrote a story about someone finding themselves in a strange world, finding things that were disturbing, and wanting to correct them, only to find when they awoke they'd corrupted the operations and procedures that had been meant to save them.

The story never worked. It never really connected with people, it was always missing something. Because the idea is only half the story.

All I was writing was "isn't this cool". And hey, it is cool. But you have to have more than that to say. Take it a step - a few steps - further. What does it mean? What is the point? What are you trying to say?

Not all stories have to have a deep, philosphical statement about life that will change people's world views. But they have to have a heart. An emotional centre. Something people take away from the story. It doesn't have to be big. I have a story at the moment where the reader is just left with an understanding of the protagonist's point of dispair and self-destructive decision. That's not a big statement to make at all. But it serves to shift the story's focus away from "here is my nifty idea" to "here is what it means".

So - if you have a story that isn't quite working, sit down and try to see if it's because you haven't quite worked out the heart of it.