1. Stories are meant to be easily read, and like it or not, using abbreviations such as "lyk" "m8" "ur" make things much harder to understand. If it's an instant message chat you're talking about, it may be acceptable, but it's preferable to suspend reality in favour of comprehension in this case. Always check your spelling and read through afterwards - what makes sense to spellcheck may not make sense in real life.

   
    

2. As I said, stories should be easy to read, thus layout is important. A different person speaking deserves a new line, and a change in scene deserves not only a new paragraph, but a line break in between. This not only makes it easy to tell when one section ends and another begins, but makes it much more enticing to read. People tend to skip through large chunks of text, thus you need to break it up. Bitesize as it were.

   
    

3. The final part of making a story easy to read is general punctuation and grammar. Capital letters to begin sentences, full stops to end. Commas for small pauses, semi-colons for longer ones. Try reading it aloud, it makes it easier to see where to put in punctuation. This also makes it easier to see where one sentence should be broken into two or three, or several joined together where things seem too jerky.

   
    

4. There are three ways to write - 1st person (I...), 2nd person (You...) or 3rd person (He...). 1st and 3rd are the generally adopted forms, and each presents its own problems.

   In the 1st person, you, as the narrator, are a character in the story, usually the central one. You can only describe events that happen around you, which is a limitation, but in a way a blessing. You can be more intimate with the characters, have them tell of their most secret desires and fears, and it's also good for a quirky writing style - you can have your characters distracted and go off on a complete tangent.

   In the 3rd person, the narrator has no part in the story. They can watch anything, see everything. Generally, you would want to follow one character for a few paragraphs, then skip to a new one. You can talk about their thoughts, but it's less personal than in the 1st person. The problem comes with the distinction between subject and object when both are of the same gender. For instance "Danny looked at Dougie as he rubbed his hands over his chest" - you don't quite know whose chest you're talking about. Generally, you want to find ways to get around this, eg "over his bandmate's chest", "his young friend" "the blonde's"...

   Finally, the 2nd person. It's the most difficult to write, but can be the most effective. You're essentially controlling what the reader does, giving them an active role in the story. The narrator, however, can either be in the story or not, it makes no real odds. The problem is that you have to get more into the reader's mind, and you have to make it good enough to seem real. If you can't do that, then 2nd person won't work for you.

   
    

5. Moving on to actual story content now, you need to think about details. The devil is in the detail, but no fic can live without it. You need to describe the environment the story takes place in, and more detail makes it seem real, plus it fleshes out the story a bit so people can't rush through it so quick. Consider the difference between "He looked up at the sky" and "He looked up at the sky, the few white clouds majestically sailing across an ocean of blue". The second one is... prettier, more attractive, and it makes you feel happy. The first just makes you think "so what?". Detail isn't just about adjectives and adverbs (he kicked the red ball hard), it's also about poetry of similes - likening something to a scene that may be completely unrelated (e.g. my description of clouds as ships on an ocean). Depending on the mood, the character might see something in different ways, to be rather cliché, he can see the cloud, or the silver lining. Or maybe he can see both.

   Another point with detail is to remember character-specific traits. For instance, how your different characters talk - are they confident, shy, arrogant? The descriptions they use will also be different - a keen footballer would likely use footballing analogies to many varied situations, say describing doing something wrong as an own goal. Remember their physical attributes - to a tall person, the doorway may seem low, while to others it may seem normal. On the other hand, someone as strange as Dougie Poynter might use extremely odd and inappropriate analogies, while Tom Fletcher would likely be more poetic.

   
    

6. Finally, style. This is partly covered by which viewpoint you choose, but you do need to be consistent. If you watch TV, even if you mute a program, you can tell just from the way the camera moves whether it's a documentary, soap, drama, whatever. A documentary is likely to use one fairly stationary camera that captures the whole scene, a soap tends to switch between one or two stationary cameras, and a drama will tend to have the cameras moving. Writing goes the same way. You can usually tell just from a line or two whether it's a plain dirty story, a romance story, or a comedy. It's hard to describe really, but try to keep to one style for one story.

   
    

7. This one is most important - never force yourself to write something. If you don't feel you want to write, don't. If you try, you'll only end up with a bad piece. Writing should be something you do for fun. Maybe you're telling a sad story, and that makes you sad, but you can still want to write it. At times like that, I feel I want to write simply for the characters the story contains - because you feel you owe them in some way. But writing for a deadline is never good as it puts pressure on you, and writing should be a release for emotion.

Finally, I guess I should say good luck, and remember - have fun.