Use the plot as a road map from which to tell your story. Lee Masterson, a freelance fiction writer, recommends writing a brief summary of your story, especially when you plan on writing a long piece of work. Creating an outline allows you to list out the important stops your plot needs to make along the way to your conclusion.
Make your characters real. A major part of character development is giving the people in your story human characteristics and flaws. Second only to an engaging plot, characters are the most important element of your story. You must create characters in your story that the reader believes are real, making what happens to them important. Some characteristics to think about include: name, age, favorite memories and their relationships with friends and family. Even if you don't introduce these matters in the story, they're important to the characters and shape how they act.
Make your characters dynamic. Dynamic characters change through the course of your story and develop, growing as a real person would. Flat characters learn nothing new in the course of the story and remain the same from beginning to end. With the combination of realistic characteristics and the character changing and developing through the story, readers will believe in and care about your characters.
Create a world your readers believe by writing what you know. Alan Bernstein writes in "How To Use Real Life Experiences To Create Fictional Stories" that new writers can take a tip from great authors such as Ernest Hemingway and Jack London by incorporating their life into their setting. Hemingway wrote about fishing because of his love for the sport. London wrote about the breath-taking beauty of Alaska because he saw it first hand. These experiences come across realistically because they're based in reality. When you write about where your story takes place, even if it's a fictional world, add details from your life to make the readers believe you are taking them somewhere you have really been before.