Ask HN: How do I learn how to tell a good story?

Maybe try some books about creative writing? Try to write down your story and workshop it.

I would be curious to know what the specific intention behind your storytelling is. All the same, advice on any specific stripe of storytelling is, as a rule, generalizable. That is kind of what makes stories stories. The first thing to do is to distill extraneous detail into clear forms. Taking a boat over an unending ocean will produce little more than ocean; but, if the water was to recede, it would gradually reveal a varied topography. You will want to bring the elements of the story down to the forms in which they interact with one another best. Taking code as an example, you do not want to string together conditional statement after conditional statement, all with the aim of getting one piece of information into a usable form, and then go on to repeat those conditional statements anew if you need that piece of information in a slightly different form. You want to create functions that can be used as building blocks toward neatly and efficiently getting to your end result. In Children of Paradise, Jericho's disheveled clothing and strophic refrains, so too the symbol that is the trumpet, not to mention his name, do much of the work for the audience. Once these details are established, the audience has an idea of how he fits into the scene upon his arrival. The end toward which all the elements of the story move is the art. But they will be too viscous to do so if they are not sufficiently distilled. Mimesis by Auerbach is the best book on this subject that comes to mind.

I've taken a lot of courses on story writing / telling. I still suck at it

There are fundamentals in story writing / telling. Depends on the medium you are using. You prob know all of this.

So, one thing that I've noticed is that people who are actually good at this is that they do it as their main passion. So, practice and see how others are doing it. Also get feedback. Telling stories is not a passive activity

Reading about what makes a good story was somewhat interesting to me and i thought just reading and knowing about it would make me better. If you don't do the thing that makes you better and just read about it's prob a passive activity

Btw, people I know who really loves stories wether sharing or writing can consume over 150 fiction books a year. Doing 100 a year was already insurmountable for me, so I gave up on that.

I've taught this for something like 20 years; happy to send you a deck with some notes that would offer a broad overview of things to think about.

Not trying to sell anything; just trying to help. gwb@gwb.one

There's a free course on art of storytelling by Pixar on Khan Academy. https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/pixar#storytelling