Every story needs to be about something. Most stories are about a character, a person (or animal) who does something interesting. A story could also be about a place or a thing. You could write a story about a hill, and tell about all the things that happen on that hill. A lot of true stories are about places. History is really just a whole bunch of stories about places like America or Spain.
The idea that you start with doesn't even need to be what the story is about. You could start with an idea of a house painted pink, and the story that comes from that might be about the girl who lives in the house and not about the house at all.
Close your eyes and start daydreaming, let your mind wander and think about the kinds of things you like to read about. When you have an idea that's your own and not one that you remember from a book or movie, go ahead and start writing.
Just Start Writing
Get paper and pen or fire up the computer and just start describing your idea. Try to spell things correctly and use proper grammar, but don't worry about it too much. Don't worry about stuff making sense or happening in the right order. What you will end up with won't be very good, but this is your rough draft, it isn't supposed to be good, it's just supposed to be your ideas on paper. Some people like to start at the beginning of a story and write it in order until the end. Some people have an idea for a story and their idea is the whole story. But for most people, all they have to start with is a little part of a story, just one scene, or one character. Whatever you have, all you need to do is make it exist on paper.
Describe your idea, and then when you're done just keep writing about it. Let the story write itself. Don't worry that it is too long or too short, or that you started writing a story about a mermaid and now your story is all about the moon. You don't have to do this all at once. Write everything that comes to mind one day, put the story away, and then the next day get it back out and write anything new that comes to mind.
This is your rough draft, it isn't a finished story, so don't show it to anyone unless you want help with it. If you read someone's rough draft it will not seem like a good story. The writing will be bad, it will have misspelled words, some parts won't make sense and other parts will happen out of order.
Put It in Order
Once you've decided that your rough draft has all the parts it needs for a story, put those parts in order. You don't need to copy the rough draft or rearrange the pages. Get a new sheet of paper and write out the order of what happens. Think of it as a table of contents (this isn't really a table of contents for the finished story, but it will look like one). You don't even have to write this out, you can do it in your head. I like to write out the order for a long story, but a short one I will do in my head. If parts of the story don't work, write more parts to fill gaps or cut parts out to make things make more sense. Sometimes you will think of a good idea but it just won't work in the story you're writing. Save these ideas to use in other stories.
Rewrite it
So you have an idea that blossomed into thousands of ideas and you fitted those ideas together in the right order to make a story. Now you're going to write that story so you can show it to other people. Go over your rough draft and fix all your spelling and grammar mistakes. Copy the whole story, in the right order, in neat handwriting (if you're not typing it), with good spelling and grammar. It doesn't have to be perfect, but you want to be able to hand it to someone to read. If you are going to have chapters, decide where they will be and name them.
Most importantly, look at how you said things and make sure that that's the best way to say them. There are usually many ways to say the same thing and they are all correct, but some ways will sound better in your story than others.
Read It and Fix Things
Put the story away for a few days (or longer) and forget about it. Then get it out again and read it. Try to forget that you wrote the story and try to read it as if you have never seen it before. Mark any part that doesn't make sense or that feels wrong and then go back and fix it. You should be extra careful of typos, grammatical errors and scenes that don't make sense, because anything that you miss at this stage might make it's way into your final draft.
Making a rough draft, organising the story, rewriting, reading and fixing can be done in any order. Sometimes when you're reading your story, you'll decide that it needs another chapter so you'll make a rough draft of that chapter, re-write it and then fit it into the story. Sometimes you'll be in the middle of making a rough draft and you'll decide to start rewriting parts of it. The order you do things in doesn't matter as long as the story that you end up with is good.
Make It Look Nice on Paper
Making the story look perfect is the one thing that you really should not think about until the story is absolutely finished. It's more important to decide what colour your character's eyes are than to decide what size of paper to print the finished story on. Once the story is done and you're ready to show it to everyone, you will want to put some thought into how it looks.
If you have typed your story, this is very easy. Make sure you have the title of the story and your name at the beginning of the story, pick a typeface that you like (make sure it's easy to read) and then print it out. If you have a printer that prints booklets, you can set it up to print your story this way and then staple the fold. Tadah! instant book.
It's perfectly all right to print it normally on full size sheets, though (single sided is easier to read than double sided). Put a staple in the upper left-hand corner and your story is good to go.
If you have handwritten your story, you might want to copy it to a typed document and print it, but you don't have to. In the old days before computers, people would write what they called a "fair copy". A fair copy is simply your story carefully written with a nice pen (not a pencil, pencils fade with time) on good paper in your very best handwriting. Write on only one side of the paper so the ink doesn't bleed through and make the opposite side hard to read. The nice thing about a fair copy is that it is in your very own handwriting and so it's more like you than a typed story. You can handwrite one fair copy and make photocopies of it to give to people. The bad thing about a fair copy, though, is that some people (like me) have terrible handwriting which no one can read. I like to write my stories by hand, and then when I'm done I copy them to the computer.
If you are going to send your story to a publisher, the publisher will probably want a certain format, and that format will be ugly. Publishers are picky, but they know what they're doing. Just follow their rules and if they decide to publish your story, they will make it look nice in the book or magazine.
