Read a few Draft stories
The typical progression for stories at Create Great Stories is to create a Draft story, then revise the story based on feedback from other members of the site. You may end up writing several Draft stories, revising and improving each time. Once you decide that the story has achieved a state of completion with which you’re happy and ready to move on to other stories, you post the last version as a Completed story.
Reading through the Draft stories, you can see a variety of types of stories in different stages. Some will be first drafts, almost nothing more than a concept, rough plot, basic characters, and some dialogue. Other stories will have been revised from the first draft and feel like they are really taking some, while some read well and are posted to get a few last suggestions for tweaking before publishing to Complete.
Read through the Draft stories to see how stories take shape.
The Draft Stories are in the top menu or can be found using this link to Draft Stories.
One thing that should be encouraging is that Draft stories aren’t all better than anything you’re publishing. At any given time, there will be stories that are evidently written by writers who have just begun creating stories. No one expects these stories to be masterpieces, or even good. The writers are taking the steps to produce something, anything, to get the process started. You will want to start the process at the same point, not concerned that your stories are competing with others, but knowing that every story begins with a draft and is then refined.
One thing you can’t assume in reading these stories is the age of the author. Sometimes these writers are young and still learning grammar and structure and punctuation and such. However, there are adult writers on this site as well who may be highly accomplished in other areas but are still beginners when it comes to writing fiction. (A lot of people match this description who have careers in math-heavy professions such as engineers and scientists, or who come from business backgrounds and other careers that emphasize formal writing structures.) No matter what ideas about the age of the author that you infer from the story, you’ll want the feedback you begin providing later to be age neutral.