Personally I can enjoy even the wackiest story, as long as the story is consistent. Even minor inconsistencies take me out of the immersion and prevent me from enjoying the story.

This reflects on the stories I write. I'm trying hard to keep the story consistent.

I'm not the first author that tried to do so. I think that learning from the experiences of past authors is a good way to improve. Here a few things I learned about writing and consistency.

Make the audience care

First and foremost a story has to be interesting before it's consistent. A perfectly consistent story that is utterly boring, it's not a tale. It's an history essay.

To make a story compelling, it's important to make the audience care about the characters what's happening to them. What's the point in having the Main Character (MC) go through an ordeal, if the audience doesn't care about him at all? If they don't care about the world, what's the point in threatening to destroy it?

I think the first think an author should consider, is to make the story compelling to read. Everything else come after that.

Willing Suspension of Disbelief (WSD)

WSD is what allow us to enjoy a fictional story. It allow the audience to immerse themselves in the fictional universe. WSD is subjective, it depends on the individual, their taste, their expectations, their experiences. It's the author's job to make sure that the WSD remains unbroken.

Example:

People that actually know how to use swords, can barely watch fencing duels in film. That's because those duels are made to look impressive, with lots of crossing and sparks flying. Which is the least efficient way to actually fight.

Example:

The audience will accept that a human is flying and shooting laser if the story established that humans can fly and shot lasers, even if no flying humans exist in the real world.

Consistency

There are many ways to break the WSD. Breaking consistency is one way to break the WSD. In a comedy, it might be a bad joke. In a sci-fi setting it might be something unbelievable happening that makes the audience says: WTF???

There are many definitions for consistency across many fields. The one I like for fictional stories is the following one: "Do not break the established rules in the story."

Even the wackiest stories will eventually have rules that can be inferred from the writing. After all, the author is following some kind of logic in his head, however warped and hidden that logic might be.

Breaking the established rules will rip some of the audience straight out of the WSD, breaking their immersion, and hindering their enjoyment of the story. Break it often enough, and the audience will stop following the story altogether.

Having a fictional story does not free an author to do whatever they want. It happens even to shows like Game of Thrones.

Some people say: "There are dragons, what do you expect?"

This is not how it works. Dragons in GOT are Internally consistent, and even are Externally consistent with other fictional stories.

Tolerance to inconsistency is highly subjective. On one extreme one can be fine with the inconsistencies in a Transformer movie and enjoy it all. On the other end, people can be thrown off even by minor inconsistencies in a film like Interstellar. It's the Author's job to understand what their target audience expect in terms of consistency.

There are different types of consistencies.

Aesthetic Consistency:

If you build a Samurai world, having modern day soldiers running around might not be a good idea. Unless you can make the audience believe that there is a good reason for modern soldiers to be there.

External Consistency:

How elements inside the story, correlate to elements in other stories or even the real world.

Example (Horses are Externally Consistent with the real world):

If you use horses in the story, the audience will expect them to work like real world horses. For example they'll know that they move at about 30 Km/h top, so if you make them travel continents in hours, the audience will say: "How the fuck did he get there in time?"

Example (Dragons are Externally Consistent with Dragons from other stories):

Dragons do not exist in the real world, but have been used in many forms in a large number of fictions. If you use Dragons, the audience will expect overgrown lizards, that are very powerful, that might be intelligent, breath fire and like gold. On the plus this means that you don't have to put in time to build them up. But it also mean that if your dragons are different, you have to justify that.

Internal Consistency:

How elements inside your story obey to the rules set up inside the story itself. The Author is the one deciding those rules.

Example (Consistent):

In Lord of the Rings having Dragons is internally consistent. They are foreshadowed and described inside the story before they appears. Their existence is part of the lore of the story. It is explained what they can, and cannot do and they obey to the internal rules of the story. LOTR Dragons are even Externally Consistent with dragons from other stories.

They are NOT Externally Consistent with our reality, but it does not matter. The audience accept their existence thanks to the WSD.

Example (Inconsistent):

In LOTR having Cars would break Internal Consistency. Cars exist in our world, but LOTR world does not have an industry, nor the technology, nor the logistic required. Cars have no place in that story at all. If Frodo where to jump on a Jeep and drive through Mordor, the audience would say "WTF??? What is a Jeep doing there??? Frodo can drive??? They are making fun of us!!!". WSD is broken.

Character Competence

Various character will have varying levels of competence and powers. Problems arise when a character act far more, or far less competently than the audience would expect.

It's easy to write characters that always act incompetently, and characters that always act competently. It's hard to make them commit genuine mistakes that are believable to the audience. Another problem is having a character that is TOO competent or Hyper-Competent.

Example (Done Well) (GOT Spoiler):

In GOT, Robb was seen marrying a woman for love, breaking an oath of marriage with a great House. It was a mistake and a terrible move, strategically. It was a mistake. But it was believable. He was young, and his Mother advice not to do so lost credibility after she freed a prisoner to save her daughters. He choose love over duty. Most audience accept it as a genuine mistake.

Example (Done badly) (GOT Spoiler):

GOT Arya was shown hiding from master assassins in a dark room in one episode. In a later episode, she was shown walking in board daylight without a care in the world and without explanation. And she got stabbed almost to death. It was not believable for her to act that way in that situation. Audience expected her to still be in hiding. She wasn't. And no reason was given for that change.

Idiot Ball

Severe case of character incompetence. When a plot line exists only because a character is suddenly acting like an idiot without any explanation. A character who was shown handling similar situations with no trouble, is suddenly unable to handle the same situation without any reasonable expectation. The character is holding the Idiot Ball. It's usually happens when the Author is forcing a certain storyline, without setting it up properly.

This doesn't mean that characters have to act competently at all times. People make stupid mistake in real life, after all. In real life accidents are often the result of missing out something small, that usually wouldn't be a problem, but because of a conjunction of other fortuitous factor, it resulted in an accident.

When a character in the story make a mistake, that mistake has to be believable. It's up to the Author to make the audience accept it.

Example (Real Life):

A pilot forgot to rise the flaps despite doing it for more than a decade and crashed his plane.

Example (Done Well):

The Trinket Guy of the group get distracted by a joke and forget to fasten a bolt. Characters ask if the bolt is fastened, he says yes. Cue to the Vehicle falling apart in a chase scene. He made a mistake, but the mistake is justified, and foreshadowed. A new plot line comes out of it. Trinket Guy has to keep the Vehicle from falling apart, redeeming himself.

Example (Done Badly):

A character is able to teleport groups of people with little restrictions. A plane lose the pilots and cannot be landed. The character try to come up with a contrived solution rather than just teleporting everyone away or go and search for a new pilot using his powers. He succeed, but the whole plot line was caused by the character holding the Idiot Ball. One does not just forget a skill he has been using for years. Not unless the author comes up with a good foreshadowing on why that might happen.

Foreshadowing

There are many definitions for it. The one I like is: "Introduce an element of the story before using it.". Foreshadowing is important for the story. You should make the audience aware that something is possible before that something happens.

Foreshadowing is not easy. For example, if you introduce something in a single implied line one hundred of chapters before it happens, most of your audience will have forgotten it by the time you use that story element. On the opposite end, foreshadowing an element only a sentence before, might come out as cheap.

Foreshadowing important story elements more than once is a good way to make sure that the audience notice it, but do it too often, and the dialogue will seem redundant. The audience will feel like it's being treated as dumb.

Example (done well):

In LOTR, Frodo falling to the corruption of The One Ring was believable. The burden was shown to be heavy on Frodo. It was shown that the corruption was seeping in. The corruption capability of the ring was repeatedly explained. When Frodo fell to the influence of the One Ring, the audience didn't have any problem with it.

Example (done badly) (GOT Spoiler)

In GOT, when Arya was shown walking in Bravos without a care, many found it unbelievable. It was sudden. It was unexplained. It was against what audience expected the character to do. It was against what the character was seen doing in earlier episodes.

Off Screen Inertia

The audience will expect a character to have kept doing the last thing he was seen doing while off screen. It's something that the author has to keep in mind. It implies that if a character has disappear for a while, a short explanation has to be given by the author on what the character was up to all this time.

Example:

In GOT, a running joke was that Gendry has been rowing a boat for several seasons. He was last shown rowing a boat, than the show forgot him for multiple seasons.

Deus Ex Machina

When the crisis at hand is solved in a way that is sudden and was never even hinted before. It comes out as cheap and makes every previous story element moot. Rarely the audience like "A God came and solved it." as explanation.

Writing an ending is probably the hardest part of the story, pulling a Deus Ex Machina is a cheap solution for the Author, but it might not be satisfying for the Audience.

Example (Battlestar Galactica Spoiler)

The whole series it was foreshadowed that there were higher powers at works, leading to many fan theories. In the end it was revealed that the higher power was literally a God.

Serial Escalation

In stories based on personal growth, the enemies have to grow alongside the character to make believable threats. But this can easily get out of hand. With the series starting from normal human strength, and ending with basically gods throwing galaxies at each others.

Care has to be taken on introducing broken powers. Because then only a Deus Ex Machina or the Idiot Ball can solve the plot.

Example (Done Badly) (Bleach Spoiler)

Bleach. Power kept escalating. by the end, the situation got solved by multiple Deus Ex Machina never foreshadowed before in the story.

Example (Done Well)

Dragonball Z.

Another problem is the stakes. If at a certain point in the story, the world is at stake, the threat after has to have stakes even bigger than that. How can the audience care about a robbery, when the character was shown fighting Gods to save the universe the chapter before? It's up to the Author to make the audience care about what's happening.

Ending

A story usually is done in three parts. Beginning, with introductions of characters and world building. Middle, when stuff happens and Ending, where the story is closed.

Writing a good ending is the hardest part of the story. All opened story threads have to be closed in a satisfying way, or it results in Loose Ends. The character arcs have to be brought to an end. The Author may want to hint at what the consequences of the ending are, by showing Everyone Lived Happily Ever After.

Writing a good story, and giving it a satisfying ending are almost two separate things.

The ending has to be both believable and satisfying. Rewarding the audience for all the time invested, while not contradicting their expectations too much. So many things can go wrong while writing the ending.

All story threads must be closed near or before that point without feeling rushed or truncated.

For example, writing a villain that is too powerful and competent, lead to problems in the ending, when the villain has to be defeated by the hero, somehow. You want the Villain to be a significant threat, but you don't want to write yourself into a corner by making the Villain an invincible infallible omniscient God that can't be defeated.

Personally, I think that a way to do it well, is to have an end already in mind early in the story, and gradually move toward that while you write the story itself. Another thing that I think helps, is spending time building elements of that world unrelated to the story. Things that are not written in the story but are in the Author's mind.

Example (Done Badly) (Lost Spoiler):

In Lost, for most of the episodes, the authors have been introducing mysterious element one after the other. Audience liked mystery, and the Authors kept giving it to them.

Then the authors realized that they had to close all of the mysteries. And had no idea how to do it. In the end most story threads were truncated, and multiple Deus Ex Machina were pulled to close the story.

Example (Done Well) (LOTR)

The epic struggle to destroy the One Ring succeeded. Sam got the Girl, Aragorn, the hero became King and got the girl. Frodo and Bilbo left Middle Earth and joined the elves. Humanity is now prominent, and the kingdoms are in a friendly relationship. Sauron, the villain, suffers a fate Worse than Death. Evil is vanquished. Everyone is happy.

To sum it up, all story threads and all characters arcs were closed in a satisfying way.

Audience

In the end different people have different expectations. Someone who is into romance stories, might never be able to enjoy a Sci-fi story.

In the end, a story will appeal only to some. Think of a comedy. There are many types of humour. Some laugh to butt jokes, others laugh to stereotypes, others laugh at dark humour. You can cater to one group easily, but how do you make a story that caters to all?

The wider you want the appeal to be, the more generic a story has to be. That's because you need to touch points that are more common. This is why many blockbuster movies have the same structure. Lots of actions, good CGI effects, a love story. With consistency and actual plot as after thought. The structure is Beginning, Middle and End without many twists. Which is not a bad thing. It's one way of doing things, and one that's proven to work and have low risk.

It is possible to making a story with a different structure while ensuring it has a wide appeal. But is much, much, much harder.

I believe that for inexperienced writers (like me), that's too tall an order. Personally, I'm writing a story, because I find enjoyment in writing it. I'm writing the way I think it should be written. If there are elements that I know can be unpopular, but are part of the story as I imagined it, I use them.

It's something you can't do if you have a publisher. Something you shouldn't do if you want to widen the appeal of the story. Yet, if you are trying to widen your audience, telling a different story might be key to success.

Example: (Star vs. the forces of Evil)

The author was forced to introduce two male friends to the MC in the story. The author didn't really know what to do with them, so they became stereotypical side characters, with almost no bearing to the story itself.

Feedback from the audience is also important. A distinction has to be made about feedback about the structure of the story, and feedback about the theme.

I listen and try to correct my style when I receive feedback about me writing badly. Like using bad colors, making too many mistakes.

If a feedback is about the theme of the story, always following it might be bad. If the Author has a direction in mind, he should stick to that, rather than keep changing direction. The risk is to lower the quality and make the story aimless.

I think that the bottom line is: "Listening to feedback is good. Following them thoughtlessly is bad."

Personally, I try to read and listen to all feedback I receive. If I think an advice makes the story better, I try to follow it. Otherwise, I ignore it.

Authors are humans, and it's easy to take a critic to your work as a critic too your own person. It may be hard for some, but my advice would be not to take feedback and criticism personally.

Outright ignore a feedback like "this story sucks!". It's generic, and it doesn't specify what the source of the dislike is. Maybe it's just a member of the audience reading a story in the wrong genre.