Yeah, that "story" at the top was pretty painful. There are many lessons to be learned here, but the most important one is this: to be an effective writer, you must also be an avid reader. It is difficult to learn how a story is put together without reading stories published by other people. That is why they give out reading assignments in English and creative writing courses. If you enjoy reading, then learning story structure will come natrually over time. It's not that hard. But if you don't enjoy reading, then you are not going to get that valuable experience - and you will end up writing passages like the one above.
Writing fiction is not a race to the finish line.
Aside from reading published authors, the best advice I can give is that fiction is fundamentally about
character. Every type of story has been done before, but character has no boundaries. A time-travelling epic can, by its nature, become very convoluted and hard to follow. It is a mistake to think that Chrono Trigger's success is due to a time-travelling storyline and cutting-edge (for the time) graphics. "Back to the Future" also had a time-travelling storyline and great special effects for its day. But that is not why we remember the film so fondly. We love it because of Marty McFly, Doc Brown, and George McFly. Those characters radiated a life of their own. Who could forget Marty's heavy metal performance in front of his incredulous audience, or George balling up his fist to slug Biff? Just the same, we love CT because of Crono, Marle, Lucca, Glenn, Robo, Ayla, and Magus. Without them, there would be no fan community. Chrono Trigger would have just been another game, quickly forgotten with the next generation of hardware. Much of the fan-fiction I read online just concentrates on plot, combat, and special powers - or just repeating existing dialogue from the game. This does the Chrono franchise a disservice. The original game already gave us plenty of plot twists and battles. What we should be doing is expanding on the characters in a way the games could not. By necessity, the games must move at a brisk pace to keep the player engaged. That limits character development. Fiction does not play by the same rules. It's okay to slow things down a little. Readers are most engaged when they care about the characters. Keep the characters interesting, and you will find success regardless of your level of writing experience.
