A good piece of advice lukeprog gave me is to structure your story around an emotional arc. E.g. a story about an awesome show you went to is also a story about what you felt before, during, and after the show. A story about the life-cycle of a psychoactive parasite is also a story about a conflict between the clever parasite and the tragic host; or a story about your feelings of fascination and horror when you first learned about the parasite.