People are more interested in people than anything else, and they only relate to the most realistic situations that people can get into, and so the best stories, in prose for novels and short story, are all entirely character based.
Never create a character like Superman, because nobody understands Superman. His problems aren't our problems, so we can't relate. The best character is a character that we can relate to. A mortal, normal, average joe.
Once the reader can understand and relate to a character, then that character is suddenly infinitely more interesting and intriguing, and so becomes the story.

This rule remains true whether you're writing Sci-Fi-Horror/Romance or Documentary Nonfiction.

Rule # 1: Have characters that we care about and relate to.

Next, the conflict must remain always. A big problem with amateur writing is that the conflict starts late or it finishes early, and this can never happen. In a story, the disaster starts immediately. In fact, one exercise is to start the story where you imagined the climactic moment to be, and then go from there. As long as there's incredible conflict and strife among the main characters who we relate to and care about, then the story is an incredible page turner.

Rule # 2: Maintain Conflict

And that's it. Those are the components of the plot, and plot is, basically, a synonym for story. These rules apply and work in all genres, and in all forms of communication from short short stories to feature films.

A good exercise for practicing this is to write a short, 2-4 pager about a nearly (but not quite) impossible event that happens to a normal person/group of persons, and then see how it plays out.
For example, off the top of my head here, a foreign exchange student who doesn't speak the language stumbles down an escalator and crashes into a security guard, who is having a really bad day. We understand everybody's stance, it's immediate conflict form the start, and it will end when the conflict is resolved, easily enough, and it can be any story.