Find Your Idea
Writing is an exciting, fulfilling journey and it comes with many benefits! It turns your ideas, creations, characters right onto paper. There, people can see what truly happens in that amazing brain you have. Whether you love reading fiction or you love writing, here’s a guide to help you navigate through your writing journey.
The very first step of writing is having an idea. It doesn’t matter if your idea makes full sense or even if it’s just pieces of an idea, it’s still an idea and that’s already a good starting point. The key is to find an idea that excites you, that motivates you to keep on writing, to keep on brainstorming new ideas.
To brain-storm some ideas, here are some questions you should ask yourself while your doing your planning.
Think of a character you want to write about – What do they want? What are their personalities? What’s the conflict? What are the obstacles in their life that they need to overcome?
Consider a conflict that interests you – What happens when two character’s get involved in a conflict? What’s the situation? Why are they in conflict? How do they overcome the conflict?
Themes/Morals – What’s the moral of the story? What do you want your readers to take from this story? What’s the message?
Asking yourself these questions is a major first step of your writing journey.
Developing a Plot
The plot is the backbone of your fiction story, whether it’s Rags to Riches (i.e, Cinderella, Aladdin, etc) or its The Quest (i.e The Lord of The Rings, Odyssey or even Indiana Jones) or even the basic Tragedy (Shakespears Romeo & Juliet is a big one) and there’s many ways you can execute your plot but here’s the basic method.
Your Introduction: Introduce your characters, setting and life. Those three keep the story moving for a bit. Establish a conflict along the way, as well, give the readers hints of the conflict.
The Conflict: Your character faces some conflict, some obstacles along the way, leading to the climax or the turning point of the story.
Resolution: The climax dies down and the story comes to a closing, finding a resolution.
Some authors skip the last part to make something called a cliffhanger, which leaves the readers on the edge of their seats when they realize the story ended abruptly. It’s fun for the authors to write and maybe not so much for the readers to read!!
There is also the Fichtean Curve Method which is a series of back to back conflicts, each leading up to the next, causing a continuous chain of tension and conflict.
Regardless of the method you chose, you must outline your plot before entering the actual writing process. A story without a plot is not a story.
Building Your Characters
This is my favourite – and hardest – part of writing a story. Although the plot is important, the characters steal the heart of your readers. Creating characters, you want to look for personality traits that are relatable, compelling and obviously, loved. Your character’s should drive the story, be the heart of the story using their words, actions, traits and conflicts. Here are some tips on making some memorable characters.
Create a complex character: Whether your character is the protagonist (hero) or the antagonist (villain), make sure they’re personality has depth, give them interesting details. Give them weaknesses, strengths, desires etc.
Give them a goal: Every character wants something, whether it’s for money, love, achieving a dream or even seeking revenge. That goal drives the character throughout the book.
Create a conflict: Every character must face a conflict or an obstacle. It could be internal or external. An example of internal conflict are Self-Doubt vs Confidence, a character can struggle with insecurity and lack of self-worth but on the other hand, they want to be self-confident and be able to be proud of themselves in their own skin. They want to be able to achieve their goal. A external conflict could be Character vs Character, a conflict between two people, Character vs Society, a conflict between societal norms, laws or expectations, Character vs Nature, a conflict between a person and natural forces like a storm or a hurricane (i.e, the I Survived Series by Lauren Tarshis, lovely series by the way) and more!
Evolution: Your character should grow through-out the story, the conflict teaching them some sort of lesson. They could overcome their fears or beat their obstacles. The transformations add depth and keep the readers invested.
Write the First Draft
Writing your first draft can be exciting but also frustrating. It’s all part of the writing process and the best advice is, don’t worry about perfection yet. It doesn’t need to be perfect on the very first try. After you finish writing, wrapping up your thoughts, you go back and edit. The goal of writing is to get your ideas out and writing the first draft of your story is a big step! To avoid writer’s block (big thing by the way) and keep yourself motivated here are some tips:
Set Daily Word Counts: Having a daily word count for you to write is a big help and can help avoid procrastination.
Accept Imperfections: Your first draft is okay to be messy, it’s okay to be imperfect because you can always go back and edit it. Focus on finishing the draft first.
Write Consistently: Although it may be hard to write while in writer’s block, you still have to push yourself to continue. It will be worth it in the end!
Second half of the blog coming out Friday, December 20th. Thanks for reading and stay tuned!
