A teacher of mine once told me that the hardest part of writing a story, is when you’re writing the beginning. I tended to disagree with this because I always wrote amazing beginnings to my stories. The problem with me was that I used up too much energy writing those beginnings and my stories started to lose their lustre just before I got to the middle. So I came up with a regimen to complement my writing abilities.
I never used to set out a plot before I started my stories. I guess that’s the biggest reason why my stories started to lose that lustre. The main thing about a story is its journey. The plot helps you, the writer, set out on this journey on your own so that you know what it is you’re going to give your readers. So plotting out your story before the time comes to write it will be very beneficial to you.
Whether it’s a science fiction novel or a true story, the main thing to do is to get your world straight. If it’s a fictional genre then the world could still either be this one, one of your own imaginings or both. Non-fiction only allows for this world (unless you’re writing the biography of a person who was kidnapped by aliens and taken to some distant planet). Conceptualize the world you’re working on and do research on those places which exist. Always do this to completion. You will get more ideas when working with full worlds, which could help you further the storyline you plotted earlier.
You, as the writer, will be living out this story in your head – so it’s up to you to feel, think and act like your characters. Become them. It helps when you can understand them better so that your readers would as well. It also helps to complete all your characters. By this I mean developing them until you’re satisfied with what you’re going to have them do in the story. It doesn’t help when your characters are half-baked and somewhere in the middle you realise that they might actually play a bigger role in the story.
Next comes the story itself. This is the trickiest part to get right but if you’ve done everything above you should be able to write this part easily. The hardest part, as my teacher so aptly put it all those years ago, is the beginning. I realise this now because if you invest too much energy into it and lose energy half-way, the rest of the story becomes bland. If you feel that this is the case, take time away from the story to regather your thoughts. Looking at your notes on the aforementioned things will allow you to do just that and may even spark a few new ideas that you hadn’t considered until you started writing.
Something else to watch out for while writing your story is situation. Some situations can bring about drastic changes in your story and some are just there for the heck of it. Be wary of “for the heck of it” situations because they can sometimes cripple your story. An intriguing story almost always has situations that increase the plot in some way. Any lulls in your story can be ripped out and rewritten so that you get the most out of it (your story).
Another thing that can influence your story is dialogue. Looking back at some of the things I’d written in tenth grade (amateur beyond amateur) I realised why my stories sucked so bad. They were dialogue dependant. They had no description whatsoever. One couldn’t decipher what it was the story was describing and no emotion was invested in the reader. Description is very important. It allows your story to have feeling and meaning and can also lead to interesting plot arcs that you didn’t notice before.
The corollary to this is also very important. Description and description alone will not help your story in the least bit. I’ve read a story where the author had around fifty pages of description and that just killed the story for me (please do not ask for the story name because I do not want to destroy his publication). Other stories describe almost every action which is absolutely unnecessary and can lead to your work becoming extremely boring to read. Things like, “He sat sinuously, with deliberately unhurried movements -” (Twilight; Chapter 13 – page 265) don’t really make sense and should be avoided at all costs (I had to reference that because it’s a quotation from a book. I don’t want to be thought of as a plagiarist now, do I?).
Well this concludes my tutorial on fictional writing. To all you twilight book fans I didn’t mean to spark something. I just wanted to show my readers what to avoid when writing (and I’m sure that you’ve already had an earful on the subject). I hope you learned from this as much as I did. Feel free to like or post a comment below if you want more tutorials.
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