Step One: Outline your basic idea

You should have some sort of basic idea about what you want to write about.  For instance, you want to write a book about the experience of an orphan moving into a new home.  So refine this rough and raw idea into a more polished form in your mind until you think you know what you want to be the centerpiece of your story.  For this orphan of yours it could be that she has a hard time adjusting to the family’s peculiar way of life, or she has a hard time trusting them because of her past, or any angle you want to take.  So you could say step one is defining what you want out of your book.

Now, if your the sort of person who wants to write a book but can’t really pin down what you want to write about, I would suggest writing down on a piece of paper what you like in a story and what you don’t like.  For instance:

• Like- loyal animals, sarcastic friends, magical beasts, classic quests, ninjas
• Dislike- kids who think they’re smarter than everyone else, selfish protagonists, cliches, aliens

Then you’ll know what you want to include in your story, and what you want to stay away from (writing down what you dislike may seem weird, but you’ll be surprised how easily things you dislike can creep into your book if you’re looking away).  And even if you do have an idea, writing down what you want in your book can help you remember them and stay on track, though sudden plot twists that may be different from what you were originally thinking could be your life-saver, but that’s for later.  Who knows, though at first it may seem impossible you can fit ninjas into your story about an orphan, you may find a spot for them later!

Step Two: Characters

The important thing about characters is growing them.  So part one of step two is deciding what the most important, central relationship is for your story.  It could be the relationship between friends, between husband and wife, between father and son, teacher and student, boss and employee,  person and himself*, so on.  I think it’s important to have this figured out from the get-go because of course one of the most important things in a story is character development.  So decide what the characters are going to develop!  Their understanding as father and son?  Their friendship?  As amazing as any plot you may cook up can be, the story is almost meaningless without this fundamental step.  So make sure you know.  It can always change, of course, but keep in mind that this relationship defines the whole story.

So as you’re building characters, write down anything about them that you think is important.  Anything like age, appearance, family members, pets, and the basic characteristics of their personality.  Writing this stuff down will not only give you a reference when you forget what Liza’s hair color is, but also help you to further what you expect from your character.  At this stage it’s important not to go crazy with details.  As you will recall from the Dragon’s Heart page, half the things I planned Rina to be like didn’t really end up in the final draft.

*Lacking self-confidence, finding himself through a personal crisis, fighting his past, etc.

Step Three: Plot

On paper or computer write or type out the series of events that will happen to bring out your brilliant conclusion.  Basically, this where you fill in the story structure: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution.  For example:

1. Lucy’s life at the orphanage: crowded, stressful, and hectic
2. Lucy is told by Mrs. Baxter that she’s being adopted
3. She’s very excited but very scared about what it will be like.  She stays up late at night thinking about it.

There you have it!  The emotions you want to convey and all the simple events that make up the frame of the storyline.  Now you know, step-by-step, how you will weave the plot.

Step Four: Write A Sequence

Now pick a section from above mentioned outline and write it out.  It could be the thrilling fight scene between evil Lord Bob and the hero Bill or it could be how Jenny meets her to-be best friend, Alice.  Just pick a part that just grabs you and you can just see in your mind’s eye.  It doesn’t have to be the beginning.  In fact, the beginning is usually the hardest part for me to write.

This should reveal the characters to you and break the ice; now you’re in your book and you can go from there.  And this is a very important moment for your characters.  This is where they’ll grab the reins and tell you where they’re taking you.  They may tell you that they have a much milder temper than you originally planned for or that they are really quite a fantastic dancer.  This is why I said don’t go crazy with planning a character.  Because, believe me, they will make changes to themselves whether you like it or not.

Step Five: Just keep writing

From then on you just write.  An important thing to remember is that this is just the rough draft.  There will be plenty of time to edit and revise it, trust me.  So maybe the way you wrote it sounds terrible, but it got you from point A to point B, and that’s what’s important right now.  Finishing.  Once you’re finished, you have the big picture, you know your characters, and it’s so much easier to pin down the problem and fix it once it’s written as opposed to getting it perfect the first time round.

Another thing to keep in mind is balance.  You don’t want to follow every whim and tangent when you’re writing, but allow room for those brilliant plot twists.  How do you tell the difference?  Well, like many things, that only comes with time and practice.  Especially once you finish a book.  When you finish, you look back and see your pit falls and weaknesses and recognize them in the future.  So reading back on your work you may wince and say, ‘Gee, that’s awful.  How did that happen?  Oh yeah, I was bored and trying to make it exciting.’  And then, hopefully, you’ll recognize that weak moment the next time it comes around.

Another thing to do when you get an idea and you’re not sure whether it’s brilliant or stupid is think it out.  Trace an arc in your mind.  ‘Okay, so if Janet falls off the bridge, she can be rescued by Peter, the hero!  Gee, that’s the perfect meeting!  It works!’  Or: ‘So Emily takes the last cookie and gets caught.  Then Aunt Maggie gets mad at her and sends her to her room.  So…how does Emily end up in the basement to find the heirloom?  What’s the point of sending her to her room?  That doesn’t make sense!  That just makes it complicated.  Scratch that idea.’  You see what I mean?  Hopefully this will be helpful.

And one final note: don’t expect your story to be perfect when your done.  Don’t panic if you draw close to the end and you start counting the plot holes and need to borrow an extra hand to hold them all.  That’s where revising and editing comes in.

And that’s that!  Note I labeled this five challenging steps.  I don’t think it’s going to be easy.  In fact, I hope it’s hard to write to book, because if it isn’t, what’s there to be proud of?  You reap what you sow.  When you come to the end and you say, ‘Gee, that was easy!’ where’s that sense of accomplishment?  So here’s to us writers: may your work always be difficult, tedious, lengthy, and hard!

Hi!  So I don’t know whether anyone really reads that weird thing I call a blog in the pages, but if you read from November you would know that I did what is called NaNoWriMo (a.k.a. National Novel Writing Month).  It wasn’t the official NaNo; the official NaNo is when you write a novel in thirty days.  As I was, and still am, in the midst of writing a novel right now that I must finish before I go crazy (short trip), I instead tried to finish the book in thirty days.  The plot-line soon revealed itself to be twice as long as I thought and I only got half-way.  However, that was significant progress, adding up to about 200 pages.  But as I said, that got me to about half-way.

As it happens, NaNo has what they call Camp NaNo; a NaNo in June and August as well as November.  I decided that this was just what I needed, as once again all I have is one last leap and I’ll be more or less done.  (Then comes revising; yay.)  So I encourage you to look into June NaNo and give it a try!  I’ll be up-dating you guys as much as I can while I’m writing so wish me good luck.  And of course, if I’m to be able to do this in June I have to be done with my schoolwork by then, which leads you to wonder what I’m doing here when I have a research report waiting!  Better get back to that.

If all goes well, I will have a finished and complete novel by August!  (But really, is a novel EVER finished?  I’m starting to doubt it’s possible.)  My deadline is August because then it will be have been two years since I’ve started!  Plus, it’ll make a great birthday gift to myself!

Hi there guys!  Just a quick note, if you have a question you want answered, I advise you to email me at dreameramanda@gmail.com.  I can answer it better there.

An important decision in writing your book is POV, or point of view.  There’s first person (I), second person (you), and third person (he/she).  To note, you really shouldn’t use second person.  That’s only for those ‘choose the adventure’ books.  Of course, you may be writing one of those, but generally speaking those are tough and definitely not one I’d recommend you try to write.  If you’re good at it, chances are you don’t care what I have to say.  But I’d strongly advise you stay away from second person.  Those are just hard to write and hard to read.

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, the question of first person versus third person comes up.  Perhaps you already lean naturally toward one of those.  I’ve always been more third person myself, finding the first person stories I started containing too much of me (more on that in a minute).  Some people are naturally better at third person, and some at first.  However, if you’re a little on the fence, let me guide you.

The pros of first person are a more personal view into the main character’s thoughts and feelings.  This can become a con, however, if your character become withdrawn, whether intentionally or on accident, or if you don’t want to reveal what’s going on inside them.  It can further be a con as you can’t tell the reader anything the main character does not know.  In the book I’m writing now, several times I go to the bad guy’s lair and describe conversations there that the main character has no way of knowing about.  The book begins that way, actually.  It’s useful to impart information the reader should know that the main character doesn’t.  Further, I have found that when I write the main character under the term ‘me’ and ‘I’, I literally make them me.  They’re no longer Bill (or whoever), they’re me.  And I often take too much time to describe ‘my’ motives than necessary.  In third person I let the actions speak for themselves.  Also, it’s harder for me to write for a male main character if it’s supposed to be me.  If these problems aren’t a problem for you, by all means, write first person.  It can be quite successfully done.

The pros of the third person are that you can switch from character to character to the degree you wish, and peep into a random character’s feelings and thoughts, which can give the reader great insights.  The cons are that you may not get personal enough with the main character.  You may forget to tell the reader about their emotions or motives.

So there you have it.  In the end it comes down to finding your own personal writing style.  So go ahead and figure out your strengths and weaknesses when you write with either one.

Here’s a link to some very good advice on writing!  Check it out!

http://www.wikihow.com/Write-a-Credible-Fantasy-Story

I’d like to make my own comments on their advice: They make very good points and suggestions about many things, but I feel that they put perhaps too much emphasis on planning.  Now of course you want to be constantly stretching and growing your idea and characters, and getting to know your world better and better, but too much planning can really slow you down, and from my experience, the momentum from the excitement of your idea should start to fade after the first few days.  So it’s important to not spend the whole of those precious days going crazy with details.  It’s in putting the pencil to the page (or the fingers to the keyboard) that really turns on that ligthbulb floating above your head.  Suddenly you see where you really want to go and what you really want to happen.  Further, if you give your brain too much space to move around in, it feels obligated to fill the entire space and this will give you more junk than you need or can work with.  Your characters and the truly important people and places will get lost in all that rubbish.  More story ideas than I care to count have been foiled by me getting over enthusiastic about planning.  In end I feel I’ve lost touch with what I want to do.  And there’s an even greater danger.

When you perfect a story in every aspect before you start writing, suddenly you are not worthy of your story.  Upon seeing how epic and amazing this whole idea is and just how perfect it could work out, you’re afraid to touch it.  You’re afraid that in the end it won’t be as awesome as you planned it out to be.  Somehow you’ll ruin it.  It seems like such a big job that you’re overwhelmed.  And really, the way to find the true nature of your universe, the way you want it to be, is to let it unfold in front of you.  It’s an exciting thing to watch.  So don’t try to cram all that excitement in the first two days.  Give yourself something to get you through those deserts you’re gonna come to.  ‘Cause, trust me, there’ll be enough of them.

Planning is very important in the early stages of story development.  Thinking and turning it over and writing down notes are very important for not only plot but also characters.  However, in the end, the most important thing is: just writing.  Planning too much for too long can slow you done and easily leads to tangents; you’ll plan way more than you’ll end up using or needing.  The only real way to meet your characters face-to-face is to write.  That’s when they take the reigns and tell you where you’re following them.  There has never been a character I’ve made who hasn’t tweaked their originally planned personality.  Not to mention those wonderful plot breakthroughs that can only be found with writing.

And just to note, many people say to draw out a map to flesh out your world.  Maps are useful but not necessary.  In fact, sometimes they’re positively deadly to natural imagination.  Things you naturally see in your head can be so much harder to put on paper.  You start to try to be so exact and mention everything about that world of yours right off that tangents and time-wasting can run rampage.  And though it’s important to give your reader the sense that you know about the world your writing and a sense of a larger, real world, it’s very necessary to let that world come to you in its own time and grow with the story.  There may come a time, a time I’m experiencing now, when your world has outgrown your head and you simply can’t contain it all.  This is the perfect time to start noting and sketching what you know and imagine down on paper, but again, this may lead you to become, shall we say, disillusioned with your world.  Suddenly, nothing really works!  So keep it simple, don’t get too fancy, and let it sit in your mind for as long as you possibly can.

I know you want to vary your writing, but don’t use queried.  Just use ask.  Usually readers aren’t even reading said or asked, just skimming, but when you throw in a weird word like that, it just brings them up short and it doesn’t sound very natural.  Some people (myself included) even find it annoying.  So just use asked.

Hey, I posted a new event on the upcoming events page!  Check it out!

Merry Christmas to all of you!  Hope you had a good one and I hope you have a happy new year!

When it comes to drama, a writer can get pretty frustrated.  You’re writing a sequence where the main character is close to dying, and you’re bored to death!  The words are dull and pace is slow.  You have a hard time finding the right words to describe what’s going on, and you can’t find the right balance between action and the thought and emotions of the characters.  All the words sound flat and boring.  So what do you do?

The truth is: nothing.  If the character is truly in danger and the reader really does care about them, you don’t need to write anything to make it dramatic.  The situation will be dramatic enough.  Trying to give it too much drama can shut the reader right off.  And the truth is, the reader will be so anxious to find out what happens, they’ll be merely skimming over the page, barely even reading the sentences you took such care to write.

Of course, build up is important.  How long and ‘large’ the build up varies in whether or not you want it to be a surprise.  There are many different ways to build up.  You could hint at nervousness and uneasiness in the character, such as saying, ‘The hairs on the back of his neck rose and he felt uneasy as he stepped inside’, or say something such as, ‘He was so engrossed in his book, Dan did not see the shadow that was following him from doorway to doorway.’  What you choose depends greatly on whether or not you want your character to know or suspect the harm about to befall him.  When you want it to be a surprise to even the reader, you have to word it in the right way so they feel the shock and not so they go, ‘Wait, huh?  Did he just get hurt?  Or not?’  They just got pulled out of the current and are rather confused.  So wording is important in that situation.