Story Writing Tips

Instructions

Hello! I've been asked several times what writing tips I could give people, so here's what I got! 1. How to get started? (Remember, things might be different for people. This is just what works for me) What I usually do is sit down and figure out the basics. Like the utter basics. Like what genre is your story going to be? A dark dystopian or a fun realistic fiction? This is very important for this to be the first thing you do, or else your ideas will be all over the place. The next thing I like to do is create characters. Start with how they look, and then create a backstory for them. Usually the more traumatic the story is the easier it is for me to create a story around that, though you do you! After that focus on sitting there and writing down little ideas that spark you imagination, or doodle it! Some of my best writing came from me sitting and doodling or an hour or so! 2. Motivation So lets say you have this amazing story rolled out, and you're a few pages into it. And then you get something referred to as writers block. Writers block sucks, though every author gets it. What is the worst way to deal with this: ignoring your book. DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES DO THIS. I once abandoned a 300+ paged book because I made that very mistake. Let me give you some tips on how to get through this. 1) Draw your characters. This really does help, it gets your creative juices flowing again. Doesn't matter if you have artistic talent or not, drawing stick figure scenes will always make some new idea pop into your head (hopefully at least). 2) talking to friends. If you love to share your writing then asking your friends or family for suggestions could give you ideas you haven't thought of before. 3) Flat out sitting down and thinking. This one might not work for a lot of people out there, because if you can't sit down for at least an hour and think then this probably isn't the best option for you. But this really helps you create pathways in your brain of what you want to add next to your story. Writers block isn't the only thing about motivation! Sometimes it is hard to sit down and write/type your story. It takes quite a bit of dedication and if your too inconsistent you'll eventually find yourself getting writers block or just giving up on your book. Don't give up! Set an alarm to remind everyday at 3 to start working on your book! It doesn't matter if it is only 200 words a day, or 1000, because consistence is key. 3. Characters Creating characters is my favorite part of writing books! It's not all that complicated, though there are dozens of methods you could use for this. What I like to do is draw out a head shot of a random character. Random combinations here, what ever works best! Lets say our character had scarlet colored hair and light blue eyes. Naming characters is honestly the hardest part of this section. You have to chose something you like, or you'll get unattached to the character. Some people like to put hidden meanings into their names, like Adriana because it is a reference to darkness if she is our antagonist. I honestly don't like doing this, though a lot of people do so I thought that I would put that in here. What I do is I look up a list of popular girl/boy/unis3x names that I like. Then I chose one and assign it to the character. So I'm going to name our red headed girl Bella. Personalities are what you should do next, and I would over complicate this. This should be something random (or not random) you pick. I'm going to make Bella a very bubbly person who likes to smile at people. That's really it! Backstory time! I can't give a ton of advice for this, though play to their personality. If their always happy I wouldn't make them have an incredibly gory backstory, vise versa. YES, you should make backstories of not as main side characters. They don't have to be as detailed, though you should for sure do it. It gives them a more realistic feel. 4. Ending This probably goes against everything you've probably ever heard, though ending a book in with a nice little bow is the hardest part of writing a book. You have to make sure that everything ties together. For example, your character is riding off into the sunset after just defeating the main villain. But then you ask, where did they get the horse? That's kind of a minor thing, though I had a lot of problems with that. Pay close attention to details and try not to add any thing that wasn't in their before. Another thing, don't make the ending tragic. This may vary from person to person, though don't you just hate it when the main character dies at the end of this amazing novel? I'm just saying it isn't worth it. 5. Editing EEE this is a really annoying part. Do not think you have to read your first draft, read the first two chapters, hate it, and rewrite the whole thing. Don't do this, it will take f o r e v e r. Try to be conscious while you are writing it of what your adding, just so you don't have these super