Tip 4

Creating a Character

It doesn’t matter what genre of fiction you’re writing; you’re going to have to create a large number of characters. These will be the major protagonists and antagonists as well as minor characters that may only appear in one scene. Here are a few tips on how to create those characters.

Don’t start a character with a name or physical appearance. Start with their backstory. You need to know how these characters will react to certain situations and delving into their past is the best way of doing this. That said, don’t waste your time writing every detail of their past. Only write the basics and anything else relevant to the story; you don’t need to know every single detail about their life, just the important bits.

Give your characters problems. The main character in your book must have the biggest problem but the other major characters should also have problems, whether they are the same as the main character, or something else entirely. Start by thinking about this question; “What does this character want more than anything else in the world?”. When you’ve worked their main aim out, start creating problems that will get in the way of that aim.

Empathize with your characters, do not sympathise with them. Understand what makes them tick and understand what causes them to act the way they do, but don’t let that understanding change tempt you to go easy on a character. If they’ve done something bad, don’t let them off the hook if they had a good reason for doing what they did; they need to face the consequences of their actions

Write from your life. If you’ve had a particular experience you want to put in your story, use what you remember to write it. Emotions, feelings, hopes and fears are all a lot easier to write about when you know exactly what it’s like from past experiences.

Tip 3

Six Quick Tips for Writing Descriptions

1. Close your eyes and try to recreate the image in your head.
2. Remember that people have five senses. Don’t just rely on visual description.
3. Adjectives should describe, not evaluate. Describing skin as smooth or tan is better than describing it as pretty or perfect.
4. Don’t over-describe things. A description should enhance the story, not drag it to a stop.
5. Don’t describe things that don’t matter. If you spend a paragraph discussing a minor character’s mustache-grooming ritual, it had better be important to your story.
6. Draw your descriptions from real-life memories.

Tip 2

Dialogue can often be tricky to work with when writing. Writers often struggle to find the exact words they need. Here are some tips to avoid coming across problems in your work.

Listen to how people talk. The speech needs to sound natural and can’t sound stupid. For example, a lot of people say ‘cos’ instead of ‘because’. Use this in your story. However don’t use ‘cos’ all of the time because the reader will think that you got lazy when writing. With words like these, use a mix. Also remember the characters. Some characters will not use any slang language and some will be the complete opposite. Write the dialogue based on the character.

Never provide too much information at once. The reader will get fed up if they realise they are being told all of the important facts. Unless a character is telling a story, let the story unfold naturally and spread out the important facts throughout the book to keep the reader interested.

Break up large chunks of dialogue. Readers will get bored with huge chunks of text (unless, as above, it is a character telling a story) so if you see a large block of dialogue in your story, use physical details to split it. Even if the physical detail is just a character moving around, it gives the reader a small break from dialogue.

Use ‘said’! 90% of the time you should use ‘said’ when describing text. While it is good to use other words (ie asked, responded, exclaimed etc), readers will become annoyed of having to imagine every single way a phrase is said. Also using ‘said’ means that the reader is paying attention to your dialogue and not the way the dialogue was said.

Profanity is found in many books and is OK to use but use it sparingly. Readers (particularly young readers and elderly readers) will feel disgusted reading constant foul language and may even be tempted to put the book down. It is OK to use swear words as people do in real life but don’t add them in just for the sake of it.

The final tip is the most obvious. Punctuate your dialogue correctly. Readers won’t read your story if they are feeling lost trying to follow your dialogue.

By following these simple rules it should be easy to write good dialogue that will keep readers interested in your story.

Keep writing.

Tip 1

If you want to write, you have to read.  If you want to write well, you have to read a lot. There are two main reasons why you should read.

1) To find out how the author surprises you, and how they managed to pull it off

2) To know what's been done so you don’t do the same thing

There are stories that have been done to the death and you don’t want to end up just writing something everyone’s seen before. Use other’s ideas but mould in to something people haven’t seen.

Reading also helps build up your vocabulary and your spelling, grammar and punctuation will all improve as well.

It doesn’t matter what genre your writing, read all genres of book to get a better feel of how people write. Read a variety of books, old and new; once you know what’s been done, you can write something that hasn’t…..

Keep writing