Writing genre fiction is work and learning the craft of writing will help you write well-paced engaging stories with solid characters even when you don’t feel artistic or inspired to write. There is only one way to learn the craft of writing, and that is with hours of deliberate practice. There is no short cut around it. This path is also one way to write stories, but not THE only way.
Story Craft Story craft is about getting thoughts, emotions, and images from your head to another person in the most impactful and accurate way possible. You do this by creating a narrative about a protagonist settling out to obtain an important goal. As the story progresses, it becomes more and more doubtful that they will achieve their goal based on the antagonistic forces set against them in the story. In the final climax, your protagonist either succeeds or fails based on their choices and actions they make in the course of the story. Story craft, in the end, is just a toolbox used to exploit and manipulate human psychology and emotions in your favor. Conflict All stories are about conflict. To have conflict in a story ALL characters in a story need to have goals, and if they don’t, they don’t belong in the story. The best way to create conflict in character is to give them a specific important goal and a really strong why and motivation to achieve that goal. When you're telling your story, with the intention of having the readers construct a movie in their heads as they are reading it, you NEED to follow the stimulus-response flow. If you don't, you will kick your readers out of the movie they’ve been creating in their heads faster than you can say “Let me explain.” Once that happens, you’ve lost your opportunity of telling an engaging story. Point of View Success or failure of your story comes down to your choice of your point of view character. First person point of views is “perfect point of views” because that's not only how we see the world ourselves, but it's also the most effective way to get your readers into the story world fast. Downsides of using the first person point of view are that you need to start tracking what other characters are doing “off stage.” This approach will force you to make your protagonist very proactive, nosy and in everyone's business as that's the only way they will get the information they need to get to their goal or overcome their current obstacle. Third person viewpoints allow you to add more than one POV character into the story and expand the creativity you’ll have in telling the story. It, however, comes with the complexity and danger of messing things up for the reader's engagement in the story and the characters. Its recommended that you start with the first-person viewpoint first before moving into the third-person point of view. When wondering which characters to pick when writing, choose the character that has the most to lose in that scene, as you will have the characters and the readers deeply invested in the stakes and outcomes of that scene. Story Skeleton The story skeleton used to build your novel/s, characters, subplots, scenes, sequels and climax on top of can fit into a two-sentence framework. [When something happens] [Your Protagoinist] [pursues a goal]. But will they succeed when [Antagonist provides opposition]? When brainstorming a story idea, go through 99 iterations of this story question and pick the one that resonates with you the most before moving on to build anything else for your story.
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AuthorLover of stories and the craft of telling great stories. ArchivesCategories |