Beginnings are difficult. You need to set-up a story, hook your reader, give a lot of information but not too much information, and make it entertaining, intriguing, or suspenseful all in one go. Beginnings are hard. But they’re also easy, because they are the beginning.
Tag: Characters
Point #3: The Care Package
Even if you haven’t thought of it yet, or even if it doesn’t matter to the overall plot, your character has a past. And in that past is something important to that character.
Not Every Character Needs To Be Relatable
There are plenty of vile characters people latch on to, people who are not vile themselves. And that is because people understand that character, even if in reality, if they were to meet, they’d never agree with them.
Session 25: Writing Prompt – Conversations with Characters
I want you to create a scene (or a number of scenes) where your characters are all talking. It could be an argument, a formal debate, a Sunday lunch. Whatever you want. The point is to get them into a room and talking, about anything. The point is to see how they think and how they respond to what others think.
Session 24: Writing Prompt – Out of Their Comfort Zone
I want you to put your characters into a scene. I want you to put them into a ridiculous and/or dangerous situation, and write how they go about getting out of it. And to be clear, I mean all your important characters, villains included. Put them all into the scene.
Session 22: Revision
Yes, you can finish your first draft fast and you can write beautiful prose, but if there are plot-holes, if the characters make no sense, if there are massive mistakes, then no one is going to care how beautiful your writing is.
Revision is your most important tool.
Session 17: You Should See The Other Guy
This way of thinking gave me the chance to spend more time with my villains, to create them to be more sympathetic, and if not more sympathetic, at least more understandable. It also gave me time to give them obstacles to climb over, and faults, and weaknesses, and set-backs, and real emotional reactions to those set-backs that wouldn’t have been there. It gave me time to get to know these characters I created, and to make them well-rounded, to nail down their voice.
Session 16: Writing Prompt – The Quiet Scene
In every story, there will be “action”. In an action story, it will be an actual fight. In an adventure story, it will be an exciting set-piece. In romance, it will be the first date, or the first fight, or the breakdown of the relationship. In horror, it will be the monster attack, or the suspense scene, or even the jump scare. Every story has its “action” scene, the scenes that propel the reader forward and make them wonder how this all ends. These scenes are exciting, and sometimes offer twists in the story. But if a story is all action, there’s no time for a reader to digest what is happening, there’s no time for them to understand what the implications of what you just wrote really are.
And so, we have the “quiet” scenes.
Treat Your Characters with Respect
Characters aren’t props. They are living, breathing people inside of your head. And when the reader/audience experiences a character, they become a living creature inside their heads too. They are real in our minds, even if they aren’t flesh and blood. We have laughed with characters, smiled at them, cried because of them, and raged over them. They may just be characters, but they produce real emotions in us. And so we should treat them with the respect they deserve.
Session 13: Writing Prompt – A Character of Conflict
In this session, you will be writing two scenes. Write the scenes out in full, as you picture, with all the details you want in them. These are not practice scenes (unless you want them to be). Make the scenes as long or as short as you want, but include everything you’d usually include. Dialogue, setting, actions, everything.
Professional Amateur Writers 