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This is something I wrote a while back, trying to help a friend of mine get started on writing her novel. I'm posting it here because I think it could be very useful to a few people who are new to writing and don't really know what they're getting into.
Please note: This is mostly not for fanfiction writing, but it could still come in handy to you anyway.
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Starting out: Starting a story is difficult. There is no easy way of making an opening to the story you want to write and finding your path to the main plot. However, there is no correct way to do this either.
When first starting out, it's best to just think up bits and pieces of the story, or just go straight to character design. Personally, I find creating my characters before figuring out the plot to be easier, but your experience may differ from mine.
Creating characters can be tough sometimes, especially if you don't know what to base them off of. Most of the time, it's easier to base character's off people you know or yourself to get started. Coming up with character ideas from watching a T.V series or reading another book is also a good way to get ideas. There's nothing wrong with taking ideas from characters in a TV show or book, just as long as you don't make them exact replicas of each other.
Figuring out how to start the story is a challenge by itself. The first sentence is always going to be harder to write. Try to think of a past life for your main character and write a prologue for the story. Prologues can help the reader understand a character with a mysterious past or personality a little better, or give them a general idea of what to expect in coming chapters or books.
Plot design and writing the story: For an author, there is no such thing as an off day. Some days you may write several pages, and some days you may only write a couple of sentences. It doesn't how much you write per day but you HAVE to work on your story every single day of the week! Taking long breaks from your story can make you lose interest in writing and make you lose interest in your own story. I'm speaking out of experience here, so I know what I'm talking about.
Writing a book can take a long time. But if you write one page every day until you finish it, after the course of two-hundred days, you'll have two hundred pages on Microsoft Word. Just write for thirty to sixty minutes a day, and you'll have the book done in no time.
You will run into problems along the way in your story, no matter how much you plan it out. The problems I'm referring to are known as this little trouble maker known as 'Writer's block' The arch enemy of all writers. Writer's block will happen to you one way or another. There's no avoiding it. However, there is a way to quickly overcome it. You're going to think I'm crazy, but the simplest way to get over writer's block is to...write a bunch of crap. Yes I said it. Write things that don't make sense and force the right side of your brain to work while the left side is screaming at you like you just spilled hot coffee on your wife's new dress.
The right side of your brain is what allows you to come up with fictional ideas. Flying ships in space, robots ripping apart a city, or two god-like titans going toe-to-toe and destroying half a continent. That's the power of the right side of your brain. The left side of your brain is your 'common sense' side. Just turn that off. You don't need common sense to write a fiction novel. Honestly, we should have light switches on both sides of our heads. It'd make the writing process a heck of a lot faster if we didn't have logic in the way!
Plot design...there's not really an easy way of putting this. Don't think too far ahead in the story. Write a time line of major events that are supposed to happen, and work your way towards them one event at a time. Whether it's the kiss of the lead male and lead female, or the final battle of the protagonist and the antagonist.
What not to do: Well, obviously you don't want your story to get boring to the reader. Don't put in a lot of pages where the characters are just blabbering to each other over things nobody's going to care about. But at the same time, you don't want to keep your readers in heart pounding suspense throughout the entire story. I mean, you're going to be responsible for a couple thousand heart attacks by doing that. How are you gonna pay that bill?
Make your readers laugh by putting in comedy characters, or make their hearts warm up by writing one of the most heart warming romance works you can think of. And the list goes on. The possibilities are endless when writing.
Now...aside from making your book uninteresting to read by making your characters blabber about nothing...don't pull of a bunch of BS stunts by making thing's just pop out of the clear blue sky. Basically...don't pull a Kishimoto and have your characters turn from weaklings into godlike beings who can destroy a city with the blink of an eye. That stuff gets annoying real fast, and many readers will stop reading your work because of it.
Edit: This should be pretty self-explanatory. Before your book gets published, you will have re-read the entire book twenty times over. No one wants to read something with a grammar mistake in every sentence. So check your work carefully. The more people you have read through your work, the better the results will be probably.
Just follow the tips on this...giant wall of text on your on your computer screen, and you'll be writing like a pro in no time.
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I hope some of you find this useful. I am a published author myself and am writing a book series called Chris Lynheart.
If this did not help you, or you want to ask some questions. Just send me a private message or leave a comment below and I'll get back to you as soon as possible!
Thanks for reading!
Edited by Night Hawk, 23 February 2014 - 05:41 PM.
