Effective writing advice for aspiring writers
“Help!” someone cried out. “Get me out of this! My leg’s fractured! Is anyone there? Help!”
“Who was that?” Victor said.
A terrible noise came from a mansion. Hammering on doors could be heard. Screams echoed in the area.
“Sounds like he’s in trouble,” Dave replied, worried.
“Fractured? How? Why?”
“Let’s find out.”
Imagine what you’d feel if you came across these opening paragraphs in a book.
(more…)
In the first part of this post I started explaining about The Big Picture of a Novel. In the second part I will start the process of how to actually be aware about it.
(more…)
For me, writing a novel isn’t the same as writing the short story. The two are very very different, and that’s not for me. That’s saying for everyone.
Writing a short story of 1000-2000 words means you don’t have to worry about the big picture. You just write a gripping event which happened one day and that’s it. You don’t have to worry about the time span your story has either. Writing a short story is certainly easier in that respect. However… there are certain other problems related with it, about which I’m going to inform you in another post.
Back to this post, as I was saying, it’s all different with a novel. There are chapters in a novel, and you can’t write disconnected, disjointed chapters. Your readers will throw your book away if they find it’s very episodic. If you want to write in an episodic style, try the short story then!
So you have to worry about the Big Picture. Find where your chapters are leading to. Find whether they’re leading to the place you want them to lead, or whether they are disobeying you (for a want of a better word). And that is not as easy as it looks. But hey, if this is overwhelming to you, remember that all this stuff is not impossible! Thousands of writers have done this thing. If you like writing, you have to do it. I also have to do it. If there’s one thing that is important for a beginning writer, it’s this: whenever you find a thing that seems just way too difficult, take a break. And then determine to do it. After all, other writers have done the same thing too.
So is writing a novel as easy as it looks? Definitely not! What I have told you is only the teaser. There’s still a lot of stuff left to tell.
Which means this post will have to be cut in parts.
Read part two | part three