Penning the Perfect Tale: Seven Essential Tips for Crafting Engaging Fiction
Follow these to create amazing stories
Writing fiction? Not sure how to start? Well, here are some great tips for writing your short story or novel.
1.Write great characters
Your characters need to be believable and relatable to your readers, so make them well-rounded. Give them character traits and flaws, and think about what motivates them. This last point is important because whatever it is that motivates your character (love, fear, jealousy, money to name but four) will drive their actions which drives your story.
2.Make your settings believable
You don’t have to have real settings. Your settings can be completely made up, but it’s important you provide vivid descriptions of where your action takes place. Think about what the setting looks like, how it smells, how it feels, what are the noises your characters hear? How does your setting play into your story and the atmosphere of the scene? Is it a creepy castle that adds to the spookiness of the story? How does the weather affect it?
3.Structure your plot
Begin with an action that will bring your reader immediately into the story and make them want to learn more. Introduce rising action (what happens that makes your character do what they do?), bring it to a climax and then the resolution. A great story can have two, three or four instances of rising action, climax and resolution eventually culminating in the final one. Introduce obstacles and conflicts between characters to ramp up the tension.
Make sure every part of the story, ever character, every setting, every action, contributes to the story and pushes it forward. Extraneous characters, action or setting will slow your story and lose your reader’s interest.
4.Use the senses
What do your characters see? What do they feel? What do they hear? Is there something they can smell? Is there a taste in the air? And don’t forget the sixth sense. Is there something that’s creeping your protagonist out?
By using the six senses, you can really enrich your story and crank up the emotions of your reader.
5.Pace your story
You will want to think about how you pace out your story. Try and have scenes with action interlaced with slower moments where your characters get to take a brief breather before the next rising conflict begins. This will make your text feel more varied and will help keep your reader engaged with the story.
6. Realistic dialogue
Think carefully about how your characters talk to each other. Only have dialogue if it moves the story forward and it feels right. Read it out to yourself and see if there’s any improvements you could make. If you are using a dialect, use it sparingly. Don’t have full sentences of, a broad dialect that your reader will find difficult to read. Not only will it slow the action down, but could potentially turn your reader away from your book.
7. Okay, I’m saying it, ‘show, don’t tell’
I don’t like this phrase because I think it confuses a lot of people. Basically, what it means is don’t write how a character is feeling or the action that is happening, use other means of getting the same thing across. For instance, don’t write: Emma was angry. You could use instead: Emma folded her arms and pursed her lips. ‘What do you mean I can’t go tonight?’ she demanded.
If you’d like to read more writing advice from me, please follow me. See also: https://danelsonauthor.com/
Here’s some of my other articles on writing:
Three Easy Ways to Start Writing Today https://medium.com/@dawnnelson-46858/three-easy-ways-to-start-writing-today-a63a5b53109d
What People Mean When They Say: Write What You Know https://medium.com/@dawnnelson-46858/what-people-mean-when-they-say-write-what-you-know-f608e2476a2a
The Things I’ve Learned as a Writer https://medium.com/@dawnnelson-46858/the-things-ive-learned-as-a-writer-68d8940c99b5
Five Online Tools to Help You Plan Your Novel https://medium.com/@dawnnelson-46858/five-online-tools-to-help-you-plan-your-novel-982aed39a1dd
Ten Top Tips for Writers — D A Nelson https://medium.com/@dawnnelson-46858/ten-top-tips-for-writers-d-a-nelson-cac02dd9412e