“Speak only when your words are more beautiful than silence.”
— Imam Ali
for the draft thing: when i start writing novels i always have a lot of beginning, a fair amount of backstory, a solid ending, and maybe one or two key events in between, but nothing in the middle. i'm never sure how to approach this and it usually kills a lot of my projects :/ not sure if this is a question you can answer easily but if there's any tips i'd love to hear it!
I’ve gathered a couple of resources that I believe may help you with this.
Coming Up With Scene Ideas
How To Engage The Reader
Pacing Appropriately
Balancing Detail & Development
Writing The Middle of Your Story
Powering Through The Zero-Draft Phase
Maintaining Writing Momentum
How To Prevent Getting Stuck
Writing Your Way Through The Plot Fog
Resources For Plot Development
Guide To Plot Development
How To Foreshadow
Novel Planning 101
Tackling Subplots
Things A Reader Needs From A Story
Planning A Scene In A Story
How To Fit Character Development Into Your Story
And some prompts in case you have trouble getting the creative juices flowing while you’re brainstorming...
Romantic Prompts
Angst Prompts
Dramatic Prompts
Suspenseful Prompts
Sad Prompts
20 Sentence Story Prompt
31 Days of Character Development : May 2018 Writing Challenge
31 Days of Plot Development : January 2019 Writing Challenge
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Masterlist | WIP Blog
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“Everything you say should be true, but not everything true should be said.”
— Voltaire (via quotemadness)
“I do not think I’m easy to define. I have a wandering mind. And I’m not anything that you think I am.”
— Syd Barrett (via quotemadness)
How do you introduce an antagonist into a story? I'm stuck. They are important to the plot.
The antagonist should be introduced in a memorable way that is useful to the story. However, first appearances and introductions can be different thing, and introducing them as a character versus introducing them as the antagonist can be two separate events entirely.
When you’re introducing the antagonist, you should keep in mind what the reader knows, and what they have yet to learn. Sure, maybe they know this person is the main character’s roommate, and they’re finding out that this roommate has helped their significant other cheat on them, but they don’t know that the roommate has held a grudge since high school which informed the decision to help them cheat. The antagonist’s introduction should be a strategic disclosure of key information.
The introduction should also be memorable enough to evoke its own details in future scenes regarding the character. Perhaps what they say or do in their introduction should come up later. Their introduction should act as a bookend to their arc throughout the novel, so keep the ending in mind as you write their beginning. You must also be mindful that this is probably the first (or a new first) impression of that character on the reader, so you want to set the tone for their presence in the story and offer some preliminary character development for the reader to build on as the plot progresses.
Here are some other resources you may find helpful:
Resources For Describing Characters
How To Fit Character Development Into Your Story
Making Characters Unpredictable
Writing Good Villains
Giving Characters Distinct Voices in Dialogue
Gradually Revealing Character’s Past
Tips on Introducing Characters
Creating Villains
How To Write A Good Plot Twist
How To Foreshadow
Tackling Subplots
Tips On Dialogue
Writing Intense Scenes
Tips on Writing Flashbacks
Describing emotion through action
A Guide To Tension & Suspense
Foreshadowing The Villain
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Masterlist | WIP Blog
If you enjoy my blog and wish for it to continue being updated frequently and for me to continue putting my energy toward answering your questions, please consider Buying Me A Coffee, or pledging your support on Patreon, where I offer early access and exclusive benefits for only $5/month.
“Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.”
— Stephen King
“Forget all the reasons why it wont work and believe the one reason why it will.”
— Unknown
“Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.”
— Benjamin Franklin
I'm just a weird girl who likes to read about history, mythology and feminism.
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