Tried Writing, Ran Out Of Ideas, Please Have This Snippet Until I Conjure Up Motivation To Finish It

I may have messed up. I may have, perhaps, created another WIP just a bit late for Camp Nano. But never fear! Introducing…

When Stars Die

The empty clutches of deep space have been their home for years. The abandoned planets that have lain in beautiful destruction for centuries have been their refuge. The nights of the creatures that stalk them with every breath have been their fuel. But something has changed - and Avery is the catalyst. The galaxy that has ignored them for so long has awakened, sending battle carriers and soldiers into Avery’s territory, putting out notices for their capture or confirmed kill. Aliens and humans alike are whipped into a frenzy as entire solar systems are crushed, and time is running out as Avery must face one question above all others - What do you do when stars die?

This is very early in the works and I have not yet fleshed out the characters or plot fully. This will probably be a side project to The DELTA Archives, and I’ll work on it a bit slower than usual. I also plan to make this a duology. But what I can tell you is that there will be a huge amount of world-building, a non-binary protag, and lots of found-family feels! 

Hi! So I have never written anything but I have this idea for a book and don’t know how to start. What tips do you have for beginners?

Where to Go from Initial Book Idea

First, congratulations! It’s pretty exciting when you come up with your first book idea. :) <3Here are some things you can do to get started…

1. Write an in-depth summary of your idea to the extent that it’s fleshed out in your mind. Sometimes, while you’re writing this summary, you’ll be able to flesh out other things as you go. I will often put things in parenthesis if I’m not sure, like: And then the princess steals the guard’s sword and escapes into the corridor. (Maybe it’s not a sword but a dagger?) Which helps me keep track of things I’ll need to figure out in more detail later on.

2. Once you have your in-depth summary, you can start thinking about your protagonist, antagonist (or antagonistic force), and any other main characters. It can be helpful to get this sorted out at the beginning, because quite often your characters (and who they are) will inform the finer details of the story.

3. If you’re not familiar with story structure, now is a good time to take a look at it. Well developed stories follow a similar structure, though that structure can vary from story to story, and how people distill that structure into a template can vary as well. But understanding what that general structure is and seeing how different people lay it out can help you flesh out your own story. I talk about that more in this post. 

4. Next, it’s a good idea to outline your story. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy, but it’s handy to have a step-by-step guide to your story. You may also want to do a timeline, and if you have enough fleshed out, a scene list would be great, too.

5. By this point, you may also want to set up a physical story binder and/or a folder on your desktop where you can organize all of your story-related files.

6. Before you start writing your first draft, you might want to spend a little time doing research and looking for inspiration. This is a great time to put together inspiration boards (digital or physical), cast your characters, and start gathering notes about other important story elements (like setting, for example.) You might also want to do a map of your story world and/or setting, layouts of important buildings/structures, etc.

7. Now it’s time to write! Whether you call it your “zero draft,” “rough draft,” or your “first draft,” this draft is really just about getting the bare bones of your story on paper. You are not writing the final version of your story in one go, so this isn’t the time to worry about quality and perfection. This is where you dip your toes into your story’s world, get to know your characters, and hey–if you feel the urge to poke around in unexpected places or foray off the path to explore organic ideas, do it! In the very first draft of your story, you can do whatever you want!

8. Once you get your first draft completed, if you feel like you have a really strong first draft and there aren’t any structural edits you know you need to make, you can assemble a team of beta readers to get feedback. Or, if you did any of that poking around or foraying I mentioned, and if you know there are structural changes you want to make, do that in your second draft, and then you can send that to betas for feedback. At this point, you just keep editing, tightening up, revising, and polishing until you have your finished draft.

9. Sometime during this editing and revision phase, you’ll want to think about which publishing path you want to pursue: traditional or indie? Traditional publishing is where you find an agent (which doesn’t cost anything upfront, they get paid if and when they sell your manuscript) and they find a publisher for your story. Querying agents can take months or even years and there’s a lot of competition, but there are success stories every single day. Indie publishing, aka “self-publishing,” is a great path for those who want more control over their novel and publishing process. Hopefully by the time you get to the point of deciding between both routes, I’ll have a “traditional vs indie publishing” guide up for you. :)

Best of luck with your story! <3 

Writing Tip February 26th

33 Ways to Write Stronger Characters (Part 1/3)

To Give:

1. Give them a goal. A strong goal not only gives your character purpose, it helps you map out your plot with ease.

2. Give them a motivation. Something is driving your character to chase down their goal. It could be a negative emotion like fear, guilt, or regret; a negative trait like pride, vanity, or greed; or a positive emotion like love, determination, or passion. Whatever the case, giving your character a motivation will make the actions they take to achieve their goal seem realistic and relatable.

3. Give them purpose. Consider how your character adds to the story. Do they create conflict or undergo emotional development? If not, your character will seem pointless.

4. Give them a fear. Fear is an emotion that all humans feel. It leads to insecurity, impatience, and conflict, which is why fear is the perfect emotion to include in your story. It both hooks readers and drives the plot forward. Just don’t let your characters cower in fear for long; make sure that they take action, too.

5. Give them a flaw. Perfection is boring. Imperfection is human. Write a human story by giving your character flaws. Go beyond the physical and give your character a poor personality trait, bad standing in society, or an unpleasant circumstance to live in.

6. Give them a history. Allow your character’s past to shape who they become. Give your character a rich history that will affect their present-day decisions.

7. Give them a present story. Don’t drown your novel in backstory. Give your character a present-day story, a quest or a journey that will shape and grow them.

8. Give them a personality. Don’t let your character have a dull, flat personality. Make your character complex by giving them contradictory traits and avoiding clichés at all costs.

9. Give them interests. A character that doesn’t like anything simply isn’t interesting. Give your character a passion, even if it’s one your readers will hate. Fervor breeds interest, no matter the subject.

10. Give them a quirk. Everyone has their strange habits. And strange is just as interesting as passionate. Give your character a quirk to help them stand out from the crowd.

11. Give them a name. More specifically, give your character a name with purpose. Showcase a time period, foreshadow their actions, or hint at their interests. Give your character’s name a role in your story.

12. Give them a desire. Desires are powerful motivators. Some desires may lead your character to accomplish their goal while others may lead your character away.

13. Give them a love. How can your readers love your character if your character loves no one? Your character doesn’t have to be all hugs and smiles, but they do need to hold love for at least one person if you want your readers to like them.

-She’s Novel Blog

Hello, Writeblr!

I’m new and very socially awkward but I made this blog to collect character/story inspiration and writing advice, and I’d love to make some connections with fellow writers and hear about the cool stories you’re all working on. Maybe even share some writing positivity and snippets of my own work.

A litte bit about me: I’m Laura, I’m from Wales, I’m fast becoming a ‘tumblr old’ (if I’m not there already), and I’ve been writing since I was about twelve or so. Up until now though I’ve mostly concentrated on play-by-post roleplay on various message boards. I’ve never actually written anything particularly lengthy and I’d like to branch out a little bit and try my hand at plotting out a whole story.

I love to read fantasy, magical realism, historical fiction, children’s literature, and anything based on folklore, myths or fairy tales. Those are the kind of genres I’m primarily interested in trying to write too. Outside of reading and writing I’m primarily a history nerd, a (partial) dog-owner, a student, and a folk music junkie.

I’ve only got the one WIP at the moment, a Harry Potter fanfic featuring an older Charlie Weasley as he tries to unravel a mystery at a dragon sanctuary in Wales. I’m more of pantser than a planner so it’s all still very vague at the moment but I’m hoping it’ll have a little bit of adventure, some original-ish worldbuilding, and a lot of cool dragons. Everyone loves dragons, right? A lot of OCs will be involved too so I ever get close to finishing it I might try to turn it into an original NaNoWriMo project or something. (Hey, if Stephenie Meyer and E.L. James can do it… )

Anyway, if you think our interests might overlap in any way please do like or reblog this and I’ll most likely follow you (as @lothlaurien, since this is a sideblog).

VERY BASIC WRITING PLANNER

This is the template I start off with whenever I have a new idea.

Overall

Themes :

Aesthetics :

Protagonists :

Antagonists :

Premise :

Subplots :

Characters

Name :

Age :

Sexuality :

Race/Ethnicity :

Role :

Position :

Goal :

Motivation :

Greatest Fear :

Secret :

Physical Description :

Recognizable Physical Traits :

Important backstory (if any) :

Biggest flaws :

Important Relationships : (Love, sibling, mentor, enemies, close friends)

Plotting

Everything has a beginning, middle and end. Therefore, I divide my whole book into three acts, three acts into three blocks, and three blocks into three chapters. They can all vary of course- but having 27 points really helps. This method is not my own- I used Katytastic’s. Click here to learn more.

Basically everything has these three points-

Set up

Conflict

Resolution

World

Races :

Creatures :

Religions :

Magic System :

Technology :

( This is very basic but a good place to start imho)

This also follows something Brandon Sanderson said: a story is the intersection of characters, plot and world tied together by conflict.

I really hope this helped you! Reblog if it did :)

I was wondering if you knew any basic guides to outlining a novel for the first time?

Outlining a story is very, very important. Without an outline and thorough planning, your story will veer off in wildly different directions and will cost you a ton of time editing later, like my book did.

1. Get the characters down first

Characters are like the chess pieces of the story. Their moves and strengths/weaknesses will decide what is going to happen and how it will happen. Sure, you can have a nice plot and setting, but without the characters, the story is meaningless.

Here is the character chart that I usually use:

Name (First/Middle/Last/Maiden name)

Aliases/Nicknames

Age

Race

Gender

Sexuality

Height

Weight

Eye color

Hair color

Clothing style

Religion

Political views

Personality Traits

Strengths and Weaknesses

Likes and Dislikes

Family

Friends

Enemies

Role in the story

Backstory/past

2. Choose a template

Just bulleting the events does not give the plot the dimension that it deserves and does not really accommodate side plots.

I personally use the zigzag method that I discovered from this post. I branch off of the zigzags for my side plots so it looks kind of like a graph.

You can also use the subway method, which I found on the nanowrimo website.

There are a whole other host of outlines to choose from if you search them up!

3. Know that you don’t have to stick to it

An outline is just that: an outline. It’s not the final decision for the plot, it’s the first draft for the plot. If you’re writing and one of the points just isn’t working anymore, you don’t have to keep it because it was a part of your outline.

Write what feels right.

Happy outlining, and good luck with your story!

2 Tips for Adding Emotional Weight to Your Story

As writers, we want our work to hold weight — for our characters’ actions, emotions, and desires to resonate with and impact our readers. But how do we make that happen?

The most helpful advice, in my experience, has been to:

Make the internal become external, and

Make the external become internal.

Let’s talk about what that means and how these tips can help you add emotional weight to your story.

1. Make the internal become external

To “make the internal become external” is to take the interior aspects of your character (their fears, desires, pains, and epiphanies) and find ways to express them with external actions. For example:

If Marcos realizes his girlfriend doesn’t truly love him, don’t just make him mope; have him throw the engagement ring he purchased into the river.

If Amelia feels overworked and stressed at her new job, don’t just show her exhausted in bed; show her bailing on plans with the people she cares about or giving up her favorite pastimes.

If Kara is afraid to get onstage and perform as Lady Macbeth, don’t just have her wait in fear; make her run out on the show on opening night.

By expressing your character’s emotions and realizations through clear external actions, you add weight to what they’re going through.

2. Make the external become internal

The goal here is similar, but reversed. Where before you were taking an internal emotion and accentuating it with action, now you’re taking the external elements of your story (plot, character actions, external conflicts, etc.) and making them have internal ramifications for your characters. For example:

If Thomas gets slapped by his older sister during a disagreement, don’t just move on like it never happened; make it change the dynamic of their relationship for the rest of the story.

If Davy’s new boyfriend excessively dotes upon him, don’t just have him awkwardly brush him off; make Davy tentative and uncertain because he’s never been in a healthy relationship before.

If Anna loses the championship match of a tennis tournament, don’t just have her grudgingly accept defeat; make her feel crushed because of her impossibly high expectations for herself.

By taking external actions or events and tying them to your character’s deepfelt emotions and, when possible, their core struggle, you add weight to what happens in your story. Everything starts to matter, and that makes for captivating storytelling.

A Final Word

I want to clarify that I’m not telling you to make your characters act and react in ways that don’t make sense for them. Always stay true to your characters. 

But I do encourage you to always look for opportunities to merge the internal and external aspects of your story — because that’s the key to telling stories with true emotional weight.

Good luck, and good writing, everybody. :)

— — —

Everyone has stories worth telling, including you. For helpful writing tips and advice, check out the rest of my blog.

A Guide to Making Up Diseases (as Explained by a Biologist)

So listen up y’all, nothing drives me crazier as both a writer and a scientist than seeing alien diseases that make no fuckin’ sense in a human body. 

If you’re talking about alien diseases in a non-human character, you can ignore all this.

But as far as alien diseases in humans go, please remember:

DISEASE SYMPTOMS ARE AN IMMUNE RESPONSE.

Fever? A response to help your immune cells function faster and more efficiently to destroy invaders.

Sore/scratchy throat? An immune response. Diseases that latch onto the epithelium of the throat (the common cold, the flu) replicate there, and your body is like “uh no fuckin’ thanks” and starts to slough off those cells in order to stop the replication of new virus in its tracks. So when it feels like your throat is dying? guess what it literally is. And the white spots you see with more severe bacterial infections are pus accumulation, which is basically dead white blood cells, and the pus is a nice and disgusting way of getting that shit outta here.

(No one really knows why soreness and malaise happens, but some scientists guess that it’s a byproduct of immune response, and others suspect that it’s your body’s way of telling you to take it easy)

headache? usually sinus pressure (or dehydration, which isn’t an immune response but causes headaches by reducing blood volume and causing a general ruckus in your body, can be an unfortunate side effect of a fever) caused by mucous which is an immune response to flush that nasty viral shit outta your face.

Rashes? an inflammatory response. Your lymphocytes see a thing they don’t like and they’re like “hEY NOW” and release a bunch of chemicals that tell the cells that are supposed to kill it to come do that. Those chemicals cause inflammation, which causes redness, heat, and swelling. They itch because histamine is a bitch.

fatigue? your body is doing a lot–give it a break!

here is a fact:

during the Spanish 1918 Plague, a very strange age group succumbed to the illness. The very young and very old were fine, but people who were seemingly healthy and in the prime of life (young adults) did not survive. This is because that virus triggered an immune response called a cytokine storm, which basically killed everything in sight and caused horrific symptoms like tissue death, vasodilation and bleeding–basically a MASSIVE inflammatory response that lead to organ damage and death. Those with the strongest immune systems took the worst beating by their own immune responses, while those with weaker immune systems were fine.

So when you’re thinking of an alien disease, think through the immune response.

Where does this virus attack? Look up viruses that also attack there and understand what the immune system would do about it. 

Understand symptoms that usually travel together–joint pain and fever, for example.

So please, please: no purple and green spotted diseases. No diseases that cause glamorous fainting spells and nothing else. No mystical eye-color/hair-color changing diseases. If you want these things to happen, use magic or some shit or alien physiology, but when it’s humans, it doesn’t make any fuckin’ sense. 

This has been a rant and I apologize for that. 

Novel Structure

Building an Unforgettable Character

Character building is one of my favorite parts of writing a novel. I love seeing where they’re going to take me and where their journey is going to end up. Even though I plot extensively before starting a new novel, I always leave room for the characters to lead me somewhere new.

So, what’s the secret to building an unforgettable character? Here are some tips to lead you in the right direction:

They need to be relatable

If your audience can’t relate to your character, that’s usually a huge problem. We relate to characters like Harry Potter not because we’ve been to Hogwarts and practiced magic, but because we can relate to his pain and to his connection with his friends. He represents emotions that a lot of us have struggled with and he doesn’t quite feel like he fits in. His struggle to find himself is relatable.

Take some time to figure out what your character ultimately represents and don’t be afraid to bring emotion into it. We want to feel connected to your characters and we want to find something in them that matches something in us.

They need to be realistic

It’s important that your character’s actions should remain realistic. Not in the sense of remaining true to our world, but to theirs. Their actions should make sense in context to what they’re going through. If you’re constantly questioning why a character would do something because it just doesn’t make logical sense, you’ll have trouble respecting that character. It’s important that we understand their actions.

They need to be proactive

A good character is a go-getter. I’m not saying they will always make the right decisions or that they’re all good people, but all main characters/protagonists should be able to do things on their own. I’m also not saying they don’t need help, but they need to overcome the big challenges on their own or through what they’ve learned. They can’t just stand around waiting for everyone else to finish things. They need to take initiative at some point, and this should be due to their personal growth throughout the story.

I understand that this point does depend on the story you’re writing. Maybe your character is an unmotivated person. Maybe they’re lazy.  This usually doesn’t matter because a story isn’t interesting if that person remains inactive. They can have periods of inactivity and become unmotivated during parts of your story, but ultimately that does need to change at some point.

They need to have flaws

Flaws will humanize your character and are usually what stands in your character’s path to success. A character that does everything right all the time and doesn’t have any growth because they’re already perfect is VERY BORING. They should fail and they should learn lessons. I’m not saying all their flaws should be fixed by the end of the novel because that’s not how people operate in real life, but character flaws should help build interesting layers.

-Kris Noel