Writing Tip

This is something I’ve been wanting to share for a couple of months:

How to write a story or how to begin a story…

For me stories don’t start with plot – how boring. If a story begins with a plot then the plot overrides characters and setting and then you may find yourself writing things just to fill the plot.

Stories begin with setting and character(s) and what happens to that character.

For example:

On the far side of the moon in 2050 a boy was left alone to die while his parents made one last voyage to earth.

As you see there is no plot, no beginning, middle or end just yet. All you have is setting and character. And there could be a hundred writers that would write a hundred stories just based from that line right there. Your story begins with asking and answering some simple questions…

Why are they on the moon, how did they get there – back story and setting

Describe the moon and structures – setting

Who is the boy? – character

Why are his parents so selfish? – character/motive

What is he going to do? – his personal journey (a hero’s journey – if he is the hero, he could be the villain and that is why his parents left him)

Is he going to live/die? – story development – plot development

Maybe he has a disease and he has to be quarantined…

As you can see the plot now serves the character not the other way around. In fact it kind of sounds like a good story to write. Any one want to write a short story about it? Or even a children’s novel.

Any way that is how I begin stories. That is how I began Trankarri.

I thought what would happen if a boy goes to England every year for Christmas and one year he gets a magical pen so that things he draws comes to life.

As you can see that is a loaded question and now the series that I am writing is eleven books long with an additional six on the backside because once that question was asked it opened the floodgates of all creative imagination in my mind. And the less I tried to write the more I wrote and the more I wrote the more I had to write and now four and a half years later I am still writing…