Tips for writing a novel?

[Marz]

Lately I've been trying to write a novel but I've been having some difficulties with compiling a story and to use grammar and words that seem fitting for the Style of Writing..I am still learning the ropes and some tips would be helpful.

Also what do I need to look at while writing a novel.

[Rezzy]

Starting small with maybe a short story would be a good step for getting the basics down before diving into a novel.

I'm not sure I understand the rest of your questions, but I could try offering some tips once I've slept for tonight.

[Augestein]

For me, I honestly take a sort of an exhaustive approach to writing anything that's more than a quick short story that's meant to make a point for someone than entertain.

Here's what I do: establish concepts first and then expand upon them. Keep it as simple and basic as possible when you start out, and then broaden the scope of the world. For instance, you need to decide if the story is driven by the characters or events or even the world itself. From here , expand upon everything else to allow for ideas to be elaborated on.

I'll start with an example: "Bob buys groceries for New Year's Celebration." From this one sentence, we have three components that we can definitely expand on. We have a character "Bob," and we have his action "buying groceries," and we have an event "New Year's Celebration." Now we have a story! But as it is now, it's not very interesting and the plot isn't there, so we need to expand on each component. So essentially what we need to do is make a list of characteristics for Bob, or at the very least, we need to figure out what led him to going to buy groceries. The easiest way I find to figure this out is by asking questions and answering them (that way, when you start writing longer and more complicated stories, you never have to "wing it" so to speak because you already gave the characters motivations for their actions, which means that you'll never have moments where you have characters behave nonsensically to move the plot along.)

Why is he buying the groceries? Does he want to buy them? Where is he going to buy them?

Let's answer these questions:

Why is he buying the groceries? Bob is buying the groceries because it's New Year's and he plans on hosting a celebration for the party.

Does he want to buy them? Under normal circumstances, Bob finds shopping a nuisance, but he can't throw a good party without shopping because he doesn't have enough snack foods.

Where is he going to buy them? He's going to buy them from his local store: Cub Foods. It's the cheapest place that we can think of that has everything that he needs. It's also close enough to his home to quickly buy the produce.

Okay, so we have a basic premise that just got expanded upon. We even managed to add some characteristics to Bob. We established that he doesn't particularly like shopping, but he's still the host of the party, which leads me to think that Bob either enjoying to host the party, or some event happened that caused Bob to have to host regardless of his opinion. We've also gave an actual place for Bob to go shopping. The next step is to expand upon those attributes until you have enough concepts to actually create a plot. IE, now that we've established that Bob is hosting, we've given him a motivation in the story. Now that we know that Bob dislikes shopping, we can understand that Bob really wants the party to happen , so much that he's willing to do something that he doesn't particularly enjoy doing to eventually partake in the activity -- either because he's forced to, or because he wants to (you decide). We've also brought a location into the world, and even felt that it was important to detail that the place is nearby. We can ask more questions upon those concepts until we have a story that's essentially writing itself. As all w'd be doing in this story is answering all of the questions that we've brought up from the initial premise. The same story could literally go anywhere from such a base premise. This is a good thing.

I'm not going to go through the whole thing as I feel that doing that would be more of a tutorial or a blog sort of post and might come across as pretentious (as I've never actually officially released anything), but I hope you understand what I'm saying. We should also take note that we actually have a location in our hypothetical world -- remember, we don't need to establish the entire world around Bob, just enough to give the audience a grasp on comprehending the initial story we crafted. Don't get too hung up on trying to create a grand world unless this world brings upon a reason that Bob cannot buy groceries for the New Year's party. Keep that initial premise posted in your face at all moments. One of the biggest problems that a significant portion of writers have is that they realize that a good plot requires development and expansion of concepts, but they spend too much time explaining things rather than just moving the plot along.

I find that taking an exhaustive approach is one of the better ways of working by virtue that you can stop expanding when you feel that you've appropriately described the situation of Bob buying groceries for New Year's. This does mean that for longer stories you'll have like a book of notes / lore for the story that might actually be longer than the book itself, but I find this is much easier than just writing the story as you go. When you do that, you'll often find contradictions throughout the story, characters being forgotten about throughout the story, or even worse, plot points just disappearing throughout the story.

In terms of actually sitting down and writing the plot, the biggest thing I can say to you is this: write a synopsis first.

That way, you know exactly how the plot is going to go for the story before you even start adding flair to the story or even dialogue exchanges between characters. When writing a story, I feel that there should never be a moment where I need to stop and *think* about how the plot should go or what a character should say. If I do, then I need to go back to the story board and tweak some things or review the concepts I made in the first place. However, I should add that sometimes characters evolve in different ways from how you originally planned, so don't be afraid to alter the plot if your characters start interacting in ways that you didn't originally conceive-- it happens. I've written a story where there was a subplot where a man and a woman were supposed to fall in love with each other towards the end, but the two had motivations that were so different from each other, and they spent so little time talking to each other that it didn't even make much sense for them to fall in love. Thus the subplot was inevitably thrown out. Sure, I could have done the "time skip" thing a lot of authors do, but I feel that time skips to make characters hook up with each other is lazy and forced.

[Rezzy]

I can't think of much more to add, but I'll re-emphasize

write a synopsis first.

Also, it's a good idea to have a story first, then make it into a novel, rather than have a novel and try to get a story to fill it. I would suggest coming up with a few ideas and crafting them into short stories, and if they compound into something that you can make into a novel-length idea, go for it. You don't want to try for a novel right off the bat and struggle to have enough material to flesh it out.

[Marz]

Thank you both so much

[Thane]

In addition to what has been said already, I would recommend finding someone who could read what you write. Writing normally takes a lot of skill, and going straight for a novel without even really knowing how to structure it would not end well. Getting a few pointers would help.

[SullyMcGully]

I would definitely start by writing a synopsis. Before adding onto it though, I would ask a friend to look it over and point out anything that feels like it was stolen from a different story. A lot of what we think are our best ideas are actually never our ideas to begin with, and it takes someone else to point that out. And it's always better to know that before you get into writing the actual manuscript.

Oh yeah, and be sure to pick someone who will be honest with you to look over your drafts. Your mom will probably think everything you write is God-breathed, but a friend will know that he won't hurt your feelings by criticizing your work.

[Grammy]

On 02/01/2017 at 10:57 PM, Thane said:

In addition to what has been said already, I would recommend finding someone who could read  https://www.gabeba.com/instant-knockout-review-results about the Instant Knockout what you write. Writing normally takes a lot of skill, and going straight for a novel without even really knowing how to structure it would not end well. Getting a few pointers would help.

You should read and write a lot. Good writing comes with practice.

Edited May 12, 2017 by Grammy