Today I thought I would share a little wisdom... from other writers all at different stages of the writing journey. So I went and pestered several of my writer friends, asking them all "what things do you wish you knew before writing." Here are their insightful responses!
I was given the opportunity by Lorraine Amber’s to be a guest post on her blog! This is my first-time guest blogging 🙂 so I discussed the early pages of a manuscript. Enjoy and do check out Lorraine’s blog it is full of great articles.
As writers we have to a pretty hefty job of carrying all those characters, worlds, ideas around in our heads desperate to come out and be added to the blank page.
Today I want to talk about the first few pages of your book.
The first pages of a book are what sell it. You can have a fancy cover, great blurb and a dazzling plot – but if you fail in the first few pages, you could have lost your chance to shine.
This is one of the reasons I usually write my first chapter last or at least after much more of the book is written. This allows me to move the scenes around and sometimes find a mid-scene that works better for the first chapter.
From publishers to readers, those few pages have to be gripping (not talking suspenseful, unless…you know…you’re writing a suspense novel!) but they…
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So today I want to talk about the massive cast of character. I am talking about main and secondary characters (not the odd village baker passing through a random scene, never to be heard from again). If you're not sure what I mean by large cast of characters, think Lord of the Rings. As well as the main cast of the Fellowship, there were additional characters that came in and hung around for a while, fleshed out and with their own thread in the plot.
I have read a number of articles that talk about speeding up your story. They talk about how a writer can "bog down" the plot by going too slowly. How the plot should barrel along like some runaway train, dragging the reader with it. So today's post is about pacing.
This mini-post has been churning around in my head recently after I read a short story online. While the story seemed okay, the word "very" rang heavily throughout and by the end I was just annoyed. As writers, I believe we should avoid the word very. Don't get me wrong, it's part of the language and you can throw it around in your everyday speech and type it in emails and even in blogs (I'm sure I've dumped it in more than one of my posts) but when it comes to your writing, your actual stories, I say - leave it out.
