Before we can go on an adventure with a character, we need to become friends with them. Learn about them. Empathize with them.
One book that does that extremely well is The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas. At the beginning of the book, the main character is in one of the most uncomfortably-relatable scenarios: being dragged to a party by a friend that she doesn’t want to go to.
Boring descriptions are boring. When writing a story, it’s important to not only engage your reader with the plot, setting, and characters, but also with the very words on the page.
If you’re not having fun describing something, your reader won’t have fun visualizing it!
You’ve found the secret to eternal youth: peanut butter. Thanks to your reverse peanut butter allergy, consuming the creamy concoction actually makes you more youthful.
The only problem? You’ve been kind of lazy these past 80 years and forgot to eat any. Now you’re old, weak, and can’t open the jar of Skippy.
One of the hardest parts of writing a story that doesn’t get talk about often enough is getting to the final draft. What separates the 5th, 6th, 18th draft from the final one?
There’s no one single answer to that question, but a big part of it comes down to scalpel-level editing.
Writing good romance is hard. More than any other genre, you have to crank up your descriptions and characterization to the max. No one will care about amorphous blobs macking on each other, they want humans!
And writing a romance story that takes place right after a war adds a whole other challenge to the equation.
“As Yams McKenzie set down his bulbous, starchy body on the surface of the moon, he remembered his days as just a sprout in the ground.”
WikiHow is one of the craziest places on the Internet, and that’s saying something. It has articles on literally everything, from How to Keep Your Glasses From Fogging Up to How to Calculate Pi by Throwing Frozen Hot Dogs. All with completely serious instructions and professional step-by-step illustrations.
So then what happens when we write a story about a random WikiHow article?
The beginning of the story is the most fragile part. The reader isn’t invested yet, so it doesn’t take much for them to lose interest and go back to YouTube, Netflix, video games, or staring at the rotating plate of instant mac and cheese in their microwave.
It’s incredibly important to make sure that the beginning of your story is as healthy as possible. If it’s not, then it’s time to call the Story Surgeon so they can operate!
You’ve been waiting for a package to arrive for a week.
Finally, you hear the delivery truck coming down your street. But you hear something else too… the yipping of a wiener dog.
No, not one. Not two. Dozens of them, pouring out from house after house!
So as it turns out, when you die you don’t go to Heaven or Hell. You just go to the Light Team or the Dark Team, to square off in an eternal game of afterlife sportsbucket.
Although there is one person who doesn’t play for either team. He is the legendary, the one and only, the… Gray Team Member.
And he is the referee of the eternal match.
