“Has she found another adolescent boy to sink her teeth into?”
Tag: Vampires
For the last stream, we did something during the exercise portion that I’d wanted to do for a while: talking about setting the scene/tone at the beginning of a story.
One common mistake that beginning writers do which I’ve seen a lot during freeshare, critiques online, and during workshops in real life is that they tend to front-load their stories with backstory and history. But, unfortunately, we don’t care about history at the beginning of a story, because we don’t know who the people are yet.
So for the exercise, we came up with a prompt and then wrote the very beginning of the story, setting the scene and tone and hooking the reader, all without giving any sort of backstory or history.
Here’s the one the chat voted on: An Elf that’s the last of her kind due to war with Humans, disease, and other elves refusing to reproduce.
Here’s the beginning we came up with:
Last stream we continued our Rubbish to Published series, where we start from absolutely nothing and create something “publishable.”
We did our worldbuilding in the previous stream, so this time we took the next step: writing our query letter.
A query letter is the letter you write to literary agents, telling them about your book and yourself. Typically you write it only once you’ve finished editing and polishing your book, but I like to do it earlier. If your goal is publication, then it’s good to have your eye on the prize from the very beginning.
I talk about this more in detail in my Tips-y Tuesday post. Here’s what we came up with for our query letter:
Last stream we continued our Rubbish to Published series, where we start from absolutely nothing and create something “publishable.”
We picked out our audience and genre in the previous stream, so this time we took the next step: creating our characters.
To do this, we created character profiles. For the three main characters in our story, we asked each of them the same questions (“What is their physical appearance?” “What are their strengths/weaknesses?” “What do they desire/fear?” and more).
You can see the profiles we can up with here: