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!
For the last stream’s exercise, we tried something new: writing about the same object in a GOOD way and an EVIL way.
What this means is you write about the same object (a rice cooker, a photograph, a house, etc.) and describe it in a happy/fun way, then describe the exact same object in a foreboding/malignant way.
This is a great exercise to force you bring out the emotional significance of an object, rather than merely describing it as-is.
I left it up to chat to decide what we’d write about, and they voted on this: Halloween party decorations.
Here’s what 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:
