Where do I start

Start putting words on paper. Make sure you do that for some significant amount of time every day.

When it's finished, go back and read it. You'll hate it. Keep rewriting it until you like it.

(This isn't my advice, but something I've seen suggested by many authors asked this question, and it works for me. Many writers say more, but this seems to be the central advice from most.)

EileenG wrote: »

Put your bum on the seat

I can't remember where, but I recently read a quote that a writer's two most valuable tools are his backside and a chair. Put the two of them together and eventually you'll get something down

As everyone above has said, just write. Honestly, practise, read, practise is the best way.

Couple of basics that I found useful when I learned them.

People tend to think about stories in two ways, Characters and Ideas. Genre stories often seem to be more about ideas, especially in sci-fi, fantasy.

But the thing about stories is that they don't really matter unless they are happening to someone we care about. Just look at the news or the tabloids. Whenever they report on something, it's never just the name of a person or their age. It's "mother of two," "father of five." Because these things give characters context that allow people to empathise with them and therefore care about what happens to them.

In that sense all stories are about characters, even when they are based on an "idea." You should try and examine an idea through how it plays with the lives of your characters.

A story is divided into three parts. Beginning, middle and end. Sounds simple, but can seem hard when you actually start writing. Many writers encounter the "mid-book wall" on their first effort, usually around 15-20k words into a novel, or a third into a short story. This is because they started with an idea and were all excited but are unsure how to develop a story beyond that.

A good analogy for this is the "stuck in the tree," structure. Think of your story as that being about a character trying to save a cat stuck in the tree.

In the beginning of the story the character discovers the cat is stuck in the tree and climbs up to save it.

In the middle of the story the character faces obstacles in saving the cat. Eg. the cat jumps away or tries to scratch the character. Or some kids turn up (the writer) and start throwing rocks at the character.

In the end, the character either saves the cat and climbs safely down, or saves the cat but dies from the stones thrown at them, or they both die, or the character has to give up and leave the cat there and is unable to save it.

The key is the middle, and to find different and interesting "rocks" to throw at your MC (main character).

Another way to describe the structure is in terms of character goal.

Your MC has a GOAL they want to achieve and they set out to achieve this. Along the way they face obstacles that they must overcome in order to achieve the goal. In the end they either succeed or fail in reaching their goal and the journey/experience of trying to get there changes them. (character arc).

Best of luck with your writing.

pickarooney wrote: »

^^Is all that really set in stone for all books? It seems very rigid and bears no relation to the structure of my novel (note my entirely reasonable position that the world is not corresponding to my view of it rather than vice versa )

Pickarooney, are you writing literary fiction? Because that doesnt really follow a plot arc, as such.

But, yeah, the plot arc that the previous poster talked about is what mainstream books follow, or so I've been taught.

pickarooney wrote: »

^^Is all that really set in stone for all books? It seems very rigid and bears no relation to the structure of my novel (note my entirely reasonable position that the world is not corresponding to my view of it rather than vice versa )

Well, that's not rigid at all....

if you want rigid... then try Blake Snyder's Save the Cat Beat Sheet : http://www.blakesnyder.com/downloads/beatsheet.doc

It's the list of beats (approximately) and where they occur in a typical 90 minute movie. You can take these beats and apply them to pretty much 90% of movies. The basic 3 act structure you can apply to 100% of movies. I can't think of a movie that does not follow the 3 act structure. Even indie movies.

As to the stuff I mentioned above. It's pretty fundamental underlying dramatic structure that I think you find in most stories (though there will always be exceptions).

It's not that writers think, ah I have to follow this structure and be rigid. It's just a natural form for drama and story telling that has evolved over time and has been studied and dissected.

Here's a useful exercise. Pick your favourite books and think of them in the above terms.

Who are the protagonists? What are their goals? Do they face obstacles in trying to reach these goals?

This is the fundamental of character. We all want SOMETHING weather that be more money, more love, more freedom, more food, more shelter. It is that WANT that drives us, and drives our characters. The dramatic need.

When someone opposes the character's dramatic need we get struggle and conflict, and that's entertainment.

The only example that I can think of, OFF the top of my head where the MC's dramatic arc isn't obvious is Othello. Funnily enough everyone else in the play does follow the cat in tree analogy. Iago wants to destroy Othello. Cassio wants to win back Othello's favour. Roderigo wants Desdemona (or is that vice versa re Cassio and Rodergo). Even Othello wants something: to be accepted.

All of these dramatic needs are set up in the first act (or the beginning). And each character pursues their own dramatic need through the story, encountering obstacles and in the end succeeding or failing. It is the CLASH between the needs of the various characters, or in simpler stories between the NEEDs of the protagonist and the antagonist that creates conflict. Remember, the antagonist doesn't see himself as such, and indeed the best antagonists arise when to them their NEED is perfectly valid and justified.

pickarooney wrote: »

100 Years is, as you might imagine, the story of a long succession of people over an extended period with births, deaths and marriages all over the place, so there's no main character as such. Can a book with no MC still fit the beginning-middle-end ideal? Essentially the book just goes on and on and on

I can't comment specifically on a book I haven't read. But 'A Suitable Boy,' is 1300 pages long, with tons of characters each leading their own lives. And though there is a token MC, we spend a lot of time away from her, even though her story is probably the one we care about the most. But even in that, each character has a story.

And stories have beginning-middle-ends. Saying it's an ideal is like saying the human spine is an ideal. We all have vertebrae, we all have spine. But we are still individuals. This most fundamental structure is just the spine upon which stores are naturally built.

Good luck getting something like that OR Ulysses published in today's marketplace. But hey, you might just be the next Joyce and genius enough to understand anatomy so well that you can fashion your own spine that isn't a spine upon which to build a body.

Memnoch wrote: »

Saying it's an ideal is like saying the human spine is an ideal.

Er, it really isn't. It's built for moving around on all fours.

Anyways, the important thing is that even if this idea is true, it's not something worth thinking consciously about while writing a novel, because striving to tick all those boxes winds up with something formulaic and dull.

Okay, I'm an unpublished amateur myself. But I can look back at my writing from a couple of years ago and see the improvement. The following is the most useful advice I think I can give to any aspiring writer.

Writing cliches and rules exist for a reason. It's one thing to understand what these things mean and to then make a conscious decision to ignore them because they might not work for your story, it's another entirely to be simply ignorant of them out of some misguided fear that they will artificially constrain you.

The irony is that, this was also a fear I used to have (and still do sometimes) and I'd say is a fear for a lot of budding writers. It is also wholly unfounded.

Now there are a lot of these so called rules. A few of the more important ones that I can think of, off the top of my head are:

Characters should be 3 dimensional.

Avoid overwriting. Each word should serve the story and be made to justify it's place in the prose. (adjectives tend to fall into this category)

Active voice is better than passive voice.

Head hopping is a bad idea.

There are a good few more. Even in the above there is a heirarchy. For instance, you should ALWAYS aim for 3d characters. Passive voice can be fine, but a whole paragraph of it is a bad idea, unless you are consciously trying to build a particular lyrical tone or style. Head hopping is a very bad idea because you are likely to leave your reader confused and break the immersion of the story.

All of these rules can and do get broken, it's just a question of knowing when to do it.

But this whole idea that BASIC story structure, i.e. setup - conflict - resolution, is some kind of artificial cage that will unduly constrain you and dampen your creativity is, and there is no kinder way to put this, baseless paranoia.

It's not about ticking boxes at all. It's about understanding. Think of it like vocabulary and grammar. The more words you know, and the more you understand the meaning of those words, and the more you know how to put those words together, the better sentences you can construct.

The going belief is that 90% (I've read as much as 98% in places) of all novels submitted to literary agents are unreadable. And I'd bet anything that most of the time this is because the writers never made an effort to understand the fundamentals of story telling.

Yes, story telling is an art, it is about creation. Some might even claim it is about talent. But it is also a skill. And requires understanding, practise and mastery of its tools to execute to a high standard. A lot of these tools we acquire subconsciously, by reading great writing. We learn without realising. But in order to succeed, I believe it is important to study, to find our weaknesses and improve upon them.

Points of view jumping round all over the place. At its worst where you have a crowd of people in one scene, and you get the POV of all of them.

The general rule is to stick with one POV per scene, and many successful books only have one POV all through it.

Depends how it's handled. I personally think you need to get a few POV just to round out your different characters. Especially the villain.