Okay, so we’ve talked about getting ideas. What’s next? Well, whenever I write a story, I follow 4 very general and broad steps. They are:
1 thinking about ideas
2 planning
3 drafting
4 editing
1. Whenever I think of an idea, I write it down in my ideas book, or in a folder in my computer. Sometimes I think about an idea for a long time before I write a story based on that idea. I might have an idea rattling around in my head (and scribbled in my ideas book) for years, and then inspiration strikes and I can see the way I could develop that idea into a story.
2. People have different ideas about planning. One thing I’ve learnt in all my years being both a publisher and a writer is that there is no correct or incorrect way to write a story – we all do it differently, and that’s fine! If you’re interested in writing stories, then the important thing is to work out which way works best for you. Maybe you’re a planner, and you find doing a plan before you start is helpful. Maybe you do some planning, or a very general or vague plan, and incorporate this with free writing. Maybe you hate planning and the joy for you is the writing itself – some people don’t know what their story will be about until they start writing it and see where the idea will take them. All of these methods can work! Everyone is different and we all write stories in different ways.
Here is a picture of my very messy plans for my novel When Rain Turns to Snow.
3. Okay, here’s an annoying fact – all writers, even writers who may have written 150 books, need to do more than one draft of their stories. No one can get everything right in one go, because there is so much to think about when you write a story. You need to think about:
The structure. (Does your story have a beginning, a middle and an end? Is there a problem that needs solving?)
The language. (Do you have too much or too little description? Have you made sure you don’t repeat the same words over and over – unless it’s intentional?)
The characters. (Can you see them in your mind? Have you described them so that the reader can see them too?)
The themes. (What is the main idea of your story?)
In order to consider all these aspects of the story, you need to do several drafts.
4. Editing your work. In the next blog post I’ll give you a checklist for this, but in the meantime here’s a tip. It can be very helpful once you’ve done a couple of drafts to read your work out loud to someone else. You can ask that person to stop you if you get to a part of the story that isn’t clear to them. That might be a part of your story that you need to think about a bit more.
I have found these steps helpful when I’m writing – I hope you find them helpful as well!
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