![]() Give your skeptical reader someone he can identify with and force him to acknowledge you were fair to his side. Make them credible! Give them opinions and arguments that are hard to counter. It’s so easy to build straw men and shoot down their arguments and logic like shooting fish in a barrel. One thing that contributed to the success of my Left Behind series was that I determined early on to have credible, skeptical characters. That doesn’t make him right, but it can make him real and believable. Give him real, credible motivations for doing what he does. In real life, villainous people rarely recognize themselves as evil. Simply this: don’t allow him to be one-dimensional (evil just because he’s the bad guy). So what do I mean by “be fair to your villain”? You need a villain too, but be fair to him (or her I use he inclusively to mean both genders and avoid the awkward repetition of he/she I know the majority of writers-and readers-are women). Are they running to someone or something?īy now you should have an idea of a main character and, bottom line, start imagining a story.Are they escaping someone or something?.Are they waiting to be picked up or heading somewhere on foot?. ![]() Maybe there are cornfields all around.Ī Greyhound bus appears on the horizon and rumbles to a stop. Imagine you’re at a rural intersection in the middle of nowhere. Now here’s that exercise I promised above: You might use one person’s gender, another’s looks, another’s personality, another’s voice … If you don’t know where to begin, consider creating characters who are composites of people you know. That means characters must feel real and relatable so readers will buy your premise. Ironically, Fiction (though you know its definition) must be believable, even if it’s set in a land far, far away or centuries before or since now. Step #2 - Create realistic and memorable characters. Jot or dictate ideas that strike at any moment for these elements:Īnd if you’re still having trouble conjuring an idea, see Step #2 below for an exercise writers everywhere have told me works to stimulate their thinking almost every time. If it loses steam, it’s because I’ve lost interest in it and know readers would too.īut if it holds my interest, I nourish and develop it until it becomes a manuscript and eventually a book.Īlways carry something on which you can record ideas, electronic or old school. I find myself sharing the idea with my family, embellishing the story more every time I tell it. I know a story idea has legs when it stays with me and grows. That imagining became Margo, the novel that launched my fiction career. So I could imagine the ultimate dilemma-desperate to hide the truth while being assigned to oversee its coming to light. That’s all I had-along with its obvious ramifications. My first novel was about a judge who tries a man for a murder that the judge committed. You have to learn to recognize the germ of an idea that can become a story. Maybe you have a message to share but no story idea to help you convey it. Step #1 - Come up with a great story idea. Want to sell more books? Click here to get your free copy of 8 Simple Secrets to Big Book Sales on Amazon Maintain your reader’s attention with cliffhangers.Trigger the theater of your reader’s mind.Create realistic and memorable characters.Is that the kind of novel you want to write? 9 Steps to Writing Captivating Fiction I’ve found no shortcuts, but following certain steps help me create books in which my readers can get delightfully lost. I’ve written nearly 200 books (two-thirds of them novels) and have enjoyed the kind of success most writers only dream of. Writing fiction isn’t about rules or techniques or someone else’s ideas. That you’ve landed here tells me you have a story-a message you want to share with the world.
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