Write Amazing Fiction!

Patricia Renard Scholes

Important Note

This book is free. If you buy this book, you get a discount my editing service for your next book. Questions about this? Send an email to [email protected].

Introduction

You’ve got your wonderful story to tell, but you feel awkward and ill-fitted for the task of getting your amazing adventure written down. Your friends tell you that what you write is terrific. But they’re not writers. You know your work needs help.

This guide is to help you overcome that hurdle. Don’t worry about talent. Even Stephen King, as gifted as he is, works hard on his craft. He knows that talent is only 10% of the game. The rest is just plain old hard work.

Every part of your craft can be learned. You can do this, if you’re willing to apply yourself. Hard work, remember?

Chapter 1

How to Make Your Characters Unforgettable

Demographics

You’ll find, as you go through this book, that some chapters are divided into sections and are very long.  Other chapters are very short.  No, you aren’t missing anything.  I wanted this course to be digestible.  If I gave you an English Master’s Program on creative writing, you’d lose heart. Instead, I made sure that the most important points were covered so you could not only follow, but enjoy the process.

Quick Notes on Plot

In a novel, everything works to move the story along.  That means that everything has that one objective. There are many things you’ll need to know that will not be written in your book.

Demographics – the details about your characters, height, weight, skin color, hair color, eye color, scars, marks. tattoos, family of origin, and so on, are less important than you may realize.  Still, you must know them.  Even though we will not cover Plot in this chapter, you need to realize this: Everything you write MUST move the plot along.

When you dead-drop details about your character into your book, it stops the flow of the story.

Your characters are REAL That’s what your readers must believe. They must fall in love with them, hate them, cheer for them, get exasperated with them, curse at them and shed tears for them. If they’re not that real, then you’re missing the point of writing fiction.

The more you know about them, the more alive they’ll be for your readers. However, not everything you know will be in your book. Still, for your subconscious to work for you, you must know them. As you progress, you’ll find ways of sharing the information about your characters that don’t interrupt the plot.

Are they fit or flabby? Are they well educated or street smart? The details your subconscious understands about your characters will influence how they act. In fact, you may find that they don’t respond the way you want them to at all. If this happens, celebrate! Your characters are well on their way to becoming unforgettable, which is the goal of this chapter.

One caution about demographics: A very prolific mystery writer began her series by stating her main character’s actual age. She told an interviewer years later that she wished she hadn’t.  Her character reached fifty before she finished the events that happened in her thirties. So if you intend to write a series, never mention age.

You can, however, show aging in later books without a single reference to actual age. One character, with black hair in the first book shows threads of silver in a later book, then streaks of white at his temples in another. The reader never knows his exact age, but can follow through with the natural aging process.

If your character is female, you can use hair color in other ways. A friend of mine once said that the younger generation will probably assume that as a woman ages, she gets blonder.

In another story, a person’s age is never mentioned, but the main character realizes that upon a closer look, his hair is white, not blond as she thought at first. This surprises her, because she assumed by his fit body build that he was much younger.

Assignment 1:

Write a description of your main character. You will not, I repeat NOT, use this description in any of