I’ve got a new article up over at Fantasy Café, wherein I do the dreaded thing: give writing advice. More specifically, I talk about my learning journey, and the trail of bad-to-good advice that got me, skill-set-wise, to where I am now.
If you’re a new spec-fic writer looking for straws of knowledge to spin into story-telling gold, I highly recommend you give it a look:
When I first attempted to write fiction professionally, I was desperate for any and all information I could find on how to write effectively. I enjoyed telling stories and people had told me I was a good writer—but love of a thing doesn’t automatically mean you’re good at a thing.
I had so many questions that I was sure had concrete answers. How do you create strong characters? How do you convey a theme? What’s the quantifiable difference between a boring story and an immersive story? What are people actually looking for when they read? When do you know a story has ended? How do you know where to begin?
When I started to break a story down into all of its components, I realized a lot goes into them. I could identify the parts, but I didn’t know how to piece them all together. I mean, I could try. I knew stories had beginnings, middles, and ends. I’d been consuming stories all my life. I knew what a story was (or, I thought I did), and I was fairly sure I could write something that resembled a professionally-told tale, but I knew I needed advice on how to actually get all of those story parts to work together in a way other people could connect with.
How do you actually write a story? What’s the secret?
Click here to read the full article: Learning to Feel the Shape of Stories
Happy reading!
~Marina
