Chapter One:
A Fun, Fast Way to Learn to Write Fiction
Meredith Bond
This Smashwords edition is copy written by Meredith Bond and may not be used by anyone for any purpose other than their own personal enrichment. If you share this with anyone, please encourage them to buy their own copy. October, 2011.
Published by Anessa Books, Bethesda, Maryland
Acknowledgments
I want to thank Leslie Ruby at Frederick Community College for giving me the opportunity to teach wonderful classes there and for coming up with such a terrific title. I’d also like to thank Jeannine Covington, my editor, who did a meticulous job on this book. Any grammatical or punctuation mistakes are entirely my own fault for not following her excellent advice. And finally, to my husband for his unending support and the terrific cover design.
Table of Contents
2 GMC, OMG! Goal, Motivation and Conflict
Character Examination Worksheet
3 It’s a Whole New World (Building)
Fantasy World Building Worksheet
4 Wiggles and Arcs: Story Structure
5 Movin’ On Down the Road: The Hero’s Journey
Do you love to read a good story? Do you wish you could write your own? Have you ever started writing a story and then got bogged down and didn’t know where to go after the first page or two or five? Well, this book is going to help you.
I’m going to guide you in writing not just a good story, but a great one. I’m going to teach you how to engage your readers and have fun while you’re doing it. Now, don’t think for a minute that this is going to be a breeze—writing is hard work! It takes a lot of time and energy. But it can also be fun and exciting. You get to create people and whole new worlds, and then you get to live in that world and interact with those people. You decide where those people go, what they do, and what they say. You put thoughts into their minds, give them a history and a life—you make them into real people. In this story of your own creation, what you want to happen is what’s going to happen and I’m going to show you how to get started.
With this book, you are, essentially, going to be taking the writing course I teach. Each chapter in the book equates to one “class”. In class, my students and I discuss and learn about the day’s topic and then, in almost every class, I give out a worksheet (or two) to help the students organize their story and put what they’ve learned into practice
Because you’re reading this and not having to listen to me while I’m standing in front of a classroom, you get to take this class any way you want. You don’t have to “listen” to my entire lesson, you can go directly to the meat of each idea by reading “The Basics”, which gives you just the basic idea of the lesson and then skip to the end of the chapter and get started on the worksheet. Or, if you want or need more information on any topic, you can read “The Details” and get the whole lecture, all of my explanations and examples. Or, you can do both—first, learn the basics and try to do the worksheet; then, if you get stuck or don’t understand something, you can go back and read through the details where, hopefully, all of your questions will be answered. However you choose to use the book is the best way for you do it.
I believe that the easiest way to learn how to write fiction is by starting with the bigger concepts first. For this reason, this book deals with those—characters; goal, motivation and conflict; setting; story structure and the hero’s journey. With these basic building blocks you can get started either writing or just planning your story. In my next book, “Writing Craft”, which, naturally, corresponds to my second writing course, I get into more of the detail—point of view, dialogue, show vs. tell and editing. But as they all say, it’s best to start at the beginning.
Speaking of the beginning—where do you begin when you start to write a story? I like to begin with the characters, and so that is where I begin this book. You might like to begin with the plot. If so, start with the chapter on story structure, that’ll help you get your plot going and then you can go back to the chapter on characters when you start working on them. You should feel free to start wherever in the book you like—but do be warned, I sometimes refer back to previous chapters, so if you start in the middle, you just might find yourself flipping back to figure out what something means.
And one last note—you’ll notice that I switch back and forth between the male and female pronoun when referring to characters. Please read it in whatever way you feel most comfortable or is appropriate for your character. Likewise, I frequently refer to the hero of a novel, please assume that I mean the heroine as well. Unfortunately, English is an inherently sexist language—when we say man, we mean man and woman, please read it in that light.
Reading a novel takes you on a wonderful adventure into someone else’s imagination; writing your own story is even better because you get to go on a fabulous adventure into your own imagination. Be wild, be wacky, be sweet or romantic, be brave and strong and daring, or be cruel and nasty. But whatever you do, have fun because if you are having fun writing your story, you can be pretty sure your readers are going to have fun reading it.
Enjoy!
Merry
THE BASICS
Harry Who?
I start my planning process with characters because they are the most important part of any story. Without characters, you wouldn’t have a story because there’d be no one acting out your fabulous plot. Imagine “Harry Potter” without Harry, a “Stephanie Plum” novel without Stephanie, or “Artemis Fowl” without Artemis. You just can’t do it. These books don’t exist without their heroes. They are what the book is about, for the most part. Yeah, it may be about magic or another world or even a murder, but the reason we read these books (and many others) is to get to know their heroes and, maybe, live in their shoes for a time.
So, you’ve got to start your story with the characters who will enact it. You need to know who your hero is and your villain. You need to know where they come from and what they want. You need to know what sort of person they are, how they talk, and what happens when they get mad. At the end of this chapter is a basic worksheet for getting to know your main characters and a quickie for your secondary characters. In the next chapter, we’ll get into more details about your characters, get to know them a little better, and have a more detailed worksheet. Right now, you just want a general idea of who these people are to get you started.
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Vocab You Need To Know
Protagonist: the main character in your story.
Antagonist: what stops your protagonist from getting what they want.
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THE DETAILS
Heroes, Get Your Heroes Here
Not all heroes are created equal. Some are fabulous, brave people (like knights), some are ordinary people (like you), and some are really nasty (dark protagonists).
Think about what makes someone a hero. I mean, really. Think about the hero (and remember, I’m referring here to heroines as well) of the novel you’re reading right now. What are they like? What makes them heroic? Take out a blank piece of paper and write down at least three things that makes the hero of that book heroic. Now, think about your favorite hero of all time. Why do you love this character? What’s so great about them? Add this hero’s qualities that you love to your list. Now, be sure that the hero in your novel has at least some of these characteristics.
All heroes have a few things in common. It’s quite likely that your list includes some of the following:
they’re brave
you can relate to them
you want to be like them
you want to be their friend
they have a great sense of humor
they’re powerful
they’re clever
they have charisma
they do what you wish you would or could do
they have “fuzzy socks”—that is, they’re good and comfortable and make you feel really good, too (although sometimes that fuzziness is buried deep inside or deliberately hidden from the world).
If your hero has very few of these traits, maybe they’re a dark protagonist. Dark protagonists appeal to readers only if they have a sympathetic side—some way we can see ourselves in them or, at the very least, understand that they are going to change or repent for the bad things they do or have done.
There are other general types of protagonists:
The Wounded Hero is angry about something or was hurt in some way. He’s got to learn to forgive and forget in order to heal.
The Heroic Hero embodies most of the wonderful traits listed above, but has to learn that he isn’t actually as fabulous as he thinks he is. He’s got a flaw too. They all do.
The Ordinary Hero is just like you or me or the guy next door. He is called upon to do something extraordinary and he rises to the challenge in a way nobody could have ever expected.
There are other, more well–defined character types listed at the end of this chapter under “Archetypes.” I’ll explain what they are when we get to them.
Most heroes also have a presence. They have something outstanding that sets them apart from everyone else in the book, some heroic quality that we all wish we had, too. They, and we, may not know it at first, but it’s there and through the book it’s going to be discovered and put to the test.
And finally, one thing that all protagonists have in common is that they must grow. We are all growing, learning, and changing in very subtle ways all the time. Your protagonist must do the same. They go through some very exciting stuff in your story and it’s got to affect them or teach them something, usually something about themselves, so that by the end of the story, they’ve learned some sort of lesson—but please, don’t make it a moral for your reader and don’t be heavy–handed with this lesson. It’s just a little something that your reader, after reading your story, can realize and think about as they close the back cover of your book with a satisfied sigh.
Simple Simon Just Stayed Home
Real characters are not simple people. They have many sides and many layers. (As Shrek says, he’s like an onion—you have to peel away the layers of his personality to find the sweetness inside. Of course, onions are also stinky and sometimes, when you peel away those layers, they’ll make you cry. The same holds true for your characters.) What I’m trying to say is that heroes are not perfect. They have flaws. They have problems. They make mistakes. They are human (or whatever type of creature they are, but at heart, they’re human). If you make your hero perfect, they won’t be believable and your reader won’t be able to relate to them because no one is “ferpect”. And having a flaw will give your hero that room to grow that I talked about a little earlier.
When you are first creating your characters, you may not see all of their layers. Don’t worry about that. Just as when you first meet someone, it takes a little while to get to know them, the same happens with your characters. As you get to know them better, understand the way they think and speak, and begin to experience your story with them, their layers will become clear to you.
Mwa Ha Ha... er, Villains
Now, what about villains? Well, they’re very much like heroes, aren’t they? They’re usually brave and frequently they have charisma. When a villain walks into a room, all eyes turn to him, and then, sometimes, they turn away in disgust. But are villains always people?
No, they’re not.