Writing a book is hard. Let’s just get that truth out of the way. The people who make it look easy are either really good at their sales pitch, are lying, or have zero care about their final quality. (Even the skilled and talented have to work hard to make a good book come to life.)
Today, we’re dipping our toes into facing off (and ultimately conquering) the challenges of writing.
Step 1: Read what you wrote.
Step 2: Pat yourself on the back. You have written something, and the first steps of a journey are super important. GREAT JOB. Seriously. Having the courage to try, even if you fail, is SO important.
Those who never try fail by default, and 1% effort is ALWAYS better than 0% effort.
If you add enough 1%s together, you’ll eventually reach 100%.
If you add 0% to 0%, you’re still stuck at 0%.
I want to be in the corner of the person who struggles but adds that 1% over the person who is so afraid of failure they never try at all.
Don’t be the person stuck forever at 0%.
Step 3: Put yourself in a reader’s shoes. How can you improve the introduction of your story?
Here are a few questions to ask yourself:
1: Is this the right starting place for my book?
Now that you’ve started the writing process, it DOES become easier to see if a book is starting in the right place… but sometimes, you have to write the whole book to realize you screwed it up.
See if you can figure out if you started at the right place. And if you didn’t… fix it now.
2: Is the character likable?
Will readers want to follow this person throughout their tale? The fastest way to lose a reader is to present them with a character they simply cannot relate to. What sort of person do you want reading your book… and what sort of character do those readers like?
In a perfect world, you’ll smack the readers with the “this character is relatable and I like them” in the first 2 pages of your book… which is often the maximum amount of time a shopping reader is going to give you. If you’re lucky.
(Let’s just say that even on the blog ‘I just didn’t like the description’ stopped people from reading books that they ended up loving just because the description wasn’t a perfect match for their taste; they didn’t even give the sample a try. That’s the reality of writing a book. Readers are picky.)
And yes… I have had people refuse to try one of my books because they were looking for covers with green and mine was blue. That’s how finicky people can be over their reading material.
3: Finally, why should the reader care about your character?
While a lot of us want to dive right into the action, in reality, most authors need to transition readers from “doing nothing” to “doing something with stakes” because if you “do something with stakes” WITHOUT the reader having a reason to care, they get bored and wandered off.
This ties to the relatable character issue.
When you go back and read over what you’ve written, take the time to correct a few of your mistakes along the way. See if there’s a place you can flesh out the character, give them a distinct personality, and blend their narrative (and personal thoughts) with what they need to accomplish.
And remember… a character doesn’t need to be SPECIAL to be INTERESTING… and readers are, every time, going to pick the interesting character over the special one.
You do not need to give the purple or amber or green eyes and a rare hair color to make them interesting.
Brown hair and brown eyes are just fine. Just know what they are (and write it down) so you don’t have to go hunting for it later.
Do I use rare eye and hair colors? Sure, at times I do, but I have many more characters with brown hair and eyes, because they’re just regular people doing extraordinary things… and giving them ‘societally prized’ traits doesn’t actually add anything to their character.
It’s okay to skip it. Really.
If you want to accurately portray the world you live in, go to the mall and take a look around. Make a chart. Tally hair color, eye color, ethnicity. Study the world you share with others.
And then write that.
I’m now going to take my migraine ridden self off to see what I can get done through the fog permeating my brain.
Happy writing!
Leave a Reply