This is part two of an ongoing series of articles to help you start writing. This series will appear every Thursday.
Write about monks!
Last week we ended with you writing down an idea. This week, you’re going to start expanding on it.
There’s an old adage that you’ve probably heard before. Write what you know. Try not to take that too literally. You probably don’t want to set your story where you work, with all of your coworkers as your characters. Well, you might want to, but it’s probably not a good idea, because you’re bound to offend someone, and that’s just going to make your life more difficult.
There’s a lot of things that you know that you can write about. You know how people talk and interact with each other. You know that behave differently depending on who else is around, or where they are. You know that different people respond to challenges in different ways. You know what it’s like to experience a wide range of emotions, and why you’ve experienced them. This the stuff that you know that you want to use.
Let’s pull out your idea from last week. Maybe you’ve got an idea for a scene, or a couple of characters that you want to write about. Maybe you’ve got a setting that you’d like to write about, but no idea what the story is yet. What you need to do is to start developing the context for your story.
You need to figure out who your characters are, what’s going to happen to them, and how they are going to react to what’s happening. You don’t need to have all of the answers right away. Part of the fun of writing is that you get to figure some stuff out as you’re writing.
So there are two things that you can do with your idea at this point, now that you’ve started to ask yourself some questions about what’s going on. You can make an outline of what has to happen. Or, if you’re like me and don’t like to outline, you can just start writing. Pick a scene that you want to write, and start working out some details on the page. Introduce some characters and have them interact with each other.
Next week we’re going to talk about writing descriptions, and the ever important show don’t tell rule. If you have any questions or feedback, feel free post a comment on this site, or email me at mromard@gmail.com.
