hayati: Tips

Hello everyone,

 I will share tips on writing a novel. You guys please read as much interest. For those interested in the hopes to write a novels

1.  Write the story you’d most want to read. Don’t write a story just because you think it might be a bestseller. Think about the books you love, the ones you really lose yourself in. If those are mysteries, then don’t try to write an historical romance or a quiet literary novel. It might not be anything genre-specific that you love, but a certain voice, or type of story, or kinds of characters. Write what you love.

2. Begin with character such as for a girl. Make her flawed and believable. Let her live and breathe and give her the freedom to surprise you and take the story in unexpected directions. If she’s not surprising you, you can bet she’ll seem flat to your readers. One exercise I always do when I’m getting to know a character is ask her to tell me her secrets. Sit down with a pen and paper and start with, “I never told anybody…” and go from there, writing in the voice of your character.

3. Give that character a compelling problem. Your character has to have something that’s going to challenge her, torment her and propel her forward. At the heart of every story is conflict – whether external or internal, make it a good one, and remember that this problem is going to shape your character, leaving her forever changed.

4. Make things happen! You can have the greatest characters in the world, and write beautifully, but if nothing’s happening, the story falls on its face pretty quickly. In the books, you must make sure that something important to the plot is happening in each scene. And if there’s a scene in there that isn’t helping to move the story along in some vital way, you must cut it, no matter how great it is. When you edit, you must go scene by scene and write a single word sentence describing the action on an index card. Then you must lay the cards out and got the bare bones of my story. You can see if things are moving forward, if it throwing in enough twists and turns, and if there are scenes that just aren’t pulling their weight.

5. Stick with it the project. You’ll be tempted to give up a thousand and one times. Don’t finish the story. Then work twice as hard to revise it. Do your best to get it out in the world. When it’s rejected by agents and publishers (which it will be) keep sending it out. In the meantime, write another. Then another. Trust me, you get better every time. You’re not in this writing business because it’s easy.

7. And lastly: Ignore the rules.  Everyone’s got advice and theories; people want to pigeonhole you, put you in a genre with its own rules and conventions. I think the work comes out better when we leave all that behind; when the only thing to be true to is the writing.