Dear Friend,
Not knowing where to start? Perhaps you have the drive to write but the end result looks dauntingly far away? The following will help you to sit down and start writing immediately. You only need to follow below guidelines and you are on the way of becoming an author!
I will forgo for the moment all the preliminaries that need to be taken care of before you can sit down and write as they only make everything look complicated and therefore would present a psychological burden. Like your frame of mind, the location of writing, your expectations, the list goes on. Because you re geared to ‘get on with it’, with the actual writing, that is.
If you are a self-publisher, you can also ignore the correct form of double spacing, headers and footers, pagination, which publishers require. And you do not need to bother with a business proposal and introductory letter, however, an automatic word count is a handy instrument, freely provided by most word processors
Immersing into the writing part you enjoy the wonderful world of painting with words and style of sentences. Later on, you may transform your finished manuscript in to the correct layout with all the trimmings for an ‘official’ presentation. But your creation will always be the same.
There are three things you need to take care of to enable you to put words together into sentences and get somewhere, namely towards the end result:
1. SYNOPSIS
The first is the writing of a synopsis, that is, exactly what the book is about. A love story that leads through a lot of difficulties and tribulations, a thriller with sudden and unexpected surprises, a historic work, containing newly discovered facts, your own past you wish to enlighten the world with or addressing your family and close friends, you understand what I am trying to say. In this short description, the persons are named, the actions are laid-out, the story is explained to an unsuspecting reader or publisher.
Having this synopsis before you, you cannot get astray- it will guide you through the other pieces of pre- writing that you require.
2. CHARACTER OUTLINE
Now, having your book outlined and printed out before you, it will be easier to identify the various characters that appear in your story. Write them down by their name, what they are and describe their main characteristics. This comes easy if you manage to think of a relevant screen character you know – perhaps you can manage to paste into this a picture of this actor, as this will assist you later on in slipping into this persons personality and acting out on paper a very realistic behaviour. Which will make your story so much more believable and fascinating!
This goes, of course, not only for humans, but animals too and even sceneries you are describing can be from a well-known personal experience or from a movie. This would bring so much more immediacy to your writing.
3. CHAPTER OUTLINE
Now the story unfolds in a concise way and in segments. From the begin you dive into the story and deal with who does what with whom, where they met, and on the story goes all portioned into chapters
There is now law requiring certain amount of chapters, but normally a chapter is somehow self contained, like in a theatre, where a change of scenery indicates a new act. And the beauty is that you can change things around as you recognise improvements in your story whilst working on this outline. Complicated situations are put down on paper as well twisted emotions and reasoning thereby straightening out your train of thoughts
With these three requirements, namely synopsis, character outline and chapter outline, printed out before you, it will be so easy to start your story. Now, writing down the words as they come to your mind will be easy and after a while your surroundings will disappear and you are in your own world, created by yourself. I shall soon deal with more tricks of easy writing, if you only bring the determination and discipline. And now – off to create your own publication!
Peter Frederick
http://www.peterfrederick.org
http://life-on-the-road.com
