Fiction Writing

"The police said to stay inside and bolt the doors..."

"The sky was a dreary shade of grey and the air smelled like a storm was approaching..."

"The foster home, where I grew up, was across the isolated dirt road from a neglected cemetery..."

"Steven was just beginning to unpack for the weekend at his friend's lake cabin, when he heard a sound unlike anything he had heard before..."

"I didn't know what it was, but I had felt ill most of the morning, and as the day wore on, I began to feel weaker and weaker..."

"Riding my horse on the trails, deep in the colorful woods in the fall, had been a favorite activity since my teenage years, but I couldn't shake the feeling that something was wrong that first morning in late October. I could tell that my pinto, Cherokee, was on edge and spooked as each falling leaf whipped past us in the brisk winds that had suddenly come up...."

"It was just the typical Halloween costume party with everyone happy to be inside near the fireplace, since the air had turned quickly cold earlier in the day. Until, that is, Travis arrived wearing a very convincing costume of a ...."

Click the link to see how to start a story instead of depending on some anonymous person on the internet to write your story for you!

Schwarzwald.

Here is a link to show you how writers name places in their stories! Don't depend on someone else to write yourstory.

Only you can come up with a good name! Titles come from the story, not from some anonymous person on the internet! You're getting this backwards I'm afraid -- you need to write the story first and think of the title last.

Titles are also not as important as some writers think - your title might change many times between your first write and your final draft!

Think about your story - what is going on and who are the people involved? What is something special about the story that might make a good title? Don't sweat it - just write something down and get on with the story!

It has been a wonderful experience teaming up with my daughter for the House of Night. I do all of the writing, and Kristin serves as my front line teen voice editor. It was awesome knowing that Kristin had my back, which allowed me to focus on the story.

Kristin and I have always been close, so that hasn't changed. I have learned to appreciate her skills as an editor. I am very proud of her!

At first I relied heavily on Kristin to be sure that I didn't make Z and/or the Nerd Herd sound, as Kristin once put it, "like a disgruntled 40-something year old school teacher". But after the first few books the characters were so firmly set that Kristin had very little dialogue editing to do. It was then that she and I began discussing the overreaching story arch for the entire series. Most of the time Kristin was my sounding board, and by discussing plot points with her I worked my way through potential problems. Sometimes she had a very strong voice in what I was considering. Example: Grandma Redbird was almost a casualty. Kristin was very vocal about that! "Nooooooo! Don't kill Grandma!" And I didn't!

As I did all of the writing we really didn't have these kinds of disagreements. During the editing process Kristin would leave me comments about the manuscripts, but it was ultimately my decision about whether I would follow her advice or not. Mostly that advice was about cutting descriptions that were too wordy, and I usually followed it.

Here are my ideas: -write about a girl who goes to find gold because her family is poor, later she enters the Bermuda triangle and her ship is wrecked, she later swims to a near island where she has to learn to survive with the things she has. -a boy (who can talk to animals) receives the news that his parents shipped was wrecked last night. He and all his animal friends go on a brave adventure to hel rescue his parent. -pretend your a retired pirate and tell the story of how you survived the worst ship wreck of all time.

Any idea that is interesting enough to you will be a good idea. You cannot write a story or novel based on ideas that someone else invents - you won't be interested enough in the subject to be able to research and write anything that will actually sell.

If you want someone to tell you what to write, ask your English teacher for an extra assignment -- that's what you're doing here, you know. Plus, anonymous people on the internet have no idea how old you are, what your interests are, or how well you can write!

In order to write, you need a personal connection to the subject. Write about whatever you enjoy, or whatever you find interesting, and you will end up with your novel or story.

WikiAnswers is happy to help you learn how to write better. We will not do your writing for you by giving you ideas and paragraphs to copy.

Here are some more suggestions from WikiAnswers contributors:

• Write about what you know. A good idea for a first novel is to write your own personal story. Everyone has at least one novel in them waiting to be written.

• Observe the world around you. Anything interesting can be an idea for a story or novel.

• Research. The more you know, the more ideas you will have.

• Read stories and books that other authors have written in your chosen genre. This way, you can see how other people do things.

A story can be either plot driven, character driven, or both. Most are stories are both but one or the other usually takes precedence. Charles Dickens' novels are primarily character driven Ian Flemings' are plot driven (although all the plots are the same.) If you need a place to start - trying thinking up interesting characters who can be developed and evolved against an interesting plot, or think up a good crisis that characters can be illuminated through.

Only you can come up with a good name! Book Titles come from the story, not from some anonymous person on the internet!

Think about your story - what is going on and who are the people involved? Horror novels are scary, so try something that is creepy or mysterious.

Check out the Related Questions for help with your book, too!

See the link below!

WRITE-First, get a notebook and start writing. Keep a journal in which you can record your life, like a diary -- or better yet write your thoughts about events in your life (or the lives of those around you, or news events), or books you've read and movies and TV shows you've watched. What's good about them, what's bad? What's ordinary, what's odd or strange?

EDIT-Every so often, go back over what you wrote and see if you can fix up your writing: correct any misspellings, change a word here and there to make your meaning clearer, or re-organize a sentence. This will improve your writing, so that everything you write will be better

One way to develop a plot would be first to think of something important or interesting that happened in your life, or where you live, and imagine what could have been different about it. Brainstorm a while, writing down everything from minor modifications to wild and crazy outcomes.

Look over your list and see if anything grabs you. If not, brainstorm some more, or pick a different event.

To work on characters it's a good idea to write down something about everyone you know well in a notebook. Describe how they look, how they talk and act, and how (you guess) they feel.

This should be private, because you don't want the possibility of a friend reading something that sounds negative about them. To further avert this possibility, you might label the top of the page CHARACTERS and give each one a quite different name. In addition, you could add one or two invented "facts" about each one to further disguise their identities.

I personally like playing with characters. Once with a friend also interested in writing, we wrote down on slips of paper various attributes (one to each piece of paper) -- how old they were; where they worked or went to school; something about their clothes, something they were holding or carrying.

We each did several slips on each attribute, the sorted them face down into piles on the table, sort of shuffled. We picked a slip form each pile and then had to write a little story about that character in a way that accounted for their assortment of attributes.

Joyce Carol Oates said it best: "The first sentence can't be written until the final sentence is written."

Worry about finishing your story, not about writing the perfect opening sentence! You can change anything you like once you've finished -- go back and think of a great first sentence then, instead of waiting for some magical "first sentence" to fall out of the sky and hit you in the head.

Now get off the internet and get back to writing that story!

Any idea that is interesting enough to you will be a good idea. You cannot write a story or novel based on ideas that someone else invents - you won't be interested enough in the subject to be able to research and write anything that will actually sell. Plus, anonymous people on the internet have no idea how old you are, what your interests are, or how well you can write!

In order to write, you need a personal connection to the subject. Write about whatever you enjoy, or whatever you find interesting, and you will end up with your novel or story.

WikiAnswers is happy to help you learn how to write better. We will not do your writing for you by giving you ideas and paragraphs to copy.

Here are some more suggestions from WikiAnswers contributors:

• Write about what you know. A good idea for a first novel is to write your own personal story. Everyone has at least one novel in them waiting to be written.
• Observe the world around you. Anything interesting can be an idea for a story or novel.
• Research. The more you know, the more ideas you will have.
• Read stories and books that other authors have written in your chosen genre. This way, you can see how other people do things.

Any idea that is interesting enough to you will be a good idea. You cannot write a story or novel based on ideas that someone else invents - you won't be interested enough in the subject to be able to research and write anything that will actually sell. Plus, anonymous people on the internet have no idea how old you are, what your interests are, or how well you can write!

In order to write, you need a personal connection to the subject. Write about whatever you enjoy, or whatever you find interesting, and you will end up with your novel or story.

WikiAnswers is happy to help you learn how to write better. We will not do your writing for you by giving you ideas and paragraphs to copy.

Here are some more suggestions from WikiAnswers contributors:

• Write about what you know. A good idea for a first novel is to write your own personal story. Everyone has at least one novel in them waiting to be written.

• Observe the world around you. Anything interesting can be an idea for a story or novel.

• Research. The more you know, the more ideas you will have.

• Read stories and books that other authors have written in your chosen genre. This way, you can see how other people do things.

A story can be either plot driven, character driven, or both. Most are stories are both but one or the other usually takes precedence. Charles Dickens' novels are primarily character driven Ian Flemings' are plot driven (although all the plots are the same.) If you need a place to start - trying thinking up interesting characters who can be developed and evolved against an interesting plot, or think up a good crisis that characters can be illuminated through.

Only you can come up with a good name! Titles come from the story, not from some anonymous person on the internet! Titles are not as important as some writers think, also - your title might change many times between your first write and your final draft!

Think about your story - what is going on and who are the people involved? Picture books are much simpler than longer books, and need simple titles. What about the name of the character followed by "Criminal Genius" if it's a funny book? If this kid's the villain, you'd need a different slant.

Check out the Related Questions for help with your book, too!