I was just telling my husband at lunch that I'm really intimidated to start writing my first book even though I really want to. And this notification pops up... Good timing (or phone was listening.) It was a great video. Thank you!
If you write 200 hundred words a day (Graham Greene's quota in his last years) you will have one thousand words over five working days. Remember Shaelin's advice : A bad first draft (bad only in your eyes) does not mean you are a bad writer. You have something to rework. George Moore walked round the square of his London home when he was stuck : he saw someone who caught his eye, got an idea. Moore wrote the short story Albert Nobbs on which the Glen Close film was based; he said he rarely had to walk his square twice. Used bookstores, old magazines, B movies, historical biographies, strangers walking past a cafe window : material is everywhere.
I'm thinking of writing novel, but i don't know how to. I do poetry and stuff but writing novel feels overwhelming. I don't know if I have it in me to keep going with a novel. Writing long consistent stuff with a storyline doesn't come as naturally as writing poems to me. Do you have any tips for me? Any tutorial that teaches how to write? Thank you.
'Prepare to get stuck', the most honest thing I've ever heard, man if that ain't the truth,.smh, I was just feeling like that ten minutes ago,.I'm about 14k into this new story and I was thinking about scratching the whole thing
Hahaha yeah. Almost 100k words later... Now you tell me! :D hahahaha Yeah, we're all prone to meandering ... especially when it comes down to MC's that we personally like, and you end up sitting there making sure that nobody can have a different picture of the character in question other than what you give em...resul= five chapters later: weary sigh: all done. I'm guilty as charged! Okay, actually I've written eight chapters worth of backstory that so far has no obvious connections to the main story other than the characters are there, and some new...or in this case, old characters too, events in places that later get referenced in dialogue by main characters and some more detailed vision of the story world, how it works. It's generally not a good idea to do this, but hey... If you're like me, just write it all out.
As a fledgling author who's doing the prep work for NaNoWriMo, this is exactly what I needed! And so far, it looks like I have at least 70% of these covered. Thanks!
Wow ..i been watching a lot videos today on how to write my first novel but no video have shown me exact details as i need as i wanted but then i found your video and you are amazing and you are mentioning the points exactly as i just wrote in my novel raw pages.....thank you so much dear...we shared same thinking about novel writing.....glad to have you in my subscription list now....now i can start my Novel 💕
I have noticed that there is never advice on short story books. When you write a collection, what should one do next. There ought to be a Dummies book on publishing 😊
Just wanted to say Thank You to Shaelin's amazingly helpful videos, for sending me in the right direction in writing 30 short stories and getting selected in the weekly prompts last week. Number #2 and #3 in this video were really helpful. - Scott Christenson
On chapters. Simple example: If a character's home gets burned down and the protagonist has to flee. Then he travels to a town seeking help and allies. And then travels to the guild of thieves to join them in their secret hideout. Those 3 sentences should be their own chapters, regardless of length. Even if C1 is just 3 pages, C2 is 22 pages, and C3 is 9 pages. Why? I don't know. I'm a complete amateur writer. But it makes the most INTUITIVE SENSE. As a reader. I'm pissed off when books don't seperate chapters where they make the most intuitive sense. Length of chapters on average shouldn't be extremely short or long. Very short or long chapters is ok, if they are rare and it makes sense. My gripe with chapters is that they should strive to start and end where it makes sense with the flow of the story. It's why chapters are easy if you write a fantasy adventure. But more difficult if you write a crime novel where it all takes place in one small town. In the latter I would seperate chapters by time or events instead. I will die on this hill. Chapters should start and end where they make intuitive sense. Length is a secondary contextual factor.
Actually I feel that the beginning is the hardest part because I have nothing to start with. I really really want to start but I truly have nothing to start with.
This is just exactly what I need, what my WIP needs. I'm currently stuck on a chapter of my WIP. It's been weeks, and I started to think I might actually have a burnout. I didn't really stop writing for two years. That write everyday routine really frustrates me. Thank you for this encouraging video btw!
Thank you! I'm not a first time writer, but I haven't written for so long that it seems as if I were. You once said the inciting incident shouldn't preferably happen before the beginning of the story. Can you explain why that's so? I'm planning to start with my protagonists' reaction to the inciting incident in the first chapter and reveal it through dialogue in the second. I thought it might be interesting to keep my readers wondering for a little while why people are doing what they are doing. Would that be a bad idea? I really find your videos extremely useful. Thank you very much.
I strongly believe that no writing rule is totally set in stone. Powerful guidelines at their strongest. If you really feel right about it then go for it and shape your novel around it like you said you would. It sounds like a cool idea!
@@FireFeather214 Thanks! I agree that no rule is set in stone, but I also think that guidelines are there for a reason, and I would like to know why the inciting incident shouldn't happen before the beginning of the story so I know how my story may be affected if I decided not to follow the principle.
@@Eduarodi usually I think it’s because of character development, establishing the character and their life to get people to *feel* something about them and then boom - inciting incident invokes empathy, and a sense of “well now I have to know how they handle this” But I think you can definitely work around that with your story. You’ve got something that sounds like it should be gripping the readers from the start, and all authors know how important that is too.
Thank you, watching you for four years now, at the ages of 52! When I started my first novel done everything wrong!!! Now near the end 15 drafts, 160,000! Words Kiwi fantasy open world, every pages driven forwards to keep the reader interested. Did not no what I was getting my self into lol. Thank for your channel.
Prepare to revise, which helps getting unstuck, in the sense you just keep writing (maintain that habit!), and revisit during revision. Even if that 'getting unstuck' writing is bad, don't get hung up on it: take later opportunities to fix it.
Great video thanks! I love the advice for setting easy goals at first. I followed the frequency over magnitude strategy when I started writing, and it helped create a good habit. I wrote a novel in a year and have since been editing it for multiple years. I got busier in life and accept that it takes time to write a good story, and this novel was a wonderful learning ground for me. But the simple, 15-minute per day writing goal I set early on made it so now, busy with work, I still ache to write each day and daydream about how my story needs to unfold. Enjoy your adventure, novelists!
the one thing ive learned on my own is that no matter how many notes you take, or how in depth your character bios get, even with all the rich new connections you make in these extra curricular formulations, dont matter. the things that matter never leave your head after you think of them, and whatever you can only remember while youre actually writing it, are the pieces of good writing youve done. any and all extra curricular connections will surface on their own and become part of that ingrained memory you have of your own story. the most helpful thing is to re-write your story in summary and see what parts arent going anywhere because you didnt need the notes for it. then see what you left out, add that in and it might become ingrained. youll know by the next time you summarize your story, where moments of learning new information become the punctuating events that push it forward. between learning new information about the bad guys plan, or learning new information about the character backstories become the story itself, and the action and running and discovering is just the glue that you couldnt forget if you tried. idk to me its all about fully memorizing your own story, then writing it.
Number 7, getting stuck - oh man that is me. I was doing great: I had a strong beginning and some killer early scenes and then a really big scene about a third of the way through my outlined plan...and then I realized that the way I had written it, which I really liked, didn't mesh as much with my outline as I had planned. Then I got stuck. Had to rewrite the second act of my outline and meld it to the 3rd act and it became daunting because I wanted to keep most of it even though I had kinda messed it up.
"...feel great in the beginning, then start to lose your momentum after a couple of weeks, feel like writing is extremely hard, and giving up because you're no longer meeting your goals" ohhhhh, so it's not just me?? 😂
Generally an internal motivation is what your character hopes and dreams of. Your character is a person (probably, with rare exceptions) So think about what people want, what drives people forward, what do they seek out achieving? Some examples: Wanting to grow skills like becoming a musician, training so they can get a specific job, wanting to find love, wanting to experience new things and explore.
Time & Place can draw us into a novel. Amy Tan's *The Valley of Amazement* is set in Shanghai, during China's last imperial dynasty. The Kevin Costner film *Let Him Go* is set in Montana in 1963, was filmed in Alberta, Canada, and was based on Larry Watson's novel. Having watched the trailer on RU-vid (the DVD is on my buy list) I was drawn by the dangerous family living off the grid in the Dakotas. I was reminded of Dan Brown's advice : Take extra care in working out the back story of your bad and dangerous characters. There is a D.M. Thomas novel in which the protagonist dreams of Hitler working at night in a quarry, attacking the rockface with his hammer. This image disturbed me enough to purchase Volker Ullrich's biography of Hitler on top of all the other Hitler biographies on my bookshelves. Historians have likened Hitler to Alberich in Wagner's greatest opera : See * Wagner's Ring - Who is the Worst Character? * Ira Levin devised a cold-blooded killer in his first novel *A Kiss Before Dying* . Joanne Woodward played the heroine who dies on her wedding day.
The D.M. Thomas novel in which Hitler appears in a dream sequence is not *The White Hotel* (his masterpiece). I think the scene is in *Summit* (1987) or *Pictures at an Exhibition* (1993). It is years since I read this wonderful writer. We should be grateful that films of *The White Hotel* or *Ararat* were never made : great novels should stand alone. Italo Calvino left instructions in his will that none of his novels be filmed. Calvino loved the great directors but his books were off limit.
The obvious is usually the overlooked. Besides, Shaelin's ideas are often subtle & surprising. *David Albert - Why Is There Anything At All?* RU-vid. Closer To Truth. August 22 2022.
