Hacking the First Draft in 30 Days
I promised I'd post a workshop on my blog to help authors so here it is. This is for people who have wanted to write a FICTION story and don't know where to begin. And if they do begin they don't know how to continue. I tell you I remember well being in that very place. It was overwhelming. Before I had any instructions, or read any good books on the subject, I was lost and alone. In fact, I didn't even think there were instructions on how to write a book. I thought people were so talented that they just sat down and started typing and in a few weeks there it was, a complete novel!
Not so my friend.
What I'm going to show you here is a compilation of years of study. I'll also be referring you to information online too.
Now I'll be honest with you. I am not a best-selling author. I've had some of my books on the best seller's list on Amazon but that was only because I paid a ridiculous price for ads or a BookBub deal. I make no claims to being a marketer. That has nothing to do with writing. You don't have to write good books to be a best seller and you might write the best novels in the world and still not sell well. Those are two completely different talents and sometimes they are related by only a thread!
With that out of the way, I write a lot and I write well. I could write better, agreed, and I'm working on it. But the part of this whole business is that I love to tell stories. It's fun. And I think that qualifies me to give you the following information.
We'll take it in several posts. There will be assignments so be ready. I was selling this course for $75, but not anymore. I'm doing this to help you because it's so simple and I see so many would-be authors struggling, and I'm getting old, and so many people have helped me, that I'm paying it forward.
Lesson 1
First Step to writing...sit down and ask yourself what do I want to write?
The answer will most like involve genre, which is a category of stories and you can do a search yourself on the different categories and tropes that they include. I'm not going to go into this in detail, but study up on the genres you might like to tell a story in. I do fantasy, but I also have dabbled in sweet romance and it seems all my stories end up with a mystery in them. That's okay to cross genres. But you'll do yourself a favor to understand what puts a book into what genre because you should fulfill your reader's expectations.
Different genres have different expectations in terms of length, content, and even main characters.
For example, a work of middle-grade fiction has to be on the shorter side of things. The content generally can’t be too dark (there are exceptions, but there are often reasons for those exceptions), the language tends to be “clean”, and an adult character will never be a “Point of View” character.
If you know what genre you are writing in, it can also help you to read other books in the same genre.
Some rules for your genre you might want to look up. These links are from a Writerswrite workshop.
Manuscript length, character types, settings, themes, POVs (POV means the point of view. We'll get into that at a later date), and length of description.
So as you can see, there's a little bit of study that is required of you before you begin. If you want to do this course on a step-by-step basis, I suggest now's a good time to look up these genres and determine where you best fit in. Do you want to write for children? Teenagers? Adults? and I'm adding one more category...seniors.
Yes, don't laugh. I've always believed we older people need our own category because we have our own likes and dislikes in novels and they tend to be somewhere between young adult and adult with some literary thrown in.
So there's your homework. Research the genres, follow my blog, and feel free to write me a note telling me what genre you want to write your story in.
And if you want to leave a tip, please visit my Kickstarter and pick up my Cho Nisi series.