Write like an English Paper

Wait, what?

You're in the real world now, why should you be writing a story like it's an English paper?

Turns out, they taught us these things for more than just the heck of it.

A well structured, well written book will have three main elements:

1. Beginning (Hook)
2. Middle (Development)
3. End (Climax)

Sound familiar?

Every book, every chapter, every scene - all must be structured this way.

It almost sounds like too much thinking. "I just want to write whatever I want, it's my book." Well, unfortunately, it's still dependent upon these things. You want people to read it, right?

I certainly do, so I did some more research. Here's what I found:

Every chapter should be made up of 2 parts: Action (scene) and Reaction (sequel).

Those can be broken into 3 parts each as well.

Action (scene):
   1. Goal (only those which drive the plot of the book)
   2. Conflict
   3. Disaster (typically the answer to the question someone would ask of "What's going to happen?")

Reaction (sequel):
   1. Reaction
   2. Dilemma
   3. Decision

The biggest thing with a book is that you need to have one main goal for the entire book. And throughout the story, there's going to be a cycle of Goal - conflict - modify goal - another conflict - modify goal again, and so on, until you finally reach the satisfaction of the goal and the end of the book.

In other words, you need to know, going into your story, what you want to eventually happen. This will help drive and shape what you write. It will keep your book from being too cluttered and unfocused, preventing you from adding in scenes with no value or purpose.

Add this to not creating too many characters for the sake of creating a character, and you'll have a book that won't confuse or irritate your readers. There won't be tangents, or unnecessary names and people, to remember.

Want your creative writing to have less rules? Write poetry. I did that for many years, and it was satisfying. But I know that, beyond a small subset of people, no one will read any of my poems. I want people to read my books.

And maybe, with all of these things I've learned, more than that small subset of people (friends and family) actually will.

Secondary Characters

It's easy to get caught up in creating characters for the purpose of advancing a story.

The problem comes when you create too many characters.

I had this issue myself. Secondary characters, mainly. So I did my research: how much development does a secondary character need?

This is what I discovered...

The most important thing is that they need to have a purpose in the story, a reason for being.

Beyond that, a secondary character needs to have:

1. A history
2. Story Arc
3. Personality
4. Description
5. 3 Virtues/ 3 Vices

It gives your story a little more depth, and helps you write more scenes, if you have an understanding of all of your characters. You don't have to share everything about your smaller folks, but you do need to know these things about them. Otherwise, you're very likely to end up with some one-dimensional stereotypes. They need to be human, and if you give them those things I listed above, they will be.

This is a big thing for me, because I believe these are things I lacked in my first book. And until I did this research, things I lacked even more glaringly in this current book.

And really, in doing this, I actually was able to combine two characters, and develop another one quite a bit. That was something I found during my research. Don't be afraid to combine or completely eliminate characters. Your story will be worse off if it has a character with no personality, no motivations, and no depth. If they lack these things, then the odds are you can give their "important" scenes to someone else.