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.