Writing Fiction – Page 2

Writing Fantasy || Character Personalities

How well do you know your characters?

Do you know the personalities of these people who live in your head?
Have you spent enough time with them to know how they’d feel about what’s going on in their story?
Would their reactions to certain events or a flippant statement lead to a fight scene?
If they saw a mouse in the kitchen would they scream and jump up on the couch?

Writing Character Personality Types — How would your character react?

How to get to know your characters

Knowing your characters well enough to be able to use their personality traits to your advantage as you write your novel will make the writing flow easier and create logical and organic story arcs.

For example, who is your protagonist likely to befriend?
Who may hate your protagonist?
What drives your protagonist’s passion?
What may drive a particular character crazy?
How would your antagonist behave in an argument?

As I study the next steps in writing my novel, I realize I can’t answer some of the questions I need to ask to plot my story. The reason being, I don’t know what my character would do in any given situation. So, I need to take the time to get to know who these people are and what their responses would be to the events I want in my story. I need to be able to walk through this story with my characters and see, hear, touch, smell and taste what they experience and how they respond to the circumstances I set before them.

Personality Types

We need to take time to get to know everyone in our story. It’s fascinating and fruitful. Once we know our main characters well we’ll be better able to write an accurate and believable story. It may come in handy with a few of those friends who’re giving us a hard time. If we understand people better we may just be able to get along better.

What’s Your Personality?

How about you? If you’d like to dig a little deeper or find your own personality type, you can check out a blog post I wrote for my mini-course, Your Write Voice For His Kingdom.

Once we know our characters’ personalities we can go on to discovering their backstories and why they responded to events in their past based on those personality traits.

Have fun discovering the ways we were all made so differently by our Heavenly Father.

Til next time, know you are loved by the One who made you in His image.

Lynne

Resources for digging deeper:

There are several personality tests online but, in my opinion, these three are the best. Each one brings a different perspective to a developing character.

Myers-Briggs 16 Personality Types Probably the most used. You can find a helpful sheet on my Pinterest board Writing Personality Types
Enneagram of Personality lists Type, Ideal, Fear, Desire and Vice for 9 categories
The Four Temperaments Choleric, Melancholic, Sanguine and Phlegmatic

Writing Fantasy || Logline (Elevator Pitch)

What is a logline?

Have you ever been in a situation where you tell someone you’re writing a book, all excited, and then they ask you what it’s about, and you get that glazed look like you just woke up from a nap? Yeah, I did that a lot with my first book. Then someone told me at a conference that I needed a logline. A logline is an extended premise sentence. It tells your readers more about your story. Your one-sentence premise catches their attention and the logline gets them hooked. The idea is to leave them wanting more without giving away your entire plot. The logline is what you use as your Elevator Pitch.

Why you need an elevator pitch for your fantasy/fiction novel

The Elevator Pitch is meant to be answered in the time it takes the elevator to get to the next floor, because that’s sometimes all the time you have with someone in person, and it’s the time most people online will take to decide if they want to spend time getting to know more. So–thank you for sticking around so far!

The logline is also a gem for social media such as Facebook where you have the opportunity to post more words than on Twitter.

5 key components of writing a fantasy/fiction logline

Main Character – the hero/protagonist
Their Situation – their daily life
Their Objective – what they want that they don’t have
Their Opponent – the person or thing that gets in their way
Disaster – you’ll need an epic battle or devastating event

Here’s an example:

Main character

Dave.

His present situation (occupation, relationship, what’s going on in his life?)

He works at a coffee shop.

What does he want? (the treasure or objective).

He wants to escape the drudgery of his job and start his own business.

Who or what stands in his way? (the antagonist can be a person or situation).

He doesn’t make enough money to start the business because his boss (the antagonist) won’t give him extra hours.

What happens to change his life?

He’s met by a band of creatures in the forest, and they take him to a mystical city hidden in the woods. They show him how to make delicious pastries from organic ingredients found in a secret part of the forest. The cakes are healthier and actually help with weight-loss. Dave sees the potential for a successful bakery business.

Your story will need some exciting conflict

His boss steals the recipes.

Here’s all the information in one concise sentence:

“Dave, a dissatisfied coffee shop employee, wants nothing better than to quit his job and open his own business but lacks the finances to do that because of his mean boss. Until he meets mystical creatures in the forest who surprisingly change Dave’s aspirations, but Dave’s boss isn’t ready to let him go that easily”.

This is the sentence you use as your Elevator Pitch.

Remember the premises from the last post?

Here are their loglines–

“Colin Wade is on a mission. A mission to study a singularity – the enigmatic centre of a black hole. But things are definitely not going according to plan, as Colin finds himself in an area of space with no visible stars at all until a lone blue light threatens to engulf the ship in a strange fire. Colin will need all of his cunning, and plenty of unlikely help, to solve the mystery of the singularity, or else find himself lost in space indefinitely.”

“Bookstore owner Meryn O’Reilly and Army Captain Jesse Christensen are on opposite sides of a battle. After a series of terrorist attacks in 2053, martial law has been declared in Canada and the military has taken over. When a radical Christian group claims responsibility, Jesse and his platoon are sent to Meryn’s city to keep an eye on the Christians and ensure they are not stepping outside the confines of the law.”

And, by the way, if you come across those pastries, please let me know!

Til next time, know you are loved by the One who made you in His image.

Lynne

(note: I’m an Amazon affiliate and receive a small fee for using their images when I promote someone’s work.)

5 Easy Ways to Create Income From Writing

Want to know 5 easy ways to create an income from writing?

After two years of little in the way of sales from my first book, I was wondering if anyone actually makes a decent income from writing. I realize if I could just write more, that would increase my income, but who’s got time to write more?

Here’s how I did it – I took what I’d already written on my social media and made it into a book!

Seriously. That’s what I did. All my blogs about writing, my posts about my life, my tweets of writing tips and coaching, my pins about my interests, all became tidbits to expand and form into a book! It was a lot of fun, and I’m using these methods to write more books. So, I wanted to let you know how to use what you’ve already written and get started with that income too. Still with me but wondering how the heck I did that?

Here’s How I Used These 5 Simple Ways to Create Income From Writing

From Blog To Book – The Novel Author’s Workbook I created an Etsy downloadable 99-page workbook from blogs I’d written over the course of a year on how to write fiction, as I was doing the research. It takes the author from the beginning premise and outline of a novel, through to publishing and marketing.
From Pin To Print/Nonfiction — Hosting a Shire Party is a simple ebook about a cosplay party I had. I wrote about creating easy costumes, food, and games, as I pinned the photos from the party.
From Tweet To Tutorial – Your Write Voice For His Kingdom is a course I wrote from tweets about my workshop notes as a Christian Life Coach and writer’s coach. I coach students through the decision process of becoming a writer and how God has equipped them to write for His purpose.
From Post To Published – Life at White Rose Shire is an ebook in-progress of a collection of devotionals which I’ll be posting on my blog under a sub-heading and later publishing as a Kindle devotional book.
From Muse To Memoir — Raising Benjamin Frog – A Mother’s Journey With Her Autistic Son is a print book from notes I wrote originally for my earlier blog posts on Autism. It chronicles my son’s journey from birth to age 29, and his success as an author.