Robyn Paterson's Blog, page 10

Time to make All The Write Moves!

[image error]

A little over a year ago, I released Write! Shonen Manga, and included a section for getting new writers up to speed based on my 20 years experience as a writer and teacher. To my surprise, that writing section got just as must praise from readers as the parts of the book about writing manga, and some even suggested making it into a book all its own!

Well, far be it from me to argue with my readers!

I present to you All the Write Moves: Your Essential Guide to Creating Great Fiction, a revis...

NaNoWriMo Quickstart Guide – Part Eight: Writing a Synopsis

Step 8: Writing a Synopsis

While you might be tempted to write your story just from your scene list, it’s a good idea to take one more final step and make sure everything is in place before you begin the process of turning your story into something people are going to love to read.

That final step is turning the collection of scenes you’ve made into a synopsis of the whole story.

Basically, what you’re doing is writing a short version of your story using the information from your scenes and...

NaNoWriMo Quickstart Guide – Part Seven: Organize Your Ideas Into Scenes

Step 7: Organize Your Ideas Into Scenes

The next step is also simple and fun – you take your big collection of scenes and try to see if you can arrange them into a rough version of a story. In the paper version, this involves putting them into a box (or a random pile) and then drawing each one out randomly and arranging them in front of you in ways that make sense. In the Word Processor version, you’ll want to copy-paste them into a blank document one at a time, or just re-arrange them where...

NaNoWriMo Quickstart Guide – Part Six: Brainstorm Situations and Scenes

Step 6: Brainstorm Situations and Scenes

Once you have your cast, it’s time to figure out what’s going to happen to them.

This is where the fun really begins, as all you have to do is start to write down ideas about situations that could happen in your story. Right from Step 2 and 3, you probably had images of different important scenes in your head, and now it’s time to get those on paper in rough form.

You can do this as two steps or just skip the first step and go right to the second one,...

NaNoWriMo Quickstart Guide – Part Five: Pick Your Main Characters

Step 5: Pick your Main Characters

It might seem strange that it took so long to talk about the characters, after all, you already thought up rough characters when you came up with your Core Premise for your story. However, until everything from Genre to Theme was in place, you weren’t ready to actually sit down and make your lead characters because the characters of a story are influenced by all of the things that we’ve covered so far, and each step has made the characters you will create mor...

NaNoWriMo Quickstart Guide – Part Four: Picking a Theme

Step 4: Picking a Theme

While an interesting main plot or idea for the story is going to make it interesting to read, the truth is if you want your story to really have any depth, or be meaningful to readers, you’re going to need to find a theme for it as well. The theme, as your English teacher probably told your class more than once, is the message or lesson about life that the author is trying to communicate to the reader. It’s the “point” of the story, and works hand in hand with the Core...

NaNoWriMo Quickstart Guide – Part Three: Picking a Core Premise

Step 3: Picking a Core Premise

Your next task is to pick a Core Premise for your story based on the pile of ideas you’ve just put together in the previous step. This step is extremely important and shouldn’t be skipped, because your Core Premise is the central idea of your story and the seed from which the rest of the story will grow. Without it, you’ll quickly run into problems because you won’t know the story you’re trying to tell, and with it, you have a guiding star leading the way to the...

NaNoWriMo Quickstart Guide – Part Two: Brainstorming Ideas

Step 2: Brainstorming Ideas

Once you’ve picked your genre, the next step is customizing this story so it’s yours.

How do you do this? It’s pretty simple- the same way every single writer before you made their stories original to them- they drew from their own life experience.

Now, you might be thinking, “Life experience? My life is boring! Nobody wants to read about me!”

But, the truth is, everyone’s life is unique and interesting to someone else. The more different their life is from yours,...

NaNoWriMo Quickstart Guide – Part One: Pick A Genre

The following multi-part series will offer a step-by-step quick-start guide to putting together a story. Even if you have little to no experience with writing, this guide will give you the basic structure and core ideas you need to tell the story you want. Of course, you will still need to be able to write proper sentences and use grammar on your own to make this work, but if you can, then you can tell a story. It will only take practice, time, and not giving up.

In the words of Robert Heinle...

Detective Conan Mystery Formula

The following formula, found on Reddit and submitted by user TeraVonen, is a near perfect summary of the typical 2-part story pattern you find in the mystery anime and manga Detective Conan. Conan is the 4th best selling manga series of all time, and the anime has been on the air for over 20 years, and in that time a definitely formula to how the stories play out has developed. There is still a lot of variety within this formula, but it’s the basis of the majority of Conan episodes which are...