How do you create compelling characters?
Nothing is born in a vacuum. Characters don’t emerge fully formed. Creating compelling characters is a process of getting to know them and working to make them come to life. They’re developed through character sketches, through the writing process itself, through lots feedback, and diligent revision.
Plot and structure are like gravity. You can work with them or you can fight against them, but either way they’re as real as a the keyboard at your fingertips.
Getting a solid grasp on the foundations of plot and structure, and learning to work in harmony with these principles, will take your stories to the next level.
Simon Whistler embodies the spirit of the do-it-yourself writer. In this Scrivener Superpowers interview, Simon and I talk about his editing process and how he came to book writing.
I’ve read dozens of books and hundreds of blogs on writing advice over the years, and if I could distill just one piece of wisdom from all that effort studying, it’s that every writer has a unique process for putting words on the page. However, we all have room for growth, so, today, we’ll hear about how scrivener can help us improve our writing process.
During moments when my natural enthusiasm for the craft of writing wanes, it’s useful to have a secret weapon to draw from my arsenal that reinvigorates my mind and makes me excited about working again.
That secret weapon is the certain knowledge that writers have superpowers.
You’re ready to start drafting.
At this point, you’ve been introduced to the important pieces of Scrivener’s user interface; you’re familiar with the essential plot and structure principles, including why you should break your story out into component scenes, which Scrivener excels at; you know how to create character and setting sketches using template sheets; and you have a complete account of my storyboarding process for planning stories and getting unstuck while you’re writing.
In other words, you have all the tools you need to start drafting your story.
Storyboarding as it pertains to novels and short stories is the process of mapping out your story, often using index cards, in a high-level way that allows you to see your story visually and rearrange it.
Scrivener’s corkboard view provides the perfect interface to do this digitally, with a method to transition to a physical medium.
In the Scrivener walkthroughs and workshops I’ve done, one of the most common complaints from new users is that the interface is confusing and overwhelming. People find it difficult to get used to new software, and so they give up before they even get started.
It might help you put the glut of new creative writing tools flooding the market into perspective by examining the history out of which these creative technologies have emerged.
Like all technology, new tools are built on the foundation of the technology that came it. Let’s take a quick journey through the history of creative writing tools so that we can evaluate modern creative writing in a historical context.
Do you want to write a novel? Are you one of those people who has always dreamed of writing one, but don’t know where to start? Or maybe you’ve started, but got lost somewhere in the middle? If you said [more]
“If character is the foreground of fiction, setting is the background,” the narrator of Writing Fiction tells us. But how do you create engaging settings that enhance your story? And how can the popular writing software, Scrivener, help you create setting sketches perfect for particular your story?
So you want to write fiction. Where do you begin? And what creative writing tools do you need to accomplish your writing goals?