{"id":2216,"date":"2019-11-05T11:28:51","date_gmt":"2019-11-05T16:28:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/?page_id=2216"},"modified":"2020-12-25T21:59:48","modified_gmt":"2020-12-26T02:59:48","slug":"construction","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/construction\/","title":{"rendered":"Construction"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Every story – good and bad – starts with a “What if” idea. So what’s yours, how can you tell if it’s any good, and how can you build a story off that?<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

5 Ways to Tell If You Have a Good Idea for a Book<\/a><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Every story starts with a \u201cwhat if\u201d idea: What if<\/em> a teen girl with chronic depression woke up one day with psychic powers? What if<\/em> Germany had won World War II (\u2026you see this one a lot)? What if<\/em> we found out aliens had been secretly colonizing Mars for hundreds of years? What if<\/em> a young boy with two progressive dads and thick glasses moved to the Deep South? What if <\/em>I lightly fictionalized my own life story (\u2026I wouldn\u2019t advise this one, tho\u2014most authors overestimate how interesting their lives are to other people)?…[keep reading<\/a>]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A good “What if” idea is great, but you gotta get the words on the page, babe, or your idea doesn’t mean squat. Check out this section on how to start actually WRITING a book. <\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

What You Absolutely Need To Know Before You Start Writing<\/a><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In my last article, I discussed how authors often fall into the trap of obsessing over irrelevant character details at the expense of info that matters. You don\u2019t need to know everything about a character, only certain critical details: desires, strengths, and weaknesses. The same holds true for starting a story: you don\u2019t need to know everything, only certain things\u2026but you NEED to know those key things…[keep reading<\/a>]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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9 Steps to Start Your Story<\/a><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Let\u2019s say you\u2019ve confirmed your what-if idea<\/a> is worth expanding into a whole story. Yay!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now\nwhat?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is where most people get stuck after they decide they want to write a novel. They might write a few pages, or even a few chapters, and then stall out. Part of this is waning interest and competing priorities; writing an entire novel is hard and takes a long time, dammit! If you\u2019re not committed, it\u2019s probably not gonna happen…[keep reading<\/a>]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Ending is easier than beginning, but hard to do well. Stick the landing with these tips!<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The 4 Key Attributes of a Good Ending<\/a><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s honestly not a lot to say about endings except they should be a satisfying conclusion of everything that\u2019s come before\u2014but, of course, that can be harder than it sounds. An exceptionally good ending can elevate a story to greatness (The Usual Suspects, The Shawshank Redemption<\/em>), or ruin it (Season 8 of Game of Thrones, The Rise of Skywalker <\/em>for some current examples)<\/em>. To clarify, when I say good<\/em> ending I mean satisfying,<\/em> which isn\u2019t necessarily a happy<\/em> ending…[keep reading<\/a>]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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If you don’t even know what this means, you’ve got some reading (below) to do!<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Plotting versus Pantsing, and 4 Hybrid Options to Plot Out Your Novel<\/a><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The\nbiggest issue with writing a book is that you need to somehow fill up blank\nspace on a page with words. Specifically, words that form a narrative. Failing\nto do this means you\u2019ve failed to write a book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This\nis ALWAYS, 100% of the time, the reason people try and fail to write a novel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The problem is it\u2019s quite easy to think a lot about writing a book, and then not put any actual words on a page. In a future post I\u2019ll discuss how to find the time to write, but for now I\u2019ll address the beat before the actual writing, which is to have a plan…[keep reading<\/a>]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Just like a movie or TV show, every novel is composed of scenes where stuff happens (mostly). Want me to get more specific? …Okay!<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

9 Steps to Constructing a Good Scene or Chapter<\/a><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

You know how sometimes you\u2019ll read an entire chapter of a book and think to yourself, \u201cWhat did I just read?\u201d Or maybe, \u201cWhat was the point of that?\u201d Well, the reason you\u2019re asking yourself this question is because whoever wrote the chapter didn\u2019t know how to properly construct a scene\u2026or it\u2019s supposed to be some kind of deep literary nonsense, though if that\u2019s the case you\u2019d probably think to yourself \u201cSoooo deep\u2026<\/em>\u201d while secretly feeling ashamed because you assume you\u2019re too dumb to understand it…[keep reading<\/a>]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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How To Write A Good Fight\/Sex Scene<\/a><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Let\u2019s be honest\u2014the vast majority of fight\/sex scenes in Hollywood and literature only exist to titillate. Most could be replaced by a sign or sentence that says \u201cAnd then they have sex,\u201d or \u201cAnd then they fight.\u201d I lump sex scenes and fight scenes together because the mechanics and purposes of both are very similar…[keep reading<\/a>]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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We Need To Talk About The Darkest Minds<\/em> and the Importance of Choice<\/a><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

You may have blinked and missed it, but The Darkest Minds<\/em> movie<\/a> released in August 2018 is one of the most recent Young Adult (YA) dystopia joints adapted from a popular novel to crash and burn at the box office<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cue the proclamations from on-high that the YA dystopia genre is dead. DEEEEAAAAD!!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But it\u2019s unfair to blame an entire genre for the failure of an individual movie. While the Han Solo<\/a> movie also performed below expectations nobody declared science fiction dead, or that thrillers were dead when The Snowman<\/em><\/a> garnered scathing reviews. The Darkest Minds<\/em> didn\u2019t fail because audiences don\u2019t want YA dystopias, but because it was a bad movie<\/em> that flunked the basics of Storytelling 101…[keep reading<\/a>]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Unless you’re Stephen King or a romance author, it’s probably gonna take you a LONG time to write your book. There’s just no way around it when you’ve got to squeeze 60-90K words out of your head. Find out some tried and true methods on how to do it here.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

4 Steps to Finding Time to Write<\/a><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

You know the saying, \u201cWriters write every day\u201d? Here\u2019s the thing: this isn\u2019t true. The vast majority of successful writers don\u2019t actually write every day; maybe most<\/em> days, but not every day. Sometimes they get sick, or overwhelmed with family stuff, or go on vacation, or get hit by a car<\/a>, et cetera. Things come up, life happens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The real<\/em> saying should be: \u201cWriters finish<\/em>.\u201d Successful authors finish projects, period. If you never finish, you\u2019ve effectively done nothing. \u2026Unless you\u2019re writing just for fun, and then none of this advice matters anyway. BTW, good luck with that Cinderella\/Batman mashup story told from celebrity shock jock Howard Stern\u2019s point of view! [keep reading<\/a>]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

5 Ways to Tell If You Have a Good Idea for a Book Every story starts with a \u201cwhat if\u201d idea: What if a teen girl with chronic depression woke up one day with psychic powers? What if Germany had won World War II (\u2026you see this one a lot)? What if we found out … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Construction”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"class_list":["post-2216","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/P9Vyi8-zK","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2216","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2216"}],"version-history":[{"count":33,"href":"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2216\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2826,"href":"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2216\/revisions\/2826"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2216"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}