How I Write. Lesson 11

Lessons 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8,9 10

I have been asked in replies on my blogs, in chat and in person. I've been asked to give tutorials and teach people how to write. I've thought about it, I've considered it and now I've started it.

I'm not sure I can teach YOU how to write like I do, but I can tell you how I developed my own style and maybe, hopefully, that will help you develop yours.

These are my books. It took two years to write my first book - and another nine years to publish it.

My Amazon.co.uk page

Google (free use) images and Pixabay

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Basic Advice on Writing 3

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When you write (or when most people write) the story is made up of shorter pieces. The story is made from chapters, chapters are made up of pages, pages are filled with paragraphs which are, in turn formed from sentences.

Each and every sentence you construct has to be important and mean something to the whole.

The chain is as strong as its weakest link.

All your sentences have to be strong, otherwise your paragraph will be weak and that page, and that chapter.

If you have a weak sentence, people will find excuses to skip through the paragraph and may then find excuses to sporadically skip through the rest of the book. That will not allow them to see the beauty in the rest of the book – and all for one weak sentence.

For want of a nail, the shoe was lost.
For want of the shoe, the horse was lost.
For want of the horse, the rider was lost.
For want of the rider, the message was lost.
For want of the message, the battle was lost.
For want of the battle, the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

Snowball effect. Everything builds and grows until it’s out of control and you can't get it back.

That can be the same for success as for failure.

Your book is made from building blocks of chapters and that’s the same for your sentences.

Meanings can be misunderstood unless you’re clear and careful. Make sure you tell the story in a clear and focused manner. My speech goes off at a tangent when I’m enthusiastic about something. I can bounce from one subject to another and the people I’m speaking to can lose track of where I’m going (and so can I) and getting back on track is difficult and by then I’ve sometimes lost my audience.

Do NOT do that to your book! Keep on track, stay focused and say what you were going to say.

Don’t use filler words, don’t pack the words in because of a word-count target. That attitude will fail your book AND your readers!

If you have a word-count, use it as a goal by all means, but be flexible about it. Don’t do your book the disservice of packing it with filler content (all-filler, no killer) because it will doom your book before it has chance to shine. It will probably kill your writing career too – first impressions last.

The next building block – one of the most important, difficult, and satisfying ones to master is to describe the scene, set the back-drop.

You’ve got to be able to picture it in your head because if you can’t picture it, you have no chance of describing it to and for your reader.

If the scenery is important, it’s vital that you tell the reader all about it before it becomes a focal point in your story.

The guy came round the corner – oh, did I mention there was a wall and he couldn’t see the car park where his girlfriend was being abducted? Sorry, my bad.

Not only have you lost the chance of building tension and atmosphere – Will he get there in time? Will he see her being abducted and be too late to stop it? Will there be a pitched battle and he runs after the abductor, only to get back to his beloved and find she’s dead, bled-out and he could have saved her if that dang wall hadn’t shielded the action from view and he’d got there quicker?

But you know… it’s your story, not real life and you can go back and edit your story…

You have to train your brain to slow things down. There may be a flurry of activity, but the words:

And then everything happened at once!

Just will not cut it.

Unless of course, you’re going for:

And then everything happened at once. He came around the corner, spotted his girlfriend’s car because it was the only one left and it was in the middle of the carpark.

He saw two people struggling and the chance that one was his girlfriend was too high to risk.

He sprinted across the carpark with the added boost from his adrenaline-fuelled bloodstream and he leaped across the bonnet like a cop in a movie, pulled off the attacker and flung him to the ground.

The woman he thought was his girlfriend wasn’t and he stood in shock, his adrenaline boost gone.

He only realised the attacker was actually the victim when she used the knife the guy on the ground was trying to wrest from her grasp and stabbed him through the heart.

He crumpled to the ground next to the guy he’d pulled off the crazy woman, and as he died, he watched her kick him in the head and stab him too.

“Oh, my bad…”

Personally, I’d describe the carpark. It puts your reader where you want them to be, following from the angle you want them to follow from, giving them the same point of view that you have and then you can hit them where it hurts

Wide open space, a couple of cars dotted about. The harsh glare of the security lights, high up on the pylons brightened the area, but bled the colour out.

Everything seemed monochrome, darks and lights, no colour. The tarmac surface glistened from an earlier shower and puddles reflected the lights in fathomless pools of black ink.

The one car in the middle of the carpark, exactly where she always put it so there were no hiding places to be ambushed from.

The next part of my book, Deadlier Than The Male gives an example of what I mean for this lesson.

She was not begging or negotiating to be allowed to go, nor was she struggling, and yet she was in mortal danger, she had to realise that?

Her arms were by her sides, the car keys in one pocket. Her gloves had been removed and were now in the other pocket.

Her bag lay at her feet, but she had allowed it to drop there, she had not dropped it in panic. She was not as small as he had first thought; she must have been over five and a half feet tall.

Although she was slim, she was not weak; she had good musculature – toned muscles that he could feel even through the coat.

Her manner - the new confidence bordering on arrogance - was beginning to irritate him; she should be damned-well scared by now, at least screaming her head off, even pissing her pants.

This was not as much fun as it had been last night, or the previous times. She was spoiling his enjoyment!

"Fuck this," he growled, "you need a fright to get you going!"

With that, he let go of her coat and stood upright, away from her and the wall that he had been trapping her against. He half hoped she would try to make an attempt at escape now that he had let her go.

His full height of six feet, two inches was impressive, as was his body which was sleek and toned under his silk shirt.

Her eyes were locked on his as his entire face began to alter. The skin and muscles were independent of the bone structure beneath yet were following the same path.

His features rippled as his skin then began to change its texture. He knew what he looked like, he'd spent time practicing this - just like a wanna-be pop star does.

Though rather than dancing around the bedroom with the obligatory make-believe microphone, he had instead watched his own transformation. He had studied this process, studying his own face in the mirror countless times until he had perfected this elaborate and terrifying metamorphosis.

He had worked hard for each of his victim’s benefit, making their ordeal as shocking as possible – after all, it would be their last experience.

His forehead changed and flattened - as did the slope of his cranium - the hairline moving forward. At the same instant, his mouth began to protrude from his face, bringing the nose with it and elongating his jaw.

The teeth moved by themselves to fill the new jaw, they became longer and pointed – a visible and lethal sharpness as his lips drew back from them.

His hairline was continuing forward - like water burbling over shale - down his face, changing texture as it enveloped skin. It passed over his jaw line and down his throat on into the open collar of his shirt. His eyes turned from dark brown to preternatural yellow as the hair sprouted along his lengthened nose.

Then as the transformation of his face had finished, his tongue, glistening with saliva, touched the tip of one front fang in a final and theatrical gesture.

The face of the full moon watched over this horrifying tableau and still the woman’s gaze never faltered.

He stood still and quiet for a moment and then, pride and arrogance gleaming in his eyes, continued to set the scene for her.

"I need no introduction; you can see exactly what I am. I belong with the dark terrors that reside in the back of your mind. I am the embodiment of what you humans hope does not exist and try to convince yourselves so, yet still fear is real. I am a Werewolf! My kind have inhabited your stories and nightmares for centuries, you delight in the telling and re-telling of stories which scare you to death and what happens when you encounter such a being? Do you revel in the experience? No, you scream and plead and beg for it not to be so. Well, I fulfil my part of the bargain; I want you to honour your part. All you need to do is make a break for it; your flesh will taste so much better if you pump adrenalin into it."

His voice sounded deeper because of his distorted vocal chords.

She waited until he had finished his speech and then said, "Oh, you're a werewolf are you?"

Sarcasm dripped from every syllable.

“Is this how you scared the woman last night? You weren’t satisfied that she was probably terrified out of her wits because you were attacking her in the first place? You needed that extra edge to make her really scared… but why? What purpose does that serve you? I don’t believe that it’s just the adrenalin taste that does it for you, there has to be more.”