Being a fiction lover and in the final stage of publishing my first fiction novel, I would like to give some useful tips to the emerging writers on how to pick up an idea and to develop it into a fiction book. My tips are five simple steps, I follow
:
1. Check for the contemporary books :
Ideas for writing a fiction should be inherent. Book writing is a skill or an ability or a god's gift in other words, if you don't have an intrinsic adroitness,it wont be an easy piece of cake to be cooked. So in this article I presume that you have the talent of generating an idea of writing a fiction.
Once the spark struck the brain, you would have to develop that to a contentful novel, which may have to run hundreds of pages. But before you sit with your pen, I would suggest you do a literature review. Which means, try and understand the novels which are closer to your genre. Read the best sellers, know about the background of the author. Find out their writing skill. Not that you need to follow the style but you need to know the pattern. Me being Indian author, I had never worried about the extraordinary stuffing of irrelevant vocabulary. The importance is not exposing the talent of the vocabulary skills but to follow a pattern. How to keep the readers glued? How to represent a regular story in a grippy manner? How to stay in the mind of the reader when he takes a break and make him come back again to the book? , to get answers for these, taking a look at the best contemporary books would help you.
2. Put yourself in the shoes of the reader:
You ask yourself the following questions. Being a reader, will I be interested in reading this book? If the answer is yes, go ahead in writing. But if it is no, due to the insecurity factor, you should spend some time thinking how to make it creative and interesting. Hoisting the inquisitiveness of the reader is the predominant success of a book. That is hard-earned though.
3. Writing is important not the words:
When you write the first copy of your novel, don't worry about the language or the ostentatious vocabulary you would want to use in the book. The thought of those would certainly disrupt your flow and it is a sheer malfunctioning of creativity. Go with the flow. Write whatever you would want to write, the editing is a subsequent job. In other words writing should be continuous and the correction of the first draft should be cautious.
4. Give a structure to the story :
When you write your first novel, you would certainly pick up some incidents that happened in your real life. But those incidents would be a cascading effect of some other incidents that happened in the past. Without understanding the triggering point, the incident which happens in the present might not look interesting. So being an author, you should know the incident-pickup point. You should decide the beginning frame-line and structure it in such a way the reader doesn't get confused. You can spend some time describing the most important characters, though it may sound a little boring and spoils the tempo, it is very important for the readers to form a mental picture. The mental picture leads to the mind space in-habitation. We, an author, want our characters to live in the mind of the reader and for which the structure to the story and narration of the characters who supports the incidents in the structure, are salient.
Narrate the story to your close ones:
Last but not the least, even before you sit on writing the story, narrating it to your loved ones verbally would give you a lot of confidence. You need NOT pick many people, rather you can choose one or two who can give a very clean and straightforward feedback to the story. Pick up the people who don't envy you or with you for favors. Grandparents, if you have, are the best choice for that. However if you have adult content in the story you need to monger around to get the right set of people.
Best wishes and happy publishing!!
Keywords : Book writing, Indian author