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Writing Tips:
How to Get Started
Think about your characters and story; allow the ideas to simmer in your head. The most important thing is to capture your protagonist’s voice. Once you know your main character and have a general idea of the storyline, just start writing and don’t fear editing what you’ve written at a later stage. Rarely does the first draft reflect the final one but the important thing is to start, let the words flow, and you will be surprised how quickly the story takes on a life of its own. |
Randa Abdel-Fattah offers
tips on: How
to Get Started
Easy. Either get a pen/pencil and some paper, or sit by your computer. And do it. Write. In order to be a writer, all you need to do is WRITE! |
Keep writing! The only way to 'learn' how to write is practice. Try to make up stories about people in all kinds of places and situations. What would you do if you were them? Don't worry if you don't know many facts. In a story it's perfectly ok to make things up. |
Read! Read lots and lots of different kinds of books, picture books,graphic novels, novels, poems, newspapers, magazines. Read even the books you suspect you might not be too keen on. They're the ones which may surprise you the most. I was never keen on Westerns but then I read Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry - and it was fantastic. Once you've got an idea, think about all the ways you can make it better, more exciting, more gripping, more emotional, more real. |
Just start! Sit down and get going. Lots of people put off starting until they've got the plot all worked out. I don't think that's necessary. I find the best ideas come to me while I'm actually writing. By all means chew over the story first in your head and maybe do some rough planning, but as soon as you've got some idea of what you want to say, get writing. |
Daydream your stories, then write them down. As a teenager, I loved writing stories – my life was pretty boring, but I could be whoever and whatever I wanted to be in a story! At 13 I started sending short stories to my fave teen mag, and after possibly HUNDREDS of rejections, I got a story published when I was 16. This was great experience and I learned a lot about what magazines wanted from a story. I also learned not to expect success overnight!!! |
Think about the kind of stories that you like to read. Could you write one of those? |
Don't be in too much of a hurry to start writing. Think of an idea first to get you started. Ideas can be triggered off by anything – maybe you've seen an article in the newspaper about a family who've won the Lottery. Maybe something has happened to you personally, which you want to turn into a story. Whatever your idea, think about it for a few days before you start to write. |
Never write on scraps of paper. Buy a notebook with an attractive cover, and this will be your special book. You can use it as a journal to write down descriptions of people, places, everything around you. You can jot down ideas in it before they escape. You can keep all your drafts in it, first thoughts, best thoughts, of all your stories and poems. And you can take it with you wherever you go. |
Alan Ahlberg’s joke is that the first thing to do is ‘get your bum on a seat’, and I’d certainly agree with that. But there is no one ‘right way’ to write a book (Art is a product, not process.) So if you’re a get-stuck-straight-into-it-and-fly writer, do just that. And if you’re a planner and brooder, then plan and brood. |
Ask yourself: how do I get the reader’s attention? Imagine two little hands come out of the book and grab his or her eyeballs. No unnecessary detail, just that key bit of dialogue, action or description to say: read me! |
Jot down a few vague ideas and see if you can expand any of them. |
Think about your idea. Does it make you smile? Are you sure you want to write it? Plan the whole thing out. You need a structure before you start writing. |
It's always one of the hardest things -even for experienced writers. |
I almost always begin with characters and dialogue. For as long as I have written, I have always found character and dialogue to be my safety net, my fallback position, my comfort zone. I suppose this is because I hear stories, more than I see them. In fiction as well as in real life, I find that people’s words, their voices, their styles of expressing themselves, deliver more meaning and atmosphere than any other element. So, to get started, I will usually walk around for a while with a couple of characters in my head before I try and write anything. Subconsciously, they are accumulating into fully-rounded characters with their own opinions, styles, and voices, so that when I do finally sit down to write them, they are behaving like real people, rather than puppets. |
Jot down your ideas. Write a blurb of your story. You'll see your story begin to grow. Write a longer blurb, with the exciting points in your story - then think what's the funniest, scariest or most exciting way I can start this story? |
Know your ending. Make sure you're clear on where you're going before you start. You'll need a clear idea of what you want to write, of course. Make notes, plan out a basic plot, maybe even make a timeline so that you know what order things are going to happen in. I find I have to make plenty of notes, and let things find their place in the story. I give it time to stew, and when it's ready to be told, I get impatient to write it. Make sure you have long periods of peace and quiet in which to write, so you can relax into it, and try and gradually lengthen the amount of time you can spend writing as you get into it. But the most important thing is to know your ending; it gives you something to aim at. |
Find an idea that really interests you –not someone else’s idea. Yours. All the best stories come from people who really want to write them. |
How to get started in 4 easy lessons |
Plan everything, even if you discard your plan halfway through. And try to think about what you are trying to say with your story. Where does it go? What do the characters think/feel? Research the areas that you aren't familiar with BEFORE you start writing. Take the time to plot your story/character development/timelines. |
Collect ideas. Keep a notebook and jot down anything that catches your interest, or might make a good story. Collect photos, postcards, newspaper cuttings, too – stick them in your book as reminders and stimuli. After a while, you’ll find that your notebook contains lots of starting points for your own, original stories. |
I get started on a part of the book that interests me a lot. In my latest book, The House of Windjammer, I wrote the end first. Don’t worry about being word perfect when you start – just get writing and make corrections later. |
Sometimes I start with the ending rather than the beginning and work backwards. The most important thing to do is to write a line or a paragraph and get the story started, you can always go back later and edit it or improve it. |
Just do it. No matter how hard it seems, you will only get going if you actually sit down and write or type. Accept that you may not get it perfect the first time, and dive in. You can always improve it later. It's much easier to change something that’s already there than to sit looking at a blank sheet of paper. |
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