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Gender: Female
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Reviews: 15
Wed Aug 06, 2014 12:47 am
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Pinkieishere1345 says...



Hey, everyone. I am here today to say that we(Pinkiegirl13 and me) are having problems with our story. You see, I am helping my sister with her new story including mines which called Sidney's Children. It is about a woman and her different species siblings went through adventures as a family. It is seems to good for us, but we are having no ideas for our new first chapter. The first chapter supposed to start like with Jessica, who is a 26 years-old woman who is writer with a twin brother, telling a story about her going to Paris with her comedian and goofy brother, Harry. She don't know who are her siblings yet first so we are starting with her not knowing about it. However, we don't how to start it with a nice(YES, NICE) beginning. I hope you give us any help with our block minds. Well, see ya around! :D

Pinkiegirl13: I don't like about this....

Me: Shut up, Sis!
  





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Wed Aug 06, 2014 2:58 am
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Rosendorn says...



Well, you seem to have a beginning:

Jessica telling a story about her going to Paris with her comedian and goofy brother


So, you open up with Jessica telling a story to somebody about her trip to Paris with her brother, maybe somebody else? It shouldn't matter she doesn't know about her siblings yet; you'e writing this as she is now, so you have to know who she interacts with on a regular basis. It's not like our world is exclusively made up of family members or plot critical people.

Past that.

Your beginning will not be what people would call "nice". It will be, honestly, terrible. It will get rewritten ten times. You will come up with a better one halfway through. The beginning will not live up to what your tastes are.

This is a good thing.

It honestly sounds like your writer's block comes from obsessing over perfection. Stop chasing it. Honestly, stop. Some things can be perfect (grammar and spelling, for instance, but even those have their flexibility), but the actual way the story is written is not on that list.

Writers always find ways to improve their stories. You will never get anywhere if you constantly polish up what you've already written. Study theory for how to start stories (I'll link some articles at the end), but you cannot edit a blank page. You have to start somewhere, and an absolutely terrible beginning of a first draft is exactly where every single author starts.

If you're really stuck, write some character sketches. Figure out where your characters are, how they interact with the world, what their start off world looks like. Figure out where they start and what their life is like before the plot starts. Try to avoid the temptation to use too much backstory in your novel, because you really don't need it. Backstory is for you to understand your characters.

Cause that sounds like your other problem. You've built your characters lives up around the plot so much you don't know anything else about them. Even when you're completely and utterly focused on one thing in your life (such as, say, finals in school), you still have a certain amount of extra: messaging friends, eating, interacting with your parents, your pets, ect. You have dozens of people in your life that you interact with on a day to day basis, and a bunch of activity that takes up your time even when you don't realize it.

You'll learn your character by creating a life for them outside the plot. Fullstop. You pretty much can't have an alive character if you build them exclusively around the plot. While the plot is a major thing that happens to them, it is still only one event. What happened before the plot is very important to figuring them out.

Now. Beginning articles:
Getting Beginnings Right
How do I start?
How to start your story!
Presenting your Presentation: Titling your Title!
Presenting... Your Story
A writer is a world trapped in a person— Victor Hugo

Ink is blood. Paper is bandages. The wounded press books to their heart to know they're not alone.
  





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Sat Aug 16, 2014 5:56 pm
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LadySpark says...



Hey there!


First chapters are a way to introduce your characters in an engaging way. You need a hook to get the reader's attention. Like Rosey said, start it out with her adventures. Dive right into the action so that the readers can get a feel for the mc and other characters without it feeling like an info dump.

Which leads me to the most important thing a writer can ever learn. do.not.under.any.circumstances.info.dump. It's something every writer has to learn, and something every writer struggles with. But whatever you do, when you're writing this, don't make the chapter an info dump just because you can't think of something to say.

A couple of techniques you can try include plotting out your first couple of chapters till you get a feel for things. Even if it's something as simple as a sentence of inspiration for the chapter ahead. It doesn't even have to be something exciting or monumental. Just a simple "MC goes to get milk and bumps into old friend" to get you started will work. I usually plot out my first new chapters that way, so I make sure that something is there for me to work off of if I have no inspiration.
Like Rosey said, I think spicing up your plot will do wonders too. Add secondary characters, build on the characters you already have. What does your MC like to eat for breakfast? Is she a cynic or a hopeless romantic? What is the one song guaranteed to put her in a good mood? Often, we forget our characters are supposed to mimic real life. They're supposed to be people on a page, and we make them to 2D because we're so focused on the big things. But we're all a composition of all our parts, so make sure your characters have all their parts.
hush, my sweet
these tornadoes are for you


-Richard Siken


Formerly SparkToFlame
  








The idea that a poem was a made thing stayed with me, and I decided then that I wanted to be an artist, not just a diarist. So I put myself through a kind of apprenticeship in writing poetry, and I understood even then that my practice as a poet was deeply related to my reading.
— Edward Hirsch