Essential One.
Stay in the head of your character and maintain the same POINT OF VIEW for your protagonist. Don’t drift !
Essential Two.
Do not mix up tenses as this confuses the reader. Most stories are past tense. You can of course go from the present time to the past if you are writing a recollection. ‘I can’t forget Harry’s mistake. Why should I? So let me take you back to last summer. Imagine a perfectly unremarkable Friday morning. We were in chemistry and we had a cover teacher who liked his phone too much to watch over us. Bad for him. Terrible for me. Catastrophic for Harry.’
Tips
- Give your protagonist an identifiable problem that affects their experience. For example, if you injure your narrator or protagonist this impacts how they tackle their challenges. This technique is frequently used in thrillers and adventure stories. It gives coherence and shape to your stories and deepens the characterisation. Imagine the effect of broken glass on bare feet if someone had removed your shoes to confine you? Or if a bully stole your character’s glasses or your protagonist had a raging toothache before a Duke of Edinburgh expedition?
- Another example might be a fear that becomes more evident as the story evolves and that must be tackled before the resolution can occur. Could your protagonist find speaking to new people extremely painful and then he or she has to host a birthday party for his relative unexpectedly? Or deliver a public speech? Or make a new friend in adverse circumstances?
- Try to anchor your story to an idea or object in order to signpost the narrative. This works particularly well with retrospective stories. The chaos of our haphazard lives feels more organised and meaningful if we remember through recurring objects/ideas/ feelings. For example, food is an excellent anchor for remembrance narratives. Meals allow you to use sensory descriptions and also group people together who may have a history of conflict. Disagreements or familial tensions are excellent for encouraging revealing dialogue and for escalating drama.
- The setting should deepen your story writing. Think about the effect of the setting on your protagonist. Are they comfortable in this world? Will they become more or less comfortable in this world as the story develops? For example, if you are writing about an isolated character in a school setting then a school lunchtime or trip might deepen their sense of loneliness and vulnerability. Yet by the close of your story, the lunch hall could be transformed into a warmer more comfortable space.
- Any form of awkwardness is also good to write about, as it draws out a range of description both physical and emotional.
- Deepen your writing by showing how your character is experiencing challenges. Show don’t tell. For example, how can you show vulnerability and embarrassment without telling your reader? Showing is often best expressed through the use of dialogue. Conversation gives people away. As soon as human beings start to talk to one another, secrets, behaviours and prejudices leak out. So get your characters into a situation where they talk to someone. It is often an effective hook to begin a story too. ‘I think the chair is taken? ‘ Do you like your sister this morning?’ ‘Why are you still smiling?’ ‘You can share my notes if you like.’
- Vary your punctuation so the reader can enjoy a changing rhythm and pace to your writing. Colons and semi-colons give readers the opportunities to pause and look around your story. Exclamations and questions usually bring vitality and drama.
- Vary your sentence length and use the page to make the reader aware of changes and drama. For instance, a single sentence paragraph separated from the previous paragraph injects a sense of importance into the narrative flow. Here are a few examples:
I never forgot the value of loitering after that.
I love the excitement of a passenger information board.
When you take the subway you leave yourself behind.
You can guess why I never liked cold coffee after that.
My Aunt preferred her chess pieces to me.
My mother thought I was a chess piece.
- Vary your vocabulary and match it to your protagonist. Be inventive. Think about their language as a means to express their attitudes, state of mind and age. Get inside the head of your character and look around. Make them real.
