Tips for would-be writers

Publishing stories.

Give the reader something to picture as well as something left to imagine themselves.

A story is a story, not a quiz.

Imagine the illustrator reading your opening paragraph.

It starts: He walked in and saw her.

What are the illustrator and reader supposed to imagine?

A sixty-year-old man and 20 year old girl? Eighteen-year-old boy and forty year old woman?

If I imagine the former I don’t want to be told in paragraph four that the people in the room are the latter.

Man with goatee beard? Bald? Teenager? Small and plump.

Angry? Or soothing?

Skinny, scared girl? Or huge, voluptuous proud woman?

Characters
1 Develop characters and situations so readers can visualise types of people and environment.

Readers
2 Amount of developing depends on readers you are aiming at.

Message
Supposing you are describing the fun to be had from a certain activity, whether skiing, sewing or bungee jumping.
Are you putting over a message that anybody – everybody - can experience this? Or that one specific type of person should?

Hero and Heroine
It might be based on yourself – the middle class women, or working class or upper class woman, who never thought she would enjoy it. You know who you are and see yourself as the main character in the scene. But the reader doesn’t know you.

If you are an elderly writer like Barbara Cartland with your picture on the cover, in paragraph one you have to tell the reader whether you are imagining yourself as you appear now as a wealthy woman of elderly looks with fancy clothes including pink ribbons or as you were in your slender youth, or as a fictional character of different age and clothing style such as jeans.

If the former, any woman, change the types of characters in each story, or give the man a series of girlfriends, all different. Different classes, different walks of life.

Publishers
For speed or to show you can finish a book self-publish through lulu on line printers.

Publishers want to know if you can finish 10 stories

Write ten stories and approach a publisher.
Publishers want you to write to a brief and to time.

Test yourself. Can you sit down every morning for two hours and write to a theme, eg stories on revenge, stories set in London, stories about secretary, stories about a supermarket?

Be prepared to promise a publisher more.

On a theme.

Or lulu.com self publisher.

Theme
Have a theme. You may already have an obsession eg about weddings or graveyards or bicycles or chains.

Within that you may have an emotion, a positive emotion such as love, or revenge, or both – ups and downs.

Titles
A title focuses your writing and helps the reader identify the theme. Think of contrasts. The Prince and The Pauper. Remember two - Pride and Prejudice. Or the rule of three.

Numbers
Why stop at three? Four or five. Four weddings and a funeral. A hundred and one dalmations.

The ups and downs of love in a graveyard.

If you have only a few stories, publish as birthday present, or as a bedtime story book to read to her.