An Author's Guide to Playtime (Where Grace gets very dark)

Here is a guide for all authors about how they can have fun when playing with their toys. 😇

Stage One

First of all, you need to make your reader fall in love with your characters. This can be achieved by:

The character having an awesome personality. e.g. Halt (Ranger’s Apprentice), Glory (Wings of Fire), Percy (Percy Jackson), Connor (The Land of Stories)
Making your character relatable. e.g. Greg Heffley (Diary of a Wimpy Kid), August (Wonder)
The character having gone through a lot so the reader can sympathize with them. e.g. Felix Salinger (Once, Then, Now, After), Newt (The Maze Runner), Katniss Everdeen (The Hunger Games)
A plot twist shining a new light on your character, causing the readers to fall for them. e.g. Severus Snape (Harry Potter), Evly (The Land of Stories)

Stage Two

This is the time when you wound your victim (cough, cough, I, of course, mean the character, not the reader at all...). Mwahahahaha!

Now, there are several ways to break your readers' hearts. Some are:

Kill your characters! Be careful to kill the ones they love, avoid the annoying characters at all costs.
Wound your characters’ hearts beyond repair!
Bomb down your ships! The ones everyone love, of course.

One thing you should always remember, though, is that you should never go destroying too much. Even though causing havoc in book worlds is not yet illegal, you do not want to turn your readers off your book from too much grief. If that happens, you will have no victims to have fun with! So, always keep your readers on the edge of overwhelming grief and loving your book.

I do have a little secret for you… shhhh… keep very quiet… we do not want readers knowing our secret to our great success… here it is… drum roll.... You can destroy everything at the end of your book/series! What’s the point of leaving your readers with a happy ending when you can haunt them FOREVER? Or, even better, it all was not real! It was just a dream. Yes, villainous authors, we can use cliché endings to destroy hearts forever! Now go out into the world, my little friends, and write your heart breaking books.

Hope you feel inspired,
Grace

Comments

10 Tips for Being Creative

We've all been there. You're really excited about this awesome project that you're going to do, and then you sit down to brainstorm ideas for it and there's just a blank page of endless nothingness. Well, here are a few tips I have picked up that are actually quite helpful. 1. Exercise daily. It actually works. Even walking just two miles a day can really stimulate your brain. Also, it reduces the risk of things like dementia in later life, so it's definitely worth a try. Studies have shown that people who exercise four times or more in a week outperform those who don't. So get walking! Or running, or whatever it is you do. 2. Research using books. The easier information is to find, the less likely it is to stick on your head. Googling things generally leads to multitasking, which is bad for focus and basically means you won't learn as much. Consulting books and people improve your memory and capacity for learning. 3. Don't multitask. ...

3 Tips On Writing Songs in Stories

- Germaine - So you want to write songs in stories, but have no idea where to start? Unfortunately for you, I have no idea how to write songs, too. But before you begin to despair, here are a few tips I've learned from reading a few books. 1. Songs DO NOT need to rhyme I see this a lot. It's a little annoying when it's overused in the same book, especially when the author seems to run out of rhymes. I'm not saying, "don't rhyme your songs at all." Some songs that rhyme are actually quite good. I'm saying, "think about it." If the song you're writing fits well with your story, go for it. But if it seems out of place, you might want to consider rewriting it. The worst case scenario would be to delete it entirely and erase all traces of it from your story. 2. Write songs like you're writing poetry Songs are poems, after all. So wouldn't it be fun to just throw out some deep, meaningful figurative language? Of c...

Writing with Colors

As a writer, it's very important to use colors to describe things. I've written a short story about a girl at her grandpapa's ranch. Notice how I use colors to make the images more vivid. This helps readers get a better picture. It also helps you get away with not using dialogue. I stepped into the hay field, longing to run my hands over the bristly heads. I wanted to run through the endless golden sea of hay. I wanted to leave my mark; my path; my trace. But that would ruin this beautiful sight. I pick a small, dying head and put it in the pouch Grandpapa gave me. It was soft, brown, and made with Indian leather. I moved along toward the pond. When I reached the pond's edge, I noticed a small thicket of blackberries slowly spreading around the side of the pond. As I reached out to pick a berry, I remembered my grandpapa laughing with my about these berries. He told me that was a silly name "blackberries" when they were really "purpleberries....

The Writing Mafia

Search This Blog