Skip to main content

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

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Strange One

An unsteady little fox kit blinked, opening her eyes she wobbled after her siblings. Taking her first steps outside the den, watching the others do the same. Their brown-black eyes gleamed in the light. Most of the other fox kits were playing, a tangled mess of dark brown fur and legs as they tumbled, chasing each other around mossy rocks and through short green grass. Some of the older foxes were lounging, gathered around a small circle of rocks. The fox kit stumbled over, her legs still not quite used to the rough ground. The circle smelled fresh, soaked in the scent of damp earth; something clear and silvery-blue filled the hole in the ground. She leaned towards it, trying to get a better look, paws scrambling for purchase on the smooth slippery stones. With no success, her paws slipped, sending her tumbling down into the pool of clear liquid. It was only water. But she didn't know that then. She landed with a splash, the liquid soaking her coat and making her shiver. S...
Post a Comment
Read more

Spoiler-Free Book Review - The Squire's Tales (Gerald Morris)

Okay, so it's technically an entire series, but that's irrelevant. I am reviewing books and it is therefore a book review.  The Squire's Tales , by Gerald Morris, is a series of novels that retell in hilarious fashion the lesser known tales of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. Don't worry, you won't have to hear about the sword in the stone again or anything at all about Arthur's childhood. Because this is where the best part comes in: these stories are told from the perspectives of those that other renditions tend to gloss over, mock or forget entirely. These characters are a squire, (as the title would imply) a page, three women and a knight who is objectively terrible at being a knight. He sings and plays music instead. His name's Dinadan. He's wonderful. Over the ten books in the series, you get seven different characters from whose points of view the stories are told (plus a couple extra in the last book, but that's a spec...
Post a Comment
Read more

How to Fix Bad Writing

A first draft of a novel is never perfect. A first draft of  anything you've written is never perfect. We all know that. If you're a serious writer who's been looking through writing websites and generally spending your time reading about writing, well, you're like the rest of us. Someday, you are going to look back at what you have written, may it be to edit, to remind yourself of how much you've improved, or just to laugh at your writing. So here's my advice. If it makes you cringe, do something about it.  I'm writing a fantasy novel about seven dragons with elemental powers who are trying to bring back flight to a world where dragons cannot fly. As my fingers flew across the keyboard, typing out the words, I came to a scene where one of my main characters has to ask a friend for help. In reply, the friend begins rambling on and on about why she can't help him, but at the end of the chapter, she agrees to help. When I looked back...
Post a Comment
Read more