Always wanted to write your own novel? But without the uhm?

Seven Ways to Inject Suspense Into Your Novel

2007-11-12T00:36:00.000-08:00

Certain genres are renowned for being more suspenseful than others: horror, crime fiction and romantic suspense, but each and every book, no matter whether it's an Historical Romance or a Paranormal Fantasy, HAS to have a level of suspense interwoven between the pages!
All stories need to have this element, otherwise the reader isn't going to want to turn the page, it's as simple as that. So if you're interested in what makes a suspenseful page turner, then please read on...

Creating conflict in your novel is a given, otherwise there would be no story. If all went smoothly it would be as dull-as-dishwater, wouldn't it? They all lived happily throughout the story and ever after, yawn...

I've listed seven ways you can inject suspense into your novel:
1. Introduce your characters to their worst nightmare!
Find out about your characters beforehand. If possible, write up their likes and dislikes etc, and most importantly of all, find out what it is they fear most? What is it that causes their hearts to thump loudly, beads of perspiration to form on their upper lips, and the hairs on the back of their necks to stand on end? Find out what that thing or things are, and then give it to them, both barrels. For example, if your heroine is petrified of flying because her parents died in a plane crash, create a story where she HAS to take a journey on an airplane. If your hero fears water because he almost drowned as a young child, put him in a position where he HAS to get back in the water to rescue someone.
Introduce them to their worst nightmare and watch how they react!

2. Lull them into a false sense of security
When your character is really frightened of something, throw in a red herring. For example, if your heroine thinks she hears a noise outside, allow the plot to let her fears grow and grow. Let it be something quite innocuous, like the dustbin blowing over in the wind. Then, when she has reassured herself, breathing a sigh of relief, petrify her to death by placing a prowler outside her back door!

3. Throw the spotlight on at least two people
This might sound a little obvious, but for goodness sake, don't make the villain of the piece stand out a mile. Instead, have suspicion fall on at least two, possibly three characters. This will have the effect of your reader not really being sure until the end, when the other shoe falls! But, by all means, leave some clues and some red herrings along the way!

4. Pacing
Pacing is important to create suspense. In general, short, snappy sentences will enable the reader to race ahead so they feel their heart is beating in time with the frightened protagonist. Longer sentences tend to slow things down. You might want to speed things up for a car chase or slow it down for a love making scene. Imagine your novel as if you were watching it on the big screen. How would it be filmed? What would that particular scene look like to the audience?

5. The calm before the storm
Make use of the weather to good effect. Thunderclouds brewing overhead, often give the reader the feeling that something is about to happen [prophetic fallacy]. A bolt of lightening hitting the night sky, power lines down, a stranger at the door, etc. Think of the last time you watched a horror film; didn't the weather come into somewhere?

6. When all goes well, throw in a dead body!
When you hit a sagging middle of a novel, and you find there's no where to go, try throwing in a dead body. This doesn't necessarily mean that a character has to be killed off, although you might want to do just that, it can mean that something unexpected happens, such as the birth of a baby, etc. Something that injects a little more oomph into the plot!

7. Setting
Setting is very important as a tool to create suspense. What about that dark stone staircase covered in cobwebs? Or the elevator that suddenly stops in between floors? Choosing the right sort of setting can make or break a novel. And sometimes, placing the object or person the protagonist fears in an innocuous setting can make the story all the more horrifying.
Be cruel to your characters and watch them run for their lives!

Lynette Rees lives in South Wales. She has had many non fiction articles published, both in magazines and on the Internet. Lynette's romantic comedy, A Taste of Honey, is due for release at Samhain Publishing in e-book format in April. Shortly afterwards, her romantic suspense novel, Return to Winter, will be released at The Wild Rose Press. Both books will also be published as paperbacks.
http://silverlady00.tripod.com/
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Lynette_Rees

How To Write A Novel - Novel Writing Made Easy

2007-11-09T01:08:00.000-08:00

By Robert William Locke

I remember getting my first rejection letter- I was seventeen years old at the time. It was for a volume of poetry - well, six poems written by me in longhand ! The letter said "we have to advise you, that in our opinion, there would be little demand for this work on the general market". I have written lots of articles and short stories but never a full length novel, partly because I did not have the resources or help at hand. Now that help is available and I want to tell you about it below.

What Does writing A Novel Involve?
Writing a novel is an act of self-annihilation as much as self-discovery- just like marriage! Writing a novel is not as difficult as you might think, and completing a novel is one of the most rewarding feelings in the world. Some writers say the hardest part of writing a novel is starting it. The problem is that writing a novel is hard but there is help at hand! Why struggle on your own ?

The Role Of Characters In Writing A Novel
The most important part of writing a novel is knowing your characters well and setting up your story in a way that keeps the reader intrigued the whole way through. They say that writing a novel is 10% telling the story and 90% editing. The most important thing in writing a novel is that the material can sustain your attention for the years it will take to finish the book.

Fiction can originate from "direct personal impression" to "the writer's resources of experience". Fiction seems to grow out of a convincing character so the author must have good characters and character development . Good fiction doesn't just happen, it is designed. Editors love character-based fiction and let’s face it, great fiction is character-driven. Fiction relies for effect on both empathy (understanding how it feels to be another person) and sympathy (a sense of emotional kinship and support for another person).

The time you invest in designing characters up front will pay off ten-fold when you start writing. Characters will assume different significance, some will fade into the background, some will leap into the spotlight. Characters play a key role throughout the entire novel and have to advance or regress throughout the course of the novel. You start hearing the voices of different characters. For each of your major characters, take an hour and write a one-page summary sheet that tells:the character's name,a one-sentence summary of the character's storyline,the character's motivation.

When you read the opening of a gripping novel, you are immediately drawn into the story either by the main character’s drama, problem or some conflict. So much so, that you just have to read on. You will find so much more advice in the link below that you will soon be writing a novel.

Robert Locke is an Internet Marketer specializing in Health, Wellness and Fitness. For more advice look at the link below for invaluable advice on writing a novel
http://www.usfreeads.com/890783-cls.html
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Robert_William_Locke

Write a Novel in 10 Weeks?

2007-11-06T03:13:00.000-08:00

By Nick Thorne

I wanted to write a novel in 10 weeks or so and so I knew I was going to have to be disciplined. I was following a structured course which taught me that the first thing I must do was to decide on the theme. What was my book going to be about? Now when I talk about my novel's theme I do not mean the plot, the idea or the approach I was going to use, I mean the heart of my novel. Now I know that some people may be confusing the theme with the story idea, here. But, as Joanne Reid points out in "How to Write a Novel in 10 Weeks", a module in the "Write Your Way To Freedom", they are just not the same.

Let us look at the idea first.
Unless we have got a good strong, focused idea for the story, you and I will more than likely dry up somewhere round about page 30 or so of our manuscript.
To get this thing written we need to be excited by the book we have in mind. It has to matter to us and often the age old adage of "writing about what you know" will be the best advice for you or I to take. Now what do we know about that can be turned into the novel? Well we probably will find that we actually know a great deal.

As Joanne says, there is:
· Personal experience
· Actual experience
· What-if personal experience
· Philosophical conclusion based on experience
· Something we heard about
· History
· A friend's suggestion
· Strong feelings against something
· Strong feelings for something
· Current event
· Chance incident
· Desire for adventure
· New inventions
· Social upheavals
· Strong interest in some business

Setting up Basic Conflict
So having read Joanne's list I moved on to thinking about the basic conflict. All novels need a basic conflict and to establish this conflict, we need to have two things: a protagonist (or protagonists) and secondly, an environment.
In this course I learnt that the environment could spring from (1) the physical setting(s), (2) the atmosphere created by the social situation, or (3) the emotional mood.

Setting the Stage
Moving on to this section, I was taught that I should put the protagonist(s) in conflict with either his or her own environment, or the environment of others. Here the lesson gave me 10 principles for placing the protagonist in conflict:
1. Something changes in the environment.
2. Moving the protagonist from one environment to another.
3. Put the protagonist in an environment that is in conflict with other environments.
4. Put the protagonist in an environment he or she wants to change.
5. Give the protagonist an environment to conquer.
6. Put him or her in a environment he or she wants to escape.
7. Put the protagonist in an environment where he or she is not wanted.
8. Put the protagonist in an environment for which he or she is unsuited.
9. Change the protagonist's status quo in his or her environment.
10.Change the status quo of the environment.

Joanne tells her students to give the protagonist a chief motivating force with a tangible object. His or her response to the environment yields a determination to do something about it to achieve some tangible objective. This is the chief motivating force. It also helps, she says, if you exaggerate the protagonist's reaction to the environment.
You need to have an idea of what the conflict might be before you begin plotting.

Theme
Everywhere that we look we will find ideas that can be used for novels. Then, once we have that idea we must focus in on the overriding subject matter of the idea. We must also seek to understand our own attitude towards it and this attitude should be strong and clear.

For example: I am thinking of writing a novel about Admiral Horatio Nelson. The principal subject matter is about an ordinary man who joined the Royal Navy as a boy and was sea-sick every time he went out to sea and yet he became a military tactician and nation's hero who captures the imagination of millions of people even to this day. I want to show that people need heroes for very personal reasons and this is my attitude in the novel that I am hoping I will now write. My next step is to come up with the approach that I shall take. The reason why I want to write the book and for this I need a statement of purpose to make clear my approach to the subject.

My purpose in writing about Lord Nelson is to prove that people need heroes so baldly that they will overlook any of their hero's negative character traits. The theme I am perusing is fame and my approach to fame is that people in our society need fame so badly that they will put certain people on pedestals irrespective of any failures that he may have had. In Nelson's case and the British nation, it is literally a statute on a column in London at Trafalgar Square. He was undoubtedly a great man, but like us all he still had his human flaws.

I am following the Write Your Way To Freedom module on Writing a Novel in 10 Weeks to help me achieve this aim. So I shall firstly be assessing my idea to see if it is strong, next I will consider what the basic conflict is to be before setting the stage and lastly working on the theme.
Want to read the module "Write a Novel in 10 weeks" in the Write Your Way To Freedom course? take a look here
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Nick_Thorne

2006-12-23T12:39:00.000-08:00

I just discovered these useful sites for helping anyone write a novel - guaranteed!!!

Ever wanted to write a novel?

2006-12-23T12:28:00.000-08:00

Did you ever had so many ideas on writing a novel, but when it came to the actual writing everything just faded???