Adder, emphasise the sounds: screaming, yelling, begging for mercy. Focus on small things like blood bubbling on a persons lips. Focus on pain, agony. Write the result, not the cause (think about it, it makes sense!)
"No, please! Don't!" screams echoed around the room. Then all of a sudden the sound of something swishing through the air, a crack, splatter, and the screaming stopped; a stunned silence drifted like fog around the horrified prisoners.
Words are all you've got to work with so use them to there fullest.
I find the three main things you need to think about in writing are character, plot and writing. I've sometimes found books with brilliant ideas and plots but the writings so bad i literally find it depressing.
On the other hand, you can have every aspect of the plot mapped out to the last word of every sentence but the characters need to be realistic: someone you can believe in, someone who you can really build in your mind. Possibly the best way to get good characters is to base them on real people. Think of your friends, family and most of all yourself. What are you like? Base characters on aspects of your personality. Write about your own experiences through someone elses eyes. Picture what's happening to a character and imagine how that would effect you. Base an early character on yourself: its the best way to create someone real: if they are real: people you know well make great frames
Get ideas from other peoples books: don't go flat out and nick it all your ideas but pick out small things that you like and develope that into a whole new plot. Think about it from an outsiders view. If you were reading that, what would you think of it? Would you like it? What do you not like? The most harsh judge is yourself. Read other books before sitting down to write yourself and think about what works for the author and what doesn't work. Best of all, get a friend to read it for you: someone who doesn't know about the story, and get them to tell you what they like and dislike. Then change it.
Most importantly of all: know where the story's going. You can have a great idea for one scene that you can build on but if you get a really great thing going and you can't think of an ending then the story is gonna end up rubbish. You don't have to plan the story word for word but at least know what's gonna happen. Know were its going. Sometimes you can sit down and write and it all flows through and everything is great. Don't rely on that happening cause it doesn't happen much.
Lastly, if your stuck for an idea, don't sit staring at a blank sheet hoping something to claw into your head. Leave and come back to it. Read a book, play a game, inspiration can come from anywhere. Think about it whenever you're not doing anything else: when you finish an exam with an hour to spare, think of the story. When you're waiting at the bus stop, lying in bed when you can't sleep, remember what happened last and develope it from there. Think about it when you have some time that you can't fill with anything else. Not when you're sitting in front of a blank sheet ready to write.
One last thing: life isn't prancing through a field of flowers. Bad things happen and its bad things that are interesting: struggles, problems. People like hearing about other people struggling. Like Homer Simpson once said: "Anything to get my mind off my life."
Last edited by Splat; 01-11-2005 at 05:17 AM..
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) in Stephen King's "Rose Madder" - most of the time they were pretty "normal", polite and with the potential to be really nice - it's only when they snap that you see how mad and dangerous they are. If the character is a little psychotic, I suppose, you could give them the undercurrent of unlikeability you wanted.
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