Eneh Akpan Writes: plot

Thursday, September 27, 2012

How to Make your Story Compelling

If anything’s 100% guaranteed to put the kick in your story, it’s your fictional people–your characters.

Story is important, yes. But somebody once said, Plot is character. I believe him/her. And you will as well once you see what this post has to offer.

Your story is bound to move your readers if it’s populated with compelling characters

Will Smith and son in Pursuit of Happyness
Photo credit: Flickr

Readers want characters they can identify with.

The protagonist of your story does not necessarily have to be superhuman. They don’t even have to fit into the prototype Rambo-style hero niche. The single ingredient which shoves a reader beyond the edge of reality and sends them scrambling into your fictional world (and if I may add, with great pleasure) is how much you make your characters partakers in the fellowship of your reader’s sufferings.

Compelling characters are often than not, ordinary people going through the motions, having the blues. And especially, characters who attain the goal of their dreams when they come through. That goal could be anything from something as other-worldly as superpowers to one as ordinary as a job. (I’m thinking of Will Smith in the Pursuit of Happyness, here.)

What are the things that strike you about your favorite stories? Who are your favorite characters? There might be a story there.

Plot is what your characters do. The bottom line is who your characters are and what your characters do should be interesting or you end up with a blunt tale in your hands.

Without compelling characters, there can be no compelling story.

Let your pen bleed!

Akpan

Thursday, November 11, 2010

Twenty Tools for Fiction Writing (Part Two)

Here we go with the second and last part of this great adventure. I hope you had a terrific moment the last time, cause I sure did. Sometimes, you don’t need people to hit you upside your bingo with a hammer. Often a word or two of advice is enough to set you off reproducing literary children like a geyser in full swing.

That’s precisely why I'm doing this. Twenty successful writers digging into their pretty-stocked archives of experience and sharing their finds in succinct and well thought-out manner.

May we thread in their footsteps!

1. The idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart.

– Maya Angelou

2. The worm that destroys you is the temptation to agree with your critics, to get their approval.

– Thomas Harris

3. A writer is someone who has written something today.

– J. A. Jance

4. Writing isn't like math; in math, two plus two always equals four no matter what your mood is like. With writing, the way you feel changes everything.

– Stephenie Meyer

5. When I write I pretend I'm telling a story to someone in the room and I don't want them to get up until I'm finished.

– James Patterson

6. There isn’t time to talk about someday writing that short story or poem or novel. Slow down now, touch what is around you, and out of care and compassion for each moment and detail, put pen to paper and begin to write.

— Natalie Goldberg

7. Readers will stay with an author, no matter what the variations in style and genre, as long as they get that sense of story, of character, of empathetic involvement.

– Dean Koontz

8. Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.

– Mark Twain

9. Books aren't written - they're rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn't quite done it.

– Michael Crichton

10. Two of the most difficult areas to write in are humor and the occult. In clumsy hands the humor turns to dirge and the occult turns funny. But once you know how, you can write in any area.

– John D. MacDonald

Keep that pen of yours bleeding.

Akpan