3 Essential Tips for new writers
I will talk about some of the most common mistakes made by new authors on writing web novels.
I. Do not write outline
Not writing an outline is one of the most common mistakes made by new writers. Many new writers write stories on a whim. Suddenly, a lot of fresh ideas came into your mind, what makes you misunderstand that you’re chosen to be a writer. When you keep on writing, you will find your draft is a “disaster”.
If you don’t have outline, the main story line would be led astray, and the clues would be messed up. You need outline to write web novels! If you have the outline, the main story line would be clear and the clue would be clear and logical.
So, the outline is necessary for writing web novels～
How should we write a novel’s outline?
There are 8 basic steps on writing a novel’s outline.
1. Plot outline
Cause → development → climax → ending. Generally, the plot of a story will go through this process. This is the main plot, so we should first determine the outline of the main plot. In addition, there are many sub-plots, which also include these parts. You also need to write outlines separately for these sub-plots.
2. The main story outline
The main story outline,or called the main clue of this novel, decides how this story is going. Cause all plots should be developed according to the main line outline, there should be a relatively complete and clear main line outline. For example, the main line of romantic stories is generally like misunderstanding caused by these fake gossips, shocking by his/her real personality and finding his/her unusual behaviors caused by uncontrolled love. Of course, I simply the real main story outline, but I think you know what I mean.
3. Map outline
That is the general moving routes of the main characters. You can draw a map to show the general moving place of the main characters, which is more convenient to check later.
4. Background outline
A general outline of the background world, which refers to the setting of the world in the story, including the components of the world, the distribution of major forces, the types and grades of occupations, currency exchange methods, etc.
5. Character relations outline
The relations among the main characters and the secondary characters can be clearly showed by a large mind map.
6. Chapter outline
This is very important, especially the important chapters. You’d better think more about it, so that you can better achieve your writing aim.
7. Main characters outline
You can list the relevant settings of the main characters, such as his or her weapons, skills, personalities, life experience and others, depending on the situation.
8. Setting outline
It includes force and power system setting, skill setting and equipment setting.
In this way, you will have a good outline. I hope these tips could help you.
II. Forgetting to save the scripts
Forgetting to save the scripts is also one of the most common mistakes for new writers, and the reasons why they did not save the scripts are probably:
1. Overconfidence
They think that writing web novels is very easy. They would not meet the day they could not write anything down.¯┐(´-｀)┌
However, having no good thoughts could happen to even excellent writers. At this time, they rely on them scripts they saved before to go through the “crisis”. If you did not save the manuscript and your ideas were exhausted, then you will not be able to update your story. After a few days later, your “full attendance” would be gone, and then your popularity would be gone after ten or twenty days. If you delay the update a little longer, you would completely fail.
2. Do as you want
The so-called “do as you want” means that you write whatever comes to your mind, and you never save script! If you always have good thoughts, then you are fine, but if once you get stuck, you are in big trouble!
Although some web novel writers will also write in this way, they generally have some scripts to save for a rainy day.
So it is essential to keep the script.
III. Thinking that you can write a good story if you have a good writing style
This is a mistake that new web novel writers often make. Although a good writing style is an advantage in story creation, a good writing style does not mean a good story.
New writers with this kind of thought often do not know one thing: what kind of story is a good story?
A good story should arouse the resonance of readers and meet their reading needs. To put it simply, it means that readers will be interested and like to read the story. So a good story should at least be understood by readers!
So the point is, could a new writer with good writing style write a good story? Of course. However, their novels may be not attracted by readers. Although they write a story in a gorgeous and profound way and appear to be in a high level, the problem is that ordinary readers cannot understand it! This is embarrassing(ー_ー)!!
So a new writer with good writing style must think about such a question: could most readers understand my stories? I suggest that you could read the popular stories of same type before writing. Taking this as a reference, so if your story is too complex, you should appropriately simply your story. In this way, you could avoid that readers refuse to read your story because of these “boring” lines.
Finally, I want to give a piece of advice to the new writers. If you like to write stories, stick to it. Maybe someday you will become an excellent writer! Keep writing, authors!
