Writing Your Novel (Just Not From the Beginning) | Bethany Lindell | Skillshare
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Writing Your Novel (Just Not From the Beginning)

teacher avatar Bethany Lindell, Author & Artist

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Welcome Writers

      1:24

    • 2.

      Why Is This Important?

      3:59

    • 3.

      "The End"

      3:26

    • 4.

      "The Character"

      4:21

    • 5.

      "The World"

      5:09

    • 6.

      Writing For Yourself

      0:57

    • 7.

      In Closing

      1:19

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About This Class

Writing a book is hard. There's no way around that. But there are ways around writer's block and brain stumps that young or struggling writers can use. In this class we will discuss three starting points besides 'once upon a time' that can help you get those words flowing from your pen. We'll go over the pros and cons of starting from...

  • your ending
  • your character
  • and your world

Now let's dive right in.

Meet Your Teacher

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Bethany Lindell

Author & Artist

Teacher

An artist currently working as an art teacher in Texas, Bethany focuses on teaching the basics of color and art to inexperienced students, while sometimes dipping her brush into more intermediate ideas. She is also an author with experience planning, plotting, and editing novels, such as The Girl Gingerbread in the Woods of Winter White and The Hybridian Way.

 

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Transcripts

1. Welcome Writers: Hello, aspiring authors. Welcome to writing your novel from anywhere but the beginning. I made this class specifically to help writers who are having trouble actually starting their story. A lot of times we want to start just at the beginning at once upon a time when, really, that isn't always the best place for us as writers to start. So today I'll be going over three different points in your story that you can start from instead. And I'll be talking about why this is useful as well as ways that you can think about your story. Help you get away from once upon a time. I'm Bethany Lendell, author of the hybrid Ian Way and the Girl Gingerbread in the Woods of Winter White. And I know firsthand how difficult it is even to just start writing that book that you're so excited to get out there. So if you're having trouble with writer's block, where you just need new scenes and ideas, try some of these different starting points for writing your novel, right? So all you need for this class is your imagination and some method of recording it later on . Now let's dive right in 2. Why Is This Important?: way, begin with what points you can start at in your story. Besides beginning, let's talk about why it could be helpful or even important for you to try this out for yourself. So first off, it may sound counterintuitive, but writing is how you get to know your characters, your world in your book. Even scenes that don't make it into the final manuscript can be useful because they tell you something about your characters in world, how they would react or what kind of phenomenon, natural or otherwise, is going on around your characters. It is important to write, not from the beginning, just so you, the author can understand what is going on. And by starting at different points, it can also inspire different scenes or reactions, consequences and such. That happened to your characters and those air scenes that sometimes do end up in the final novel. Also, by starting from different scenes, you have writing goals, and I don't mean we're accounts. Sometimes use the author have seen, do you want to include in the middle or the end, and you want them to have impact. So I'm going to use a fight between two of your characters as an example to have a really big impact, you need toe. Let those underlying feelings build and kind of let the character stew. So knowing what happens in your fight later can help you string out the tension beforehand and include reasons for why these characters are arguing or battling beforehand so that it doesn't just come out of the blue. So not shock factor. And the scene can have riel impact because it's been building toward this moment, my second reason for starting from places other than the beginning. Our novels are rarely written. Start to finish as you as reader would see them later. So your favorite author didn't just say once upon a time and write every word be in order. I don't think that happens, like ever. Instead, authors start with their favorite scenes or the ones they're most excited about, and so be excited about actually writing your story. It shows through like, Oh, this is dull. I'm not going to put as much effort into it because I want to hurry and get to the good part. We'll skip that just right the good part, so that later on you can put your full focus of attention into writing the scenes that connect what you were excited to write about and now for my final reason. Very good reason is it helps with writer's block, essentially, by helping you side step it. So life being excited to write your favorite scenes writing scenes out of order can help you scoot around. Would ever seen your blocked with and give you either? Like I said before a gold to write towards, so a resolution that you want to include that you know will happen or by giving you the build up to it. The This is what is shaping this scene, the senior having trouble with so that you know what leads to it. So if you know what leads to it and how it ends, it can be easier to write the actual scene itself that you are blocked and having trouble with. So essentially, it helps you sidestep writer's block. You kind of right around it so that you can actually write it. It may seem odd, but it could help a whole lot. And so those are like the biggest reasons why writing not from the beginning is helpful. Now let's talk about the places you can begin instead of the beginning 3. "The End": Let's begin at the end. I can hear your questions already, and no, we won't be riding our books backwards. But knowing what comes at the end of the story can help you figure out what comes before it . So one of the pros for knowing your ending before your beginning is that you know where you're going. And like I said, this also gives you a great goal to write towards because you know what's going to happen at the end. So you are doing what you can as the author to get your characters there. Think of it as a treasure map. You are starting at the beginning, and the treasure is at X. What's in the middle? We don't know yet. We might have a skeletal kind of line, but as we travel this line, we will discover scenes and characters and situations that make the story interesting. Now, if you don't even have a line to follow, knowing where you are and where X is can at least give you kind of a guiding direction to get there. Now, I don't know about you, but for me to write a story, I have to know where I'm headed, I need to have an end in mind. Otherwise, my scenes make no sense. I need that gold to focus on so that I can create an adventure that gets me there. And if you're having trouble figuring out how to get there, knowing where you end up can help you. Retro plot How to get there. You can essentially work backwards, or you can just have some steppingstones that you know have to occur to get you to your final destination. Now let's talk about some of the cons. Beginnings and ends are pretty easy to decide on. It's the middle's. That can be difficult. Beginnings and ends are concise, usually single moments. You have an inciting incident and you have a climax. You got a whole lot more in the middle. The middle is a puzzle, and you, as the author, are trying to figure out how it fits together and in what order. And that could be difficult. But knowing where you're headed can help with. That certainly has helped me. Another problem is you might get to the end and realize what you wrote changed what the ending should be. It might demand or even deserve a different ending. Now, this is more of an emotional problem for you, the author, than I think it is for your book. Because by the time you get there and realize your original ending won't work, you have written a story. So you have achieved your goal. You wrote almost a whole book. I mean, hugged up. That is fantastic. So the hard part now is not writing a new ending. It's letting go of the one you were working towards all of this time to take a deep breath and let it go. Your new ending is going to be Justus Fantastic as the one you've been working towards all of this time. 4. "The Character": beginning with your characters might make more sense to more people out there. After all, they're the ones who are doing the action within your story, so it's very important to get to know them and to get to know them. Realistically, I'm sure you've heard the cliche that writers talk to their characters like the real people . And there is some truth in that because treating them like friends or enemies. Otherwise, real people can really help you get to know them now for starting a story. That's the key here is knowing your characters, and you are going to have to do this at some point anyways, so you need to know your characters. Just point Blank does anyway, about it. Whenever you do it, you have to know them to write a compelling story. Now how you get to know them is you write, you write to see what kind of actions and consequences of those actions come out. And sometimes even as you're just getting to know them, you'll come across plot developments or interesting turns that you might not have seen before and sometimes you or your characters themselves. Because remember, we are getting to know them like we would. Other physical people already have an idea of what they need to do or want to do. So let them do it and see what kind of reactions you get from them and what kind of consequences that might have a lasting impact on your character or your story. Now for some cons, Sometimes you have an idea what you want your character to do, and they won't do it well, Bethany, I can hear you say I'm the author. I can make them do it. Yeah, but I wouldn't recommend it because making your character do things that they don't want to dio makes them act out of character. And if you make your own characters act out of character, then you usually have unrealistic actions and very frustrating stories that your readers won't like. It won't make sense to them. But Bethany, I hear you say again, people in real life act out of character. Why can't my characters? Well, it's true. People can act not like themselves, and by that I mean they will do weird, random, sometimes destructive things in response to something such as grief or an accident, trauma or some other miraculous or life changing event. That is a reason why they're acting out of character. And if your characters in your story must act like that, you need to give him a reason. A good, compelling reason that your audience will understand. They may not like it. Your character may not like it, but that has its own form of realism about it. So when you start your story with your characters, you need to remember these things. For this to work and work well, you've got to understand them. You have to understand why they want something, what they want and how they're going to go about getting it. If you don't know these things right with your character, put them in scenes that could possibly become part of your book. Or use writing prompts to help get you started and try not to get too frustrated with them if they just refuse to do what you want them to. Because keeping your characters in character helps to create a more complete and compelling story in the end, by keeping your characters in character more often than not, if when they act out of character, it also has more impact on the reader 5. "The World": when you begin to write a story from your world, your biggest pro is also a very problematic con. And that's starting with your world. Is the most open ended method I can think of because it's huge. I mean ridiculously huge. You can literally start from anywhere, go anywhere else and do anything in it. That sounds like a pretty great idea. The flip side is world is so large, it can overwhelm you in an instant. So the solution to this is easy. You need to set rules for your world, and what they are depends on you and what you're trying to write. So it's almost as open ended as starting from the world itself. However, by giving yourself some very basic rules about how your world works, you can play with them inside the world with your characters. And I'm talking like very basic stuff, such as Does rain fall down? Does gravity have one single constant across the whole of the world? Or is it changeable? All those things you and I don't think about on a day to day basis, you can rewrite here if you choose so to the pros. If you don't have an ending in mind or even strict characters you want to put in your book . This is a great place to start because it's so broad. Your world effects every aspect of your story. Your characters have to live there. Your timeline can be influenced by your weather, your terrain, etcetera. And within your world, the economy, the different cultures and the lively hoods of certain people are all going to be influenced by geographical regions those places where they live. So if you have a lot of coasts, fishing is going to be a big product. And if something is happening to the fish to the oceans, if pirates are abounding, that's all going to affect your fisherman. But not anyone who lives inland. However, the inland people might no longer have a lot of fish, so these kinds of things can cascade and effect people across just a broad range of who they are and where they live. Okay, the con. It's too big. Dear Lord, have you ever tried writing a world? It's enormous. It might be worse than trying to write a book, but what makes it worse is if you have no rules whatsoever. so you need to get some of the basics down and in place so that you can start building around them. So jazz is rain. Fall down in this world. Does it go sideways because of severe winds? Does that gravity problem I mentioned earlier mean it goes up and then curved down at times ? What is physically happening in this place that you can say this always happens or this happens with very rare exceptions, Or this is just completely unpredictable. Once you know these things, you can enforce them or have your characters live by them with with no deviation. Or you can figure out ways to break them and have that really throw your character off to build your world. What you need to do is ask questions such as your genre nonfiction being nonfiction. Your world is going to look well like ours. We will understand it's weather and mostly understand its people. There were times we don't understand people around us. That's how it works. However, a steampunk world is going to look very different from an epic fantasy. An epic fantasy is going to look very different from a sci fi thriller, and those different genres have their own atmospheres, which can lend themselves to specific kinds of worlds. I'm normal. Do you want your world to be? Is it very much like ours, or is it only like ours on the surface? Is it nothing like ours at all? Ask yourself where their water comes from, what grows and why is it important what kind of animals exist in this place? And are they friendly, aggressive? Or do they even care that something like a sentiment, human beings walking near them asking yourself these questions can really help you build a world. And I'm willing to bet that once you have a world that you are intrigued by and you like and you can see yourself in it, you begin to see other people in it, too, and they will have their own questions and wants and needs and desires and those things you can build a story around 6. Writing For Yourself: so class Project time. I'm not gonna ask you to start writing your story just here for your class project. But I do want to see you try out a few of these different methods, whether it's one or two or all three of them and show us how you use the starting points to get ahead up on your story may not sound like a hard project there, but if you try doing it any get stuck as the question in the forums or discussion board below and I end. Hopefully, somebody or other students out there as well can help you out. And also make sure to post your project into the class Project gallery so I can't wait to see what you come up with. 7. In Closing: so characters, world and endings all very important parts of your story. But they can also be used to start a story to begin with, whether you're inspired more by your main character by your favorite goofy sidekick or the kind of animals and magic and plant life in your world itself or if you just like me and you need a climax to write towards. These are three of my favorite ways to actually begin a story besides your classic Once upon a time. So I hope you found this information useful and that you enjoyed my class today. Please post your class projects to the class gallery. And if you're interested in my novels or in my art classes that are also here on skill share, goto my skill share profile and you'll find all my links there also at any time. If you have any questions, please leave them in the discussions board below and I'll answer them to the best of my ability. Excellent. I can't wait to see you guys next class. Bye