/lit/ - Literature

>>12641798
I hate these threads.
The creating part is your job, it's others' job to critique what you've created. We're not gonna write the book for you, retard.

>>12641885
geez, i'm just asking for a little help, lad.

>>12641798
so you want to fabricate a story? notice the words used in this THREAD,did you start with the greeks? warp and woof.

>>12641798
Understand acts and the importance of a first scene.

A first scene / page must convey style and tone. A first act is where you set up the story and characters, the second act is where everything goes to hell and the third act is when the characters work around their problems and grow

First and foremost you gotta know thr story that you want to tell. Second you need to be able to describe this story (as a personal test). If you seek publishing, you should repeat this description to somebody who might be a potential reader and see if they are interested.

If you passed these steps and feel ready to work for 200-400 hours on a manuscript, let's go on.

>First Scene

Establish the tone (Crime and Punishment didn't start with a gag). Don't start your epic fantasy with a first page describing the character's dull morning before they go to college. Keep the narration coherent. Writing your first page is a beast of its own and you should look for help elsewhere too.

Then we go to the first act. We need to fill it wih scenes showing the relevant characters, motivations and also establish the plot (character gets fired. Goes to Vegas seek drugs and prostitutes with his rich best friend that is mysteriously bankrolling the whole trip. He goes and has fun).

>Second Act

We have a twist and things start going south. Disappointment makes the tragedy greater, as Aristotles taught about greek theater. We need bad things to happen and for them to take down the character. (Our unemployed guy wakes up one day and finds out his rich friend has vanished, and that there is a dead body in the house but he was too high to remenber what happened. The police tries to get the character and for a while he gives up and accepts his fate).

>Third Act

Character oveacomes his own flaws and manages to get over his problem somehow, growing in the process. We need scenes where the character gets over his sorrow, beats the problem and then collect the spoils for having grown up.

That's about it. Writing novels is VERY HARD, though. Please make sure you want to writr instead of doing anyhing more productive like drawing.

>>12641798
invoke the muse

>>12644215
thank you very much. This is good.

>>12641798
just like this OP, it's easy when you know how

>>12641798
Watch Based Sanderson's lectures on the subject:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WbMihK3tFMY&list=PLH3mK1NZn9QqOSj3ObrP3xL8tEJQ12-vL&index=2

select layer, layer style, stroke

Come up with a theme, conflict, setting, protagonist, antagonist, supporting characters, point of view, and a logline. Look up the wordcount for the genre you're writing. Say you're writing fantasy. Those are selling with a long wordcount of 80,000 for debut authors, formerly 100,000 in days gone by but the trend is for shorter works now. Divide that number by 4. Those are your three acts. Act 1, 2A, 2B, and 3. In our fantasy novel example that should be 20,000 words each. You can seperate these as parts or books or whatever if you want, or run them alltogether with no breaks at all. Look up 3 act structure and hero's journey and plot out your story beats. This is the most important part, but is beyond the scope of this post. You need rising action during the course of each act, and a hook between each act, and everything has to come together and escalate during the course of the entire book. Now break your story down into scenes, where specific characters interact in a specific location to accomplish a certain story goal. Build establishments and payoffs. Group those scenes into chapters with a good word length that can be comfortably read in one sitting without distraction, but shorter than that to give the reader more options for when to take a natural break, so maybe about 1,000 to 5,000 words depending on content, so each act will be about 10 chapters long in our example. The acts and each chapter will have their own mini three act structure, but that can be amd should be looser and more varied than the big one. You should pin your 3 act story beats to specific chapters, and build your scenes around those. You need transitions between every scene. You need a variety of locations, characters, and emotional tones. Make sure each chapter break has a hook like a cliffhanger or revelation or transition to keep the reader interested in reading the next chapter, even if you arent using chapter breaks or even linebreaks. Once you've done this, you should have a list of chapters and scenes, how they flowintoone another, and the general wordcount for each you want to aim for, so you can start composing, and get down to the level of a description paragraph here, dialogue here, etc. Sit down at chapter 1 and start writing. Don't worry about making it good. That comes after the 1st draft. Just write as much as you can and start filling up those wordcounts and checkingoff scenes. Once you're done the 1st draft, start editing and actually making good quality prose.

>>12644383
Be aware of the last message, though: writing is VERY HARD. It is an incredibly time consuming endeavor and your time will mostly go unrewarded. I got into writing because I spent a lot of time in traffic doing nothing. I had that time of my life that was passing by and writing gave it a meaning.

Do consider learning how to draw, especially if you have the money to buy a drawing board for the PC. People need artists more than they need writers, unfortunately.

>>12645157
Lmao american colleges are such a fucking joke