Learn how to start writing your story with Maestro writers
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- Опубликовано: 24 июл 2024
- Hear from bestselling authors Jojo Moyes, Ken Follett, Lee Child and Harlan Coben on how to start writing your story.
Here, they reveal how to write an irresistible first line, how to introduce characters and much more.
Timestamps:
00:00 - Starting afresh
01:12 - Hook your audience with hints and questions
04:05 - Your opening line is the most important
08:00 - Plunge your reader into action
Learn more about their unique approaches to writing in their BBC Maestro courses:
Jojo Moyes - Writing Love Stories - bbcm.co/3JUbfXb
Lee Child - Writing Popular Fiction - bbcm.co/4bwACKw
Harlan Coben - Writing Thrillers - bbcm.co/3WucQul
Ken Follett - Writing Bestselling Fiction - bbcm.co/3JRUsUu
See all our writing courses: bbcm.co/3JSFrC0
☘❤ Such a pleasure to watch your videos! ☘❤
If this feels intimidaring and you get stuck on the first line, just write something, whatever, to get you started. You can always go back and change the first sentence later.
Great advice!
@@BBCMaestro I didn't watch the whole video when I wrote it and then I realized it was the exact same advice as in the final part of the video :)
While I appreciate the star studded lineup. Some are not there for their literary genius.
And I quote...
"He was perhaps forty years old. He had thick black hair, shiny, beautifully cut, and the kind of mid-brown skin and regular features that could have made him Indian, or Pakistani, or Iranian, or Syrian, or Lebanese, or Algerian, or even Israeli or Italian. His passport was British..."
Could his nationality not be condensed to ...his nationalilty well masked, somewhere between middle eastern to southeast asian?
400 pages later we get...
"He was medium height, medium weight, expensively dressed but a little rumpled. He was maybe forty years old. He had thick black hair, shiny, beautifully cut, and the kind of mid-brown skin and regular features that could have made him Lebanese, or Algerian, or even Israeli or Italian."
This does NOT pass for literature - fiction, thriller or otherwise. 100 million copies sold by this author...
The mind boggles.
As you should well know, popularity is not a mark of quality. There is a lot of dreck on the market, but people buy it.
Not to mention padding the word count.
Step 1. start writing the book
Step 2. write the rest of the damn book
Okay that's far too glib but here is my sincere advice:
1. have an idea of who your characters were, are, and want to be
2. nail down a plan for at least the opening third and have an idea of where you want to go beyond that. It might come to pass that scenes you come up with during that first third change the trajectory of your characters, so plotting it out in detail is pointless.
3. you don't have to write things in order. If you want to write the ironic ending first, go for it. Then you can foreshadow. If you get stuck in a certain scene, skip ahead, or back, and write something that progresses the story, even if it's not in the chronological order of events.