Writing Stories For Young Adults

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Posted on January 18, 2010 14:38

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Hello it's Nana with a guide on how to write good stories for young adults from ages 12-18.

The Basics of a Good Story

1.) Don't be an outsider:

Do NOT make your character in the book something different from everybody else. the character has to be thought of well and of course interesting. If you give your character a false image, the reader will lose it's interest. The reader needs to feel that the main character is one of them.

2.) Avoid being condescending:

If you are condescending to your readers, like growing up, respecting each other, etc. they would seem as if you are trying to manipulate them. Not to mention that the readers are trying to escape from the daily stress.

3.) Read and read and read:

You have to read many young adult books to see what the new trend is and also to see if you don't write the same story as an other author might have done already. Therefore I suggest that you don't copy the style of your favorite author because you don't want to be a copy.

4.) Don't think too much:

Another concept is that you should not think too much if people might like your story, how well you write and if you should keep going. Remember you are writing because that's your hobby, or job, but never feel forced to do anything. After all every human being gets to decide if they want to read your story or not.

5.) No boundaries:

In your piece of writing are no boundaries. The sky is the limit. Let your imagination be free and have fun planing your story with as many creative thoughts and ideas. Remember that you are trying to bring an image to the readers mind.

Posted on January 18, 2010 14:39

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Accept the Gift of Stories

At first you have to understand what stories do to you, how they make you feel and how you react to events happening there. This is a very important task if you want to build tension, emotions and other feelings in your story.

Furthermore you have to understand the history of writing and how creative people were back then. Of course there are other ways to write stories, but this personally helps me when I write a story myself.

You can write the story in any time period as long as you don't bore yourself, and if that happens, you bore the reader. I suggest you take shocking news and try to make it into a story for the first time.

In order for you to write successfully you have to also get used to writing about emotions or using vivid verbs to describe feelings how the protagonist has. Expressing feelings may be hard and sometimes you can't find the right words, but don't worry, you can go back anytime to edit your work.

Also look at the story gifts in which the story tells you more about the characters, their personality and appearance were the readers get pulled in. In fact, the readers like when some of the characters go and rebel about something important leading to the main issue in the story. This is a reminder: Don't make cliqu� rebellions. This would just be boring.

There are many other possibilities on how to generate ideas, such as:
? Listening to conversations
? Looking at the news; searching for an interesting event in cultures, etc.
? Look at social network sites (Facebook) and see what is being posted there
? Watch shows featuring adults
? Join organisations to see how people do work and see who is involved in social activities

Meeting Your Characters

Now that you have a rough draft on how your story should look like and what it should involve, you should start thinking about the characters.
There are many steps to look on how to actually draft your character, but we will go with the simple way:

? Look to see what interest readers
? Find the most wanted age and gender for your story
.e
.t
.c

Now think about what kind of protagonist you want to have. Some ways of helping you with that are:

? Is there any special way your character speaks?
? What are his/her activities, habits, etc.?
? Contains nervous tics or passions?
? Ambition in life?
? What type of person is your protagonist?
? Who's close to him/her?
? Any special goal?
? School?
? What are the flaws?

Now that you have your protagonist you can go on with finding your other characters. A good way to do that is actually taking the opposite of your protagonist and only making the other characters a little more interesting. I would go with a total of 4 characters to begin with and afterwards see how the story goes. If you need more characters, you can add more, but not too many otherwise you get confused with who's who.

The next step to fulfill your characters are adding emotions and depth to them so that it seems they are actually alive and real but have only been placed in a book. Come up with creative ideas each of them are involved in the protagonists activities and how they feel about it.

Posted on January 18, 2010 14:39

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Understanding the Plot

A plot is a sub category for the story. You don't write the story yet, but you may start drawing a spiderweb or anything else that helps you with collecting ideas and concentrating on only the events you want to have. In your plot you may first plot the characters or the events (in order) on how they build to the climax. Here are some ideas of a plot you might have:

? Man vs. Nature
? Man vs. Man
? Man vs. Environment
? Man vs. Machine/Technology
? Man vs. Supernatural
? Man vs. Himself
? Man vs. God/Religion
? Man vs. Anything you come to mind

After you are done with plotting, it's time to get to the plot structure meaning what sequence your story should follow. To being with you should start rather slowly with your story building up to a conflict or excitement, but it can also start in one and keep going from there. After typing/writing that you get to the point where you find complications (also described as a rising action). In this process you find the central problem in the story and you try to make everything go wrong that seemed to be perfect.

Finishing that section you follow to the crisis of the whole story meaning that at some point you have to bring your story together. But do not summarize the whole plot in this section. You should think about how it is going to turn out and what should happen next because this is the pre-climax.

The climax is the part in which the problem or conflict has been solved and everything sort of turns "happy" depending on what story you write. Of course the climax shouldn't be a complete surprise and the story should have reached its significant point. In the falling action you make everything cool down. This follows right after the climax.

In the end everything should cooldown either with a resolution, revelation, decision, explanation or trick but nothing all together.

Building Your Plot

You should start you story early, because who knows how long it might take for you to write and get through this whole process. If you want to you can write a prologue or as they now say, a preview, to see the overview of your story.

Writing a good story isn't that easy because you actually have to think like that characters you selected previously. A fact is that having a too long plot, might go bad. If the characters aren't involved with any drama of some sort in the first few chapters you write, you have defiantly too much plot and some people get bored with it and will stop reading from time to time.

You shouldn't give out the characters information in the first few pages. You should wait and keep the reader interested in finding out who the person is and what he does, etc.

An interesting idea you might think of is starting to have a teenager at the age of 15 and making him grow up in the story so that it draws the reader in that he is part of the story and it looks like he's watching him grow up.

Remember:
Nothing happens randomly. It has to build up to every event, action, etc. your characters do. The plot of the story gets instructed by the characters. This means that you have to think yourself in the characters position and see how the reactions might be to continue writing.

You should also think about creating suspense by "forethinking" on events and feelings. You can also think about withholding information from the readers. The readers would then think about questions and try getting more excited and interested.

Settings

A setting is where the story takes place. Now depending on your story, your setting could be in many different places like: Fairyworld or Cakeland and maybe even your room. Let your imagination run, but it still has to be realistic depending on what sort of story you write.

Think about:

? Including senses
? Florid descriptions
? Scenes
? Fitting the setting into the story

Posted on January 18, 2010 14:39

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Getting Point of Views

Give your rough draft someone to read and make them add comments and remarks on the piece you have handed to them. Also make them search for spelling errors so your final work doesn't seem to be from a very young child. You have to depend on point of views. But remarks like: "I don't like it", or "it is good" won't tell you anything. You need good criticism to see what you have done wrong, and what you can improve or edit.

There are 3 perspectives in which you can write:

? First person
? Second person
? Third person

Learning to Write Dialog

There are different ways in which you can write dialogs. In most ways, dialogs are written from normal conversations which may look like this when you write it down:

? Talk incomplete
? Long, complex --> Not expected in formal speech
? Not using proper grammar
? Sound expressions
? Interruption
? Exaggeration
? Banal chatter

The purpose of a dialog is to create a conflict in the story, to express feelings, advance the plot , set a scenery and provide a character development.

Finding Your Theme

Don't go with cliqu� topics, here are some suggestions on what you can base your story on:

? Acceptance
? The American Dream
? Artistic talent
? Bringing or coming together
? Challenge and success
? Charity
? Choices and responsibility
? Cooperation
? Courage
? Creative thinking
? Etc.

Posted on January 18, 2010 14:39

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Good Stories

If you have any great books, that you read, to suggest, place them in the comment section.

? The Lovely Bones written by Alice Sebold
?
?
?

Posted on January 18, 2010 14:41

christian2
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Reserved

Posted on January 18, 2010 14:43

chenmumu
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Reserved till you post everything :smile

Edit: Sorry Nana-Chan I guess I'll update this post tmr coz I really need to go and sleep now.

Edit: Its a very nice guide but Im not that good at english so I dont understand some parts.