Writing Advice

Compiled writing advice from child authors. Email to have yours added!

We believe there are 3 essential elements to any story. Get them all right, and your writing will be great. These elements are CHARACTER, PLOT, and GRAMMAR.

CHARACTER

Every story starts with a character.

It doesn't really matter what kind of character you choose. They can be a boy or a girl (or something else), rich or poor, young or old, blonde or brunette, kind, funny, entitled, generous, you name it. What matters is that your character is well-defined and fits the story appropriately. Defining your characters early on in the story is what will bring depth to it. What's their personality type? What is their backstory? What are their goals? Why are they so important to the story?

A well-defined character will drive the plot (up next) forward by making decisions and reactions which are first and foremost impactful to the story and secondly (equally importantly) believable. Each character's specific and separate personalities and backstories are what will make your story engaging and meaningful to your readers.

Make sure your characters are there for a reason. If you're putting them in there just to add a few hundred extra words to your story, take them out. Don't introduce a character in great detail if they won't be relevant for a large portion of the book. That doesn't mean they have to be physically present for the entire book, but if that's the case, they need to appear constantly in the other characters' thoughts, reactions, and so on.

Make your characters believable. Their decisions and actions need to be compatible with their personality. No one wants to read about a character they can't understand or relate to in some way!

You can have the best plot ever, but poorly defined characters will crush the life out of a good story. Your main character needs to have three things. These are GOALS, STRENGTHS, and WEAKNESSES. You can use a character chart (search online to easily find some great ones) for this.

• GOALS are crucial to driving the plot forward. If your character has no goal in life, then they will make zero decisions. Your story will end up being boring and repetitive. Their goal can be huge, like "Take over the world." Or it can be small, like "Apologize to my best friend." What's important is that the goal really, really matters to the character.
• STRENGTHS are essential! Everyone has strengths. If your character has absolutely no strengths, then they will never achieve their goal. And their strengths need to be related to their goal, directly or indirectly. If your character is good at playing piano and wants to open a corner store, their strength isn't playing piano; it's those hours of dedication that will be transferred to them opening their corner store.
• WEAKNESSES. Creating a flawless character is a rookie mistake that everybody makes more than once before they get it right. A flawless character is boring and gives you nowhere to go in the story. Readers love to see a character change and grow, but one with nothing to work on isn't very exciting to read about.

These three things are really all you need for an amazing character!

Consider what drives these elements. What motivates the character to achieve their goal? How did they develop their strengths? What about their weaknesses?

Now that you've made a believable character, you need to make sure they fit the story too. Your character needs to be connected to their surroundings. Whatever place you choose for your character, they need to interact with it. Don't spend pages and pages describing a setting and then let your character do whatever they want with no connection to the environment.

Be careful as well about your backstory. You need to provide some sort of backstory for each of the main characters, because from that backstory, their goals, strengths, and weaknesses will be born. But put it late in the story so that your reader has time to care enough about the character to want to know their backstory. Otherwise, they'll get bored early in the book reading about things that have already happened. Readers want to see action!

And finally... villains. They're characters too. They need to consider themselves the hero as much as the other characters. They need to have goals, strengths, and weaknesses just like your other characters too. And make them strong. Make them constantly kicking your protagonists to the ground. Your readers will only enjoy their ultimate demise if they're (at least initially) stronger than the protagonist.

Once you have a great character, it's time to discuss the plot!

PLOT

Your plot serves a single purpose: to bring action to your story. Your character provides the base, and the words themselves will provide feeling. But if your plot isn't strong, the story will quickly get boring.

Choosing your plot is one of the most challenging parts of the writing process. To build a great plot, you need to know where it will take place. If you're writing a fantasy or sci-fi story, you need to first do some world building. Will your story have dragons? Ghosts? Spaceships faster than light? Or if you're writing a young adult or historical fiction story, then research your timeperiod. If you're writing about the second world war, you can't have the characters searching for a hotel on Google Maps. And no one will be exclaiming "that's sick!" in a Victorian castle.

Once you're sure about your world, you can start working on your plot!

The plot can bring action in any way you choose, depending on the environment. The key word here is action. That doesn't have to mean characters fighting dangerous criminals with high-tech weapons. Action could mean the character running into their ex years after the breakup. Action could mean earning a scholarship to a top college.

Your plot shouldn't be 100% action, though. Your readers need a break (and so do your characters). If your protagonist just got sucked through a portal into an alternate universe, don't make zombies confront them the second they take a step!

Your plot shouldn't have info dumps, where you go into endless detail about something. If your story involves a steam engine train, please don't explain the inner workings of the train to us unless your character needs to design it. Or if it's set in a castle, don't detail the curtain type and color of every room unless that's going to be relevant.

Your plot shouldn't have too many lucky coincidences either. If your protagonist just broke into a high-security vault, and their brother who studies in another country and hasn't visited for years shows up at the crucial moment to help them escape, that's just not believable.

Also, don't put your characters in situations where they can't logically achieve what you want them to. Characters need to eat, sleep, and so on. You don't have to describe that, but you do need to take it into account. Your plot needs to fit the characters just as much as your characters need to fit the plot. The actions the characters take will define your plot as much as they define the characters. Unless they're superhuman, your characters won't be able to act superhuman. They are always subjected to their environment. A teen boy from the midwest doesn't have night vision and can't run on slick ice in his sneakers. Don't put that in your plot!

Creating a plot is tough, so we recommend that you follow a structure. Some suggestions are the 3-act story structure or the Save the Cat story structure. Search online for some other good options.

GRAMMAR

Number one and most important: show don't tell. If you ever took a writing class or read a book on writing, chances are this is one of the first pieces of writing advice you were given. Don't just talk to your audience. It will make your story sound like a lecture. Instead, bring them into the story by showing them. Showing makes them interpret and engage with the story. For example, writing "Jim is kind" isn't as exciting as writing about all the times Jim has been kind (like saving a cat from a tree, or giving his sister $5). Or, writing "Jim was upset" isn't as good as writing something like "Hot tears of anger poured down Jim's cheeks."

Also, read your work aloud! If it sounds good, it'll read good. (When we read, we hear certain words in the back of our heads. Sentences that don't sound good to our subconscious make them difficult for our brains to process.)

THE BIG LIST OF THINGS TO AVOID

• Starting each sentence in the same way every time. Try to mix up sentence lengths, structures, and word order. This helps keep the story interesting.
• Info dumps.
• Lucky coincidences.
• Plot armor in general.
• Dialogue that nobody would actually ever say. If you or someone you know would say it, or you've seen/heard a similar line in a book/movie before, then your characters can say it. Otherwise, don't include it unless it's intentional. A middle schooler would probably never say something like, "I was uninformed of the event taking place at five o'clock this evening." So don't make a middle-school-aged character say that.

• Overuse of ellipses, dashes, and exclamation points.
• Overuse of alternatives to "said" (like answered, explained, declared, remarked, proclaimed, cried).
• Overuse of "said" itself. This might seem counterintuitive. In short, you don't want to overuse words such as said, answered, explained, and so on to identify who is speaking.
• Overuse of words such as the following: that, suddenly, for a moment, there was, seemed like, just, basically, actually, finally. Also, overuse of whatever "crutch word" you usually go to. (Everyone uses crutch words during braindead moments when we don't want to stop the flow of words onto the page.)
• Overuse of "started to." But use that if the character isn't going to finish what they started. An example of this is, "He started to run when he got pied in the face."
• Overuse of anything in general.

• Eliminate "felt" when you can, replacing it with "was" or something similar.
• Eliminate repetition. After reading about the same piece of information a few times, your reader will at best be bored and annoyed, and at worst think you're insulting their intelligence.
• Eliminate "could" when you can. For example, instead of writing "could see" it's better to write "saw" because this makes the sentence shorter and clearer. Even better, eliminate those words entirely! Instead of writing "she could see smoke," it's best to write "smoke billowed in the distance."
• Eliminate "said to him/her" unless you need to specify who the character is talking to.
• Eliminate excessive detail. There's no need to go into three pages of description about somebody's jacket. Writing "the prince's royal cloak, made from rich purple velvet and bearing a finely polished diamond" is enough details. We don't need to know the texture of the velvet, the kind of velvet, where the diamond was from, who shaped the diamond, how many inches below the prince's beard it's set, and the exact color the cloak is.
• Eliminate cliché words. If you've seen something once before in a book, don't repeat it.