Want to Know How to Write a Story?
Try these tips!
It’s another beautiful day on the Treasure Coast.
How lucky I am to live here where the sun shines so much of the time.
I don’t know about you, but I seem to need lots of sunshine.
It not only brightens my day (literally), it brightens my mood.
Just look how gorgeous the water is here.
I can’t think of any place that’s more beautiful.
Even the clouds are awesome!
But it’s easy to get distracted by the scenery, so I’m glad I have my coach (Wendy Dewar Hughes) to help me stay focused on my writing.
Since I’m a writing coach and Wendy is a writing coach, we coach each other.
The other day, during one of our weekly coaching calls, I mentioned how much trouble I’m having plotting some fiction I’m working on.
I know that, for me, it’s much easier to write a story if I plot out the whole thing first.
But I kept trying to write first and the writing just wasn’t going anywhere.
That’s when Wendy offered me one of my own writing tips (See? Even writing coaches need a writing coach to remind them of things they know but forget to use or practice).
She said, “Get some index cards and create your plot by thinking about all the scenes you’ll need in the story.”
Use one card to make notes about the first scene.”
Then get another card and write down some notes about what will happen in the next scene.”
Keep going until you have all the scenes planned out.”
Once you know what will happen in all the scenes, you can just sit down and start writing the story.”
Lately I’ve been writing on a big yellow legal pad as I sit out on the beach every afternoon.
I didn’t want to have to keep track of a bunch of individual index cards, which is why I hadn’t used index cards sooner.
But after Wendy mentioned this, my husband went to Target and found these index cards all hooked together like a little spiral notebook.
I love this!
I took Wendy’s advice and the other evening I outlined all the scenes in my story on the first card, then started making notes for each scene on other cards.
It was the most productive writing time I’ve had at the beach all month.
Thanks, Wendy!
During today’s writing time on the beach, I plan to make more notes about the first 3 scenes, then tomorrow I’ll write at least one of these scenes.
If you’re writing a story, here are some tips for outlining a novel that might help you figure out what scenes you’ll need in your story.
Happy writing!
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