i'm writing a story about a girl that battles evil vampires. she never gets old( she's immortal ) , and falls in love with a vampire. i wrote the first chapter already, but i need help on making it longer because it's only a page and a half long. any ideas? i also need help on starting the second chapter.
2007-09-20 17:40:57 · 4 answers · asked by Anonymous in Arts & Humanities ➔ Books & Authors
My idea would be to get a new idea. Your plot has been done to death (and undeath). How many rehashings of the same tired plot are people possibly going to subject editors too? I see half a dozen submissions queries a month with the SAME PLOT. I rejected every one.
2007-09-21 05:49:55 · answer #1 · answered by bardsandsages 4 · 1⤊ 0⤋
The way to write a novel or anything for that matter, is to do your prep work first. Have you done character studies? An outline? Research? It sounds to me like you are writing Laurell K Hamilton's books. That is exactly what she writes about. Either that or Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Why is this girl "immortal"? How does she develop immorality? You cannot just lay immortality on a character without some kind of an explanation. If you have an outline and character studies for your characters, you will have a better indication of what direction your story is going to take. And unless you have some kind of original twist on it, be prepared for people to yawn and say "Another Buffy story".
Also, to quote my son who is sitting beside me - Vampires are the most over used topic of all time - for everything. How do you intend to make your story original? It isn't easy, but I have managed to write some highly original vampire material after MUCH research. And if you truly want to write vampire stories, the place to start in terms of reading is with Bram Stoker's Dracula - not Twilight. Mr. Stoker set the standards for vampires in literature. He set up a very specific set of circumstances under which vampires exist. Twilight breaks several of those rules. Traditional vampire stories do not break with tradition - they follow the rules for vampires set down by Stoker. There is a chapter that lists them explicitly. NO - vampires do not sparkle in the sunlight. That is just silly.
You need to think those things through and work on your outline before you can go much further. A page and a half isn't much of a start.
And you should know that when referring to the length of a work in progress, you always refer to numbers of words - not pages. Industry standard for a novel is about 90 - 150 thousand words. The length of the book is based on 250 words per page.
Put the writing aside and work on your prep work. It will help you tremendously. The more you know about your characters, the longer your work will be.
Pax - C
2007-09-21 01:03:47 · answer #2 · answered by Persiphone_Hellecat 7 · 2⤊ 0⤋
Well, maybe you should have thought about what the actual plot of your story is before you just started writing. There should be some sort of conflict that the character/s try to resolve. Thats how 99% of every story ever made works.
Take whatever happened in the first chapter that you wrote and then have something go horribly wrong. Then the characters can spend the next 100 pages trying to fix it.
2007-09-21 00:50:37 · answer #3 · answered by egn18s 5 · 1⤊ 0⤋
you could read the twilight series by stephine meyer if it helps. bella hasnt been turned into a vampire yet, but shes in love with edward, whos a vampire
2007-09-21 00:51:18 · answer #4 · answered by bando 2 · 0⤊ 2⤋