~The Golden Quill~

      A Hero’s Journey, that is the next book I have to read. Amy picked up the heavy book, it was a few hundred pages of carefully crafted fantasy. She read the blurb on the back.

      A Hero’s Journey is a tale as old as time, but the author breathes a new life into it here. It documents a Krawk’s quest to become a great swordsman in his hometown to slay the dragon residing in the nearby mountains that has been terrorizing his community. We follow the protagonist through his interactions with the village people, his training at the academy, and his emblazoned battle against the dragon.

      Sounds interesting enough, Amy thought, always having preferred nonfiction over fantasy. It’ll be good to see the way he tells his story though, there is a lot to learn in this book. I know it is very popular.

     She dug into the book and started reading. She had only intended on reading the first two chapters that evening but she was so caught up in the book, she read the first five. She was amazed at how the story drew her in, each chapter ending with a cliffhanger that made her want to push onto the next.

      Cliffhangers. Those are important. The chapter ends but it ends in a source of conflict without a resolution. It makes the reader want to continue on to the next chapter so they can find the solution to what just happened. It’s like a bunch of mini-movie endings that make you want to see the sequel. Our nature makes us want to find out what happens next.

     Amy realized to keep people absorbed, you had to keep them guessing and keep them unsure. Every chapter can’t be wrapped up with a bow and left to sit, or else the reader would feel comfortable putting the book down and may never pick it back up to read to the end. This book was filled with cliffhangers!

     She went to bed that night to get some rest, especially for her eyes which have been reading all day. She slept like a rock, having been so focused and her brain was exhausted.

     She awoke in the morning to the sound of the snow and ice rattling against her window, the sun starting to peek over the tops of the mountains. It was deep in winter now, and the sunlight didn’t stay very long during the day so she wanted to absorb a bit of it before the early sunset. She put on her coat and went for a walk around town, letting the knowledge she had gained last night sink in.

     Walks like this are good after a studying session, they allow your brain to relax and that is when you are really learning. Your brain tenses up when you are gaining new information, and if it is always tense then nothing will penetrate it. You need to take breathers here and there to let the information settle in.

     As she walked, she smiled at her neighbours who were also out gaining some valuable time in the sun. A lot of her neighbours were very jealous of her travels, they had mostly never left Terror Mountain, and if they did it was for a quick cruise somewhere tropical to get out of the never-ending winter conditions.

     These are the people I’m writing for. I want them to experience what I have without having to travel halfway across the world to do it. Or I want to INSPIRE them to travel halfway across the world, Amy thought with a grin. She knew the experiences she had were incredible, and she wanted to share that with the world. That is WHY she writes, like the first book asked. This was her answer.

     She headed back into her cosy home and curled up next to the fireplace with A Hero’s Journey. She still had many chapters left to go, and she was hoping to power through it all today. The content inside was so interesting, she knew it could keep her entertained.

     She followed the stories of the hero. The way he spoke with the other villagers, and the way his dialogue was written, made it all seem so alive. Like she could hear his voice in her head. He had a specific way he spoke that was kept consistent through the story, and modifiers were added to convey his emotion.

     ”Here ye, all who go forth,” the hero said with pride in his voice. “Today I will fight the dragon, our struggles will soon be at the end.”

     Creating a voice was going to be important. She could write her own voice well enough, she was familiar with it after all. She grabbed her notebook though and wrote down that she needed to give unique voices to all the characters she wrote about. And that just writing “I said” “she said” “he said” wasn’t enough. She had to describe HOW “she said” what she said, how her voice acted.

     She said, her voice trembling. He spoke nervously, afraid someone might hear.

     She wrote some examples down from the book of how this was done. Her notebook was getting full of all the different techniques she’s been learning.

     After a full afternoon of reading, she had finished up A Hero’s Journey.

     What an incredible read, I can only hope that my story comes out half as well as that one. Amy felt as though she had learned a lot. She was able to follow the through line of the story from beginning to end, it was very clear the author had the pathway carved out and knew exactly where he was going. But he also occasionally strayed from that path to tell other stories that still developed the character in a way that was complementary to the main story. Everything was relevant to the main story in the end and kept her wrapped in the entire time. There weren’t any useless details.

     No useless details. She repeated this to herself. She didn’t want her story to drag on or to get boring. And so it was on to the next book.

     “Mastering The Hooks”

     This book was all about creating a solid hook, something that “hooks” the reader in. The cliffhangers she learned about keep the reader reading, but how do you get them interested enough to read in the first place.

      A main hook is absolutely essential to a good story. This is the thing that makes it a fascinating read. A good idea for a hook is generally some type of conflict, something the main character needs to resolve. The path to the resolution is generally the story itself. What is the conflict of your story? Figure that out, that is how you will draw in readers.

     A good hook also has high stakes. A conflict isn’t necessarily enough, there has to be some type of risk involved. If the conflict is, for example, a woman who wants to travel the world but can’t, why can’t she? What risk does she take by travelling the world? These risks introduce obstacles into your story and make the resolution harder to come by. We want to read about the struggles and the difficulty, we want to see her overcome her obstacles one by one on the way to the resolution.

      This makes sense, otherwise, the story would be too short and obvious.

     Obstacles should be thought of as smaller hooks. They can be used as cliffhangers at the end of chapters, they will continue to hook the reader just when they thought they were getting comfortable and that the story was getting predictable.

     Cliffhangers! There they are again. The emphasis on the importance of cliffhangers wasn’t lost on Amy, but she wasn’t sure the best way to go about them. She knew they would be extremely important to her story, but she would have to practice crafting them.

     If I don’t come up with a good cliffhanger, people won’t be coming back again to read my stories every week, Amy struggled with the thought. The pressure on this one subject was mounting and becoming overwhelming, she knew she had to make the perfect cliffhanger but had no idea how to do it. She had to come up with a plan on how to practice them, or her story would never come together the way she wanted it to.

     Would she be able to do it? Come back next week to find out.

     To be continued…