The characters make the story

The characters are the soul of a story. Without good characters, no matter how amazing your story could, or would be, your readers will not identified themselves with it and they’ll get tired.

For me, building the characters has always been the best part of writing a new book. It’s really exciting and sometimes I just start constructing them, the characters, and somehow, a new story is born. It’s just that simple! But I don’t think I realized the true importance of characters until I started writing a non-fictional book. It might seem kind of counter-intuitive but it’s the hard truth.

Somewhere along the way, I felt the need to stop and think about people who were part of my live, portrayed as characters and that was the only way I didn’t get stuck in the first chapter.

The characters move the story along, as what they think, what they do, or don’t do, will determine how the story will evolve. Every single piece of information about them will have an impact on your reader and the way he or she will see the story.

So, in the end, they are what truly matters most, so don’t even think about the many hours you spend building your characters, as lost of time. Create them, think about all the details, and even when they do not matter to the story at this time, they will help you to create a coherent person, a believable one and it might just save you a lot of time latter on.

Create great characters, and end up with great stories.

Writing properly is “the” goal of any writer

Writing properly. What could that be? How can you know every single detail of a language, so you never make any mistake? Is that possible? Probably not, but you need to try or you’ll never be the writer you want to be.

As most of you know, English is not my native tongue, not even a good secondary one, let me tell you. Fortunately, I have my husband working on my posts and books to correct any sort of mistake that slip through the cracks, and there are plenty of those, from usage mistakes, to grammar and even some eventual punctuation mistakes… Pretty much everything is different between our two languages.

So, I’ve been studying and trying to improve my writing abilities and somewhere along the path I found an interesting website that almost seems to be written specifically for me: writingexplained.org.

Here, you’ll find numerous tips and solutions for a whole lot of problems and doubts you may have. Yet, it has plenty of information and sometimes, when you’re in a rush, it doesn’t really help or make you any better at what you’re doing. But, the best part, and the reason I decided to make a post about it, is the e-book situated on the home page.

It’s a 20 page e-book with the most common mistakes people make when writing. It’s easy to read (I did it in 15 minutes or so), practical and very easy to consult whenever you feel the need to.