Among the most important events in our lives are various rites of passage – confirmation, high school graduation, drinking for the first time, obtaining a driver’s license, marriage, firstborn child. Often in fiction the protagonist also undergoes a symbolic rite of passage.

Called an initiation, the story centers on the protagonist entering and learning a culture’s rules and language. This culture could be a foreign land, but usually it is a group, organization or institution, or simply adulthood. The protagonist is a stranger to this culture, and though he may had known of its existence, his entry marks an introduction to it.

Among the famous initiation stories are J.D. Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye,” in which the main character, Holden Caulfield, leaves the teen world of a preparatory academy for that of adult Manhattan, and Mark Twin’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” in which Huck Finn leaves his small town of Hannibal for the world of the Mississippi River beyond.

While the initiation story serves as a critique of the society that the protagonist has entered – as well as the one he left – it’s more about the character’s growth. As he either rejects or joins the new culture, the contrasts between it and the one he left tests his beliefs. Ultimately, he gains greater self-awareness from the experience.

Holden Caulfield, for example, decides to rebel against the phony adult society. He since has become a symbol of teen angst and alienation for three generation of readers. Huck Finn realizes that his slave, Jim, really is equal to him, despite what the adult slaveholding culture says, and so helps him remain free.

An initiation marks a great way to tell a story when you want to critique widely held societal beliefs. Always remember, however, that your character must learn and grow from encountering these beliefs, or your work risks becoming preachy.

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My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past 15 years, I’ve helped more than 350 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of the 7 Minutes a Day… writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.

Check out some of my self-publishing guidebooks:

Suffering from writer’s block or need to add some spunk to your writing? The problem may be that you need to change up your routine.

To that end, try this tip: Crying, counterintuitively to most people, actually helps one heal, as it removes toxic biochemicals from the body while reducing emotional stress. So consider writing a passage that induces weeping. Just keep a box of tissue next to your keyboard.

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My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past 15 years, I’ve helped more than 400 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of the Storytelling 101 writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.

Check out some of my writing guidebooks:

Don’t swindle your readers out of a good reading experience by getting these two words wrong.

Rip-off is a noun meaning that a deal is unfair or a scam: Aunt Janie knew the purse’s cheap quality made it a rip-off given the high cost.

Rip off (without a hyphen) is a verb in which you steal from someone: The scammer used a bogus ad on Craigslist to rip off the unsuspecting buyer by taking his money but delivering no services.

The easy way to remember the difference is that the noun takes a hyphen. The verb doesn’t have one (because it was stolen, no doubt!).

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My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past 15 years, I’ve helped more than 350 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of the 7 Minutes a Day… writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.

Check out some of my self-publishing guidebooks:

“I never feel that I have comprehended an emotion, or fully lived even the smallest events, until I have reflected upon it in my journal; my pen is my truest confidant, holding in check the passions and disappointments that I dare not share even with my beloved.” – Stephanie Barron, “Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor”

“When you write things down, they sometimes take you places you hadn’t planned.” – Melanie Benjamin, “Alice I Have Been”

“It is not a bad idea to get in the habit of writing down one’s thoughts. It saves one having to bother anyone else with them.” – Isabel Colegate

“Learn as much by writing as by reading.” – Lord Acton

“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.” – Joan Didion

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My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past 15 years, I’ve helped more than 350 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of the 7 Minutes a Day… writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.

Check out some of my self-publishing guidebooks:

An old but essential writing adage is “Start your story in the middle.” That is, rather than give background information about how the story’s main conflict came to be, instead start it by dropping the reader right into the hornet’s nest.

This technique is called in medias res, a Latin term for “in the middle.” It dispenses with the story’s background and start with the action already underway (or “in the middle” of the story). An excellent example of this is Homer’s “The Iliad,” which starts in the waning days of the Greek war with the Trojans rather than covering the 10-year siege before the final battle. This helps focus the story’s plot on a character resolving one significant central problem.

Some writers consider this approach disorienting and so avoid it. While that response may be true for some young readers, almost anyone who’s at least a teenager has read or seen acted out so many stories that they won’t be confused. If anything, the uncertainty will make them read on to find out what’s happening.

For example, starting a story in which a naval ship comes upon a sister craft that has mysteriously been attacked is more interesting than starting with exposition about the search for it. Yes, the “story” technically began with receiving orders from the admiralty to look for the ship, but rarely does anything that’s particularly interesting occur during the search. Given this, starting the story at the moment that the crew sees the listing ship can be emotionally evocative and set in motion a lot of action, conflict and suspense as the harrowing rescue gets underway. This likely is more important in a short story than a novel.

Readers will learn what is going on, who the main characters are, and the setting as this action unfolds. Not only is that a more economical way to deliver what otherwise would be considered exposition, it’s also more interesting.

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My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past 15 years, I’ve helped more than 400 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of the Storytelling 101 writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.

Check out some of my guidebooks for plotting your story:

Suffering from writer’s block or need to add some spunk to your writing? The problem may be that you need to change up your routine.

To that end, try this tip: Read the last line of the book you checked out or purchased. Use it as a writing prompt and spend 15 minutes writing a story in which it is the opening line.

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My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past 15 years, I’ve helped more than 400 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of the Storytelling 101 writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.

Check out some of my writing guidebooks:

When trying to show that a character is speaking louder than before or to emphasize a point, writers sometimes capitalize each letter of a word, creating what is typographically known as ALL CAPS. For example: Tinker balled his fists. “Quit BULLYING me!”

The writer may want to reconsider capitalizing all of those letters, however.

Ideally, you wouldn’t need to use ALL CAPS at all. The context alone should be enough to suggest that the character is shouting or angry. Indeed, in the above example, the character balled his fists, showing that he’s upset. In addition, the exclamation point indicates he’s hollering.

There is a time to change the typography or font that’s used, and that’s to emphasize how a word is spoken. You might italicize a word to show that a character is speaking under his breath and doesn’t intend to be heard. ALL CAPS would show a rise in the volume (that is, a shout) when it’s not expected from the character.

Such a typographical change ought to be used rarely, though, or its effectiveness diminishes. In many ways, overusing ALL CAPS is like using the same word over and over – it’s not particularly creative and eventually the repetition is annoying.

ALL CAPS actually may make reading you story more difficult. A 1955 study found that ALL CAPS text slowed reading speed by 9.5 percent over a five-minute period. In any case, since many established writers rarely use ALL CAPS, for some readers overuse of it can give your writing an amateurish feel, and that’s not the impression you want to give.

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My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past 15 years, I’ve helped more than 350 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of the 7 Minutes a Day… writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.

Check out some of my self-publishing guidebooks:

“There is no idea so brilliant or original that a sufficiently-untalented writer can’t screw it up.” – Raymond Feist (for the corollary, see Lawrence Watt-Evans below)

“There is no idea so stupid or hackneyed that a sufficiently-talented writer can’t get a good story out of it.” – Lawrence Watt-Evans

“In brief, I spend half my time trying to learn the secrets of other writers – to apply them to the expression of my own thoughts.” – Shirley Ann Grau

“A writer will seal his own coffin,
And the interests of readers will soften,
If the author insists
On the usual twists,
And he goes to the Wells once too often.” – Mark Grenier

“Observe, don’t imitate.” – John M. Ford

“The writer’s genetic inheritance and her or his experiences shape the writer into a unique individual, and it is this uniqueness that is the writer’s only stuff for sale.” – James Gunn

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My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past 15 years, I’ve helped more than 400 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of the Storytelling 101 writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.

Check out some of my writing guidebooks: