Among the most important words in your story are the ones that begin it. Those words should get the reader to ask, “What’s going on here?” so he keeps reading. In a short story, the author usually only has a couple of sentences to make this happen; in a novel, a couple of paragraphs typically is the limit.

Your opening lines – also known as the grabber or narrative hook – need to deliver some vital information to readers as well. In most stories, the opening lines provide some striking situation that presents the reader with something unusual, and they usually introduce the main character, his conflict to be resolved and the setting.

There are a couple of ploys you can use to create gripping opening lines. First, show two seemingly disparate elements, such as “At 0150 Greenwich Mean Time on December 1, 1975, every telephone in the world started to ring”, which Arthur C. Clarke uses in “Dial ‘F’ for Frankenstein.” Another ploy is to start with a “distancing move” that shows we’re in a different world, such as “The great eye floated in space”, in Ray Bradbury’s “The Lost City of Mars”. A third technique is to show your main character in a crisis or puzzling situation, such as “Why must they do it one December 28th? John Stapleton considered the question” as Theodore I. Thomas wrote in “December 28th”.

When writing your story’s opening lines, remember that they should:
• Be interesting and intriguing enough to draw reader in
• Be integral to the story, perhaps even holding key clues to how the main character will resolve the central problem by foreshadowing the ending
• Establish, without much detail, the main character/protagonist and a problem or conflict that that the main character must resolve; in doing so, those lines shows the main character threatened and indicate what’s at stake for him
• Establish the setting, or at least the story’s place by establishing the scene of where the main character is
• Reveal the antagonist, if only vaguely
• Set the story’s tone
• Give the reader a sense that the main character’s life began before the story did; as Ben Bova wrote in “Notes to a Science Fiction Writer,” “this helps convince the reader that … (the main character) is really alive”

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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:

“A critic can only review the book he has read, not the one which the writer wrote.” – Mignon McLaughlin

“The good critic is he who narrates the adventures of his soul among masterpieces.” – Anatole France

“Criticism should not be querulous and wasting, all knife and root-puller, but guiding, instructive, inspiring.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs.” – Christopher Hampton

“Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.” – Kurt Vonnegut

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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:

The very act of writing is a testament that anything is possible.

Writing brings reality to what we cannot now do: the technology to travel to other solar systems; use of magical potions to immediately heal an injured comrade; the ability to cross the Old West or sail aboard a Roman galleon. Whether you pen fiction that creates a story centered on these impossibilities or nonfiction that details the path toward obtaining such dreams, writing transforms a vision in one’s head into something tangible.

The fuel for this transformation is one’s imagination; the devices that this creativity drives vary from pen and paper to keyboard and computer memory, from paperback to ebook.

When our visions become something tangible that others enjoy as well as learn and grow from, they can ignite within readers the desire to make that dream more than just words on a page. The annals of science fiction are ripe with readers who became engineers, scientists and entrepreneurs that made visions of space travel, new communication devices, and medical cures a reality of our modern times. Political, economic and philosophical tomes have spawned new ways of thinking about our world that whole generations then embraced and constructed.

Are you lonely and seeking love? Write a romance. Do you dream of greater wealth? Write a guidebook to investing. Want to visit mysterious Incan ruins? Write a travelogue or an action-adventure novel.

For with your pen, you can go anywhere and achieve any wish you desire.

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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:

If you don’t have a personal Facebook page yet, you should give serious consideration to getting one. Facebook is the largest social networking site on the globe. Everyone on Facebook has a page on which they can post updates, photos, and videos about their life. A page can be set up so that either “friends” (and you get to approve who is your friend) or the public can see it. The social networking site offers an excellent way to reach potential readers.

To promote your book via Facebook, you’ll have to begin by setting up you personal page. It’s quite easy to do, and Facebook takes you through the entire process with a step-by-step tutorial. It’s also free to join.

Once you set up your personal page, you then can create a page just about your book. This page won’t contain all of those updates, photos and videos about your kids and trip to Mexico that you’ll soon be posting on your personal page.

To set up your business page, you should have jpegs on hand of your book’s cover and some vertical photo that might be used as your “cover.” The book cover will serve as your profile picture. The vertical cover photo could be of you at a book signing, a photo related to what your book is about (for example, a spacecraft orbiting the earth if you’re book is about why we should spend more money on space exploration), or a close-up of the book cover.

You’ll also want to write a description of your book in the “About” section.” This description essentially can be what you’ve placed on your back cover blurb or the home page of your website. Also, there is a spot where you’ll be able to place links to your website and blog, so be sure to do that.

What to post on Facebook? Anything that you might blog. Given this, I essentially post what I write for my Twitter feeds (which are just links to my blog) on Facebook. This may sound redundant, but not everyone on Facebook uses Twitter and vice versa. You’re just covering your bases.

To make Facebook truly useful, you’ll need to get “friends” to maximize the number of people who view your page and will potentially read your book Once you get friends then you can ask them to “like” your business page. Each time you make a post on the Facebook page for your book, it will go out to a “wall” where anyone who “likes” your page can read what you wrote (along with what all of their other friends wrote).

How do you get “friends”? You have to ask them to be your friend via Facebook (it’s a simple click or two of a button). Look for the following people on Facebook to be your friends:
• Family
• Friends (Makes sense, doesn’t it?)
• Colleagues past and present
• Former classmates (high school and college)
• Friends of lots of your friends (You may not know them personally, but you do have something in common!)
• Pages on related subjects and “like” or “friend” them (If you’re book is about coffee, seek out coffeehouses.)

All of your posts show up on each of your friends’ walls, so hopefully others who are not friends will take an interest in your page.

Some savvy Facebook users reduce some of this work simply by making their personal page their book page. If you do this, however, you’re counting on people to buy a book by an author rather than buying a book about a specific subject or from a specific genre. Since you’re a new author, you probably don’t yet have much name recognition to generate many book sales. People will come to you because of the book’s genre and subject matter, not because you wrote it.

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My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional book 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 decade, I’ve helped more than 400 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of 80 books including 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 book marketing guidebooks:

How many times have you read a book then later as trying to find some statement or paragraph in it said under your breath, “What page was that on?”

Eventually you probably just give in and look up the page number in the index or table of contents. Good thing the author included page numbers!

You, too, should include page numbers in your book. Besides being useful to readers, including page numbers helps your book look professional.

Page numbers and running headers that include the book’s name and your title also are called folios.

Almost every page in your book should have a page number. Start with the introduction/preface and run through the main text, appendixes and index. Forewords and prefaces get Roman numeral pages (i, ii, iii, etc.); all other pages get Arabic numerals (1, 2, 3). You can skip page numbers, though, on the half title page, copyright page, dedication, acknowledgements, table of contents, first page of a chapter (though each first page of a chapter is counted), and the author’s bio at the back of book.

Some other basic rules for placing page numbers in books include:
• Don’t write “Page x”, just give the number
• Left pages are even numbers, right pages are odd numbers (Side note: To avoid looking amateurish, place the first page of a chapter on an odd-numbered page, even if that means you must leave the even-numbered page before it blank)
• Put page numbers on the outside margin (e.g. the side of the book away from the spine)
• Post them on the bottom of page (They can be combined with the running header, though – read on!)
• Change the font and point size so they appear slightly different than the book’s text

As noted above, you might include the page number in the running headers. Appearing in the top margin, these include either the book title on each page (typical of novels) or the book title and chapter title on opposite pages (typical of nonfiction books). Usually, the book title appears on the even-numbered page and the chapter title on the odd-numbered page, but there’s no hard and fast rule for this. Sometimes the book title and author’s name both will appear at the top of the page.

The running header can be centered rather than aligned left or right. If doing so, then consider placing page numbers at the top of the page. Align the page number to the outside margin (e.g. the side of page farthest from the spine); otherwise align them to the margin edge farthest from the spine.

Regardless of what format is used, place the running header slightly more than a line of type above the top line of text appearing on a page.

If formatting your book in Microsoft Word, you can set up running headers, but it gets complicated. Sometimes the best thing to do (especially if you have a nonfiction book or any book in which chapters have titles) is “cheat” by creating a text box for a running header for an even numbered page, copying and then modifying it for an odd page running header, and then copying and pasting each one to where it should appear on each page, changing page numbers and chapter titles as you go. This can be rather tedious, though.

There are a lot of good reasons to self-publish besides that mainstream publishing has shut its door to most authors. Most notable is the high royalty that can come back to you. With a mainstream publisher, you’re lucky to make a dime for every dollar of books sold. Up to 70 cents for every dollar can come to you, though, if you self-publish. Another good reason to self-publish is that it’s quick. Within a few hours, your book can be available for sale to the public when you self-publish. Mainstream publishing may require months from the time you complete a manuscript to its appearance on bookstore shelves. In addition, you instantly can sell your book across the globe when self-publishing. Expect several more months and attorneys to be involved with global distribution and sales if you go the mainstream publishing route.

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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:

Good stories center on the clashing of characters’ goals and motivations. Sometimes a character’s goals and motivations arise when tracking another or when being tracked. Here are four writing prompts for stories that center on the plot of being tracked down.

Man vs. nature
Your main character is hired to capture some creature – a dangerous escaped animal, a monster of some sort, a beast on an alien planet. How does the main character go about capturing this creature? Elevate the power of this story by having the main character discover something about the creature that leads him to believe it should not be captured.

Man vs. man
The main character is hired to capture someone – a man wanted for a crime, an escaped convict, someone who holds a dark secret. How does our main character go about finding this person? What lessons about himself does the main character learn as he fails through the story’s rising action to capture the person?

Man vs. society
Turn the man vs. man conflict around: What if your main character is wanted by law enforcement or an intelligence agency? How does he avoid being caught by that organization? What does he learn about himself as the organization closes on his capture?

Man vs. himself
What if your main character, whose job is to track down someone, uncovers clues about the hunted that leads him to doubt his assignment? Focus on his internal struggle to rectify his assignment against his morals and the truth.

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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:

Mess these two words up, and you may be hitting the back space key. That all depends on what side of the Atlantic you’re on, though.

If in America, use backward, no “s”.

If in Britain, use backwards. Unless you’re using “backward” as an adjective, then use backward as in “The people of the north country revel in their backward ways.”

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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:

So you’ve written a scene packed with action, ripe with conflict, and filled with tension – but every time you read it, the writing feels flat. The problem may be that you’re writing in passive rather than active voice.

Active voice is when the subject of the sentence does (or acts upon) something. In the following active voice sentence, the subject (streak of light), does something (arcs):

The streak of light arced across the sky as if a falling star.

Passive voice, however, occurs when the subject is acted upon. For example, the above sentence in passive voice would be written as:

Arcing across the sky, as if a falling star, was a streak of light.

Passive voice generally should be avoided, for a couple of reasons:
• It’s dull – It’s like telling you something “exists.” In the above example, the author really is saying “In the sky exists a streak of light.” Sleeker and more economical, active voice speeds up the story.
• It’s awkward – Notice how the phrase “as if a falling star” seems stuck in the middle of the sentence, as if it is out of place. Rewriting the sentence so it’s in active voice would give the phrase a place to fit.
• It’s wordy – The passive voice sentence above says in 14 words what the active voice sentence says in 13 words. One word may not seem like much, but in a 100,000-word novel, it can mean a few unnecessary pages of copy.

Of course, sometimes “passive voice” is needed. You do need, on occasion, to tell people that something “exists,” especially when writing exposition. In addition, you don’t want to overdo it with active voice. The reader can only go at high speed so long before getting motion sickness.

How do you know if you have a passive voice sentence? Look for “being verbs” – these are verbs that show the subject “exists.” There are only eight being verbs: is, are, am, was, were, be, being and been. Also, look for the three words had, has and have, which are week fill-ins for the verb “possess”. If any of those words appear in your sentence, you need an active verb.

Converting passive to active voice is a simple process. First, identify the sentence’s subject, or who/what the sentence is doing something. For example, in the passive sentence “Through him was running an icy shiver,” “shiver” is the subject.

Next, place the subject at the sentence’s beginning. You would then have a sentence that reads “An icy shiver through him was running.”

Then identify the verb, or the words that describe what the subject is doing. In this case, its “was running.” Place those words immediately after the subject so that the sentence now reads “An icy shiver was running through him.”

Finally, get economical by cutting out the being words – in this case “was” – and reworking the verb so it makes sense in the sentence. The sentence we’re working on now would read “An icy shiver ran through him.”

You now have a sentence in active voice.

Sometimes you may have to replace the being verb with an active voice verb that actually shows action. For example, in the passive sentence “Miles of salt flats, a dry bed of crimson and pastel green, is between them”, “is” needs to be replaced with a verb. “Separated” would work much better. The sentence “Miles of salt flats, a dry bed of crimson and pastel green, separated them” is in active voice.

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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 writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.” – Ernest Hemingway

“If you will practice being fictional for a while, you will understand that fictional characters are sometimes more real than people with bodies and heartbeats.” – Richard Bach

“I wanted to invent myself as a fictional character. And I did, and it has caused a great deal of confusion.” – Jeanette Winterson

“Basically you come up with the fictional idea and you start writing that story, but then in order to write it and to make it seem real, you sometimes put your own memories in. Even if it’s a character that’s very different from you.” – Jeffrey Eugenides

“I do like to embed a fictional character firmly in an occupation.” – Penelope Lively

Today’s sophisticated readers generally demand that your stories contain three-dimensional characters, that is, a protagonist who behaves like a real person and who probably grows by learning something along the way. But how do you create such a character? A three-dimensional, or round, character would do the following:

Express multiple emotions
In our daily lives, we rarely express a lone emotion all day or react to all things with the same single feeling. We are cheerful, we are frustrated, we are pleased, we are angry, we are lustful, we are bored. In fact, whenever a person constantly displays only one emotion – sadness or anger, for example – we tend to worry that there is something wrong with him. Except for the most dire of circumstances, such as to show a character has sunk into deep depression, always have a character express a number of emotions, as the plot permits.

Struggle with conflicting emotions
Most of us find ourselves doing what we think is best though we don’t feel like doing it or vacillating between thoughts as our feelings play tug of war inside us: we want to tell off someone but know we need to bite our tongue; we don’t want to attend our loudmouth neighbor’s party but know his good-natured wife will be offended if we don’t. Have your main character grapple with his emotions as well.

Possess flaws
No one is perfect, except for hackneyed story characters. Allow them to make mistakes, to have weaknesses and fears. If they don’t have a flaw, they risk becoming a comic book-like caricature. Make their flaws integral to the plot so that it stands out.

Undergo change
As a real person, you experience and learn something new everyday; though it may not be earth-shattering, it does affect who you are so that the person you are today is not the person you were 20 years ago. In a story, a protagonist ideally will experience and learn something that changes – for the better – his perspective on himself or the world.

Display some unique quirk
Each of us has some habit or subtle tic that sets us apart from others – biting one’s fingernails when nervous, twirling one’s hair when uncertain, winking at others when feeling happy. Your main character also should have some quirk that is uniquely his, that can come to be associated with him.

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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 decade, 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: