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When you’re beginning the work of creating your story, you must keep in mind where it takes place. You can choose a famous city, opt for your own environment because you know it by heart, or invent a location to your taste. But how do you know you’ve chosen the right setting? Consider the following aspects:

1. The Importance of the Setting

The first thing you have to ask yourself is whether the setting is an important aspect of your story. There are tales in which the place where the characters live is as significant as the characters themselves. Once you answer that question, you’ll feel more confident when deciding where to set your story.

2. The Advantages of a Good Setting

Let’s consider a horror story as a example. It could take place anywhere, but if you choose the right setting, it’ll be easier for you to recreate a sinister atmosphere. Imagine a small, creepy village, or better yet, imagine the village is next to a swamp that fills the air with mist at night. Don’t you think that would be the perfect location for a horror story?

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As Picasso once said, “Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.” However, sometimes we get stuck and working harder is not enough. This may be because we can’t think of what to write, or it may happen because we don’t find the best way to proceed once we’ve started writing. When that happens, where do you look for inspiration?

Every writer is different, and what inspires me might not inspire you. Some people need a lot of fuss around them in order to get inspired, while other people work better in silence. The truth is the muse appears more frequently in certain places. These are my favorite locations for inspiration:

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I bet you’ve heard that some characters in a story are round while others are flat, but do you know exactly what that means? How do you know if your characters are round or flat? Should you always create round and dynamic characters? How can you make your characters more believable?

Before answering these questions, let’s first analyze what round and flat characters are and when to resort to using them:

Flat Characters

Only a few features (usually based on clichés) are necessary to create flat characters. They’re generally static characters meant to serve the story.

When should you use flat characters and why?

Flat characters are often used in TV comedies (30-minute sitcoms with canned laughter) because comedic stories usually focus on the anecdote and the joke. Thanks to their commonplace situations and characters, sitcoms are able to transmit a sense of familiarity to the spectator. Flat characters also have a supporting role in stories with round main characters in order to achieve one of these effects:

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Clichés are usually defined as hackneyed ideas or overused elements that fail to surprise anyone. At the time of writing, there are three places where we can find clichés – metaphors, characters, and plots.

Metaphors

Writers often resort to metaphors when they need to set their stories or introduce a description. There is nothing like a good comparison to give the reader an accurate mental picture of what you want to express. This is not a simple task since the image you create should be original and natural at the same time. This way, it will easily form in your readers’ minds without them having to stop reading to reflect on it. After all, the function of metaphors is to facilitate the understanding of the story.

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There are four key elements when it comes to telling a story: summary, plot, structure, and suspense. However, as all of them are interrelated and even interdependent, it’s sometimes difficult to tell them apart.

In this post, I’ll analyze these elements separately to discover their functions and peculiarities.

Summary

Summary refers to the main events of the narrative presented in chronological order. This sequential type of organization provides the writer with a clear answer to two questions. What’s the story about? What does it tell the reader? As we’ll discuss in the next section, once those questions have been answered, the author can break the chronological order of narrative discourse and choose the one that best fits his or her story.

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Have you ever experienced fear of a blank page when you can’t come up with ideas, or the ideas you have seem useless? That’s when you can fall into the vicious cycle of not writing because you lack ideas and lacking ideas because you don’t write. In other words, you fall into the dreaded writer’s block.

Years ago when I myself went through a period of creative drought, I discovered my problem lay in a mixture of fatigue, stress, fear, and insecurity. I found the best way to solve it was to change some of my lifestyle habits and face my fears.

Even though every writer is different and the same solution doesn’t apply to every problem, there are some general tips to help you identify and overcome writer’s block. In the case that you need them, I hope they help you as much as they helped me.

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A character arc is the transformation a character goes through from the beginning to the end of the story, the stages he (or she) goes through, and the psychological or emotional growth this process entails.

For you to understand it better, I’ll show you how you can create your own character arcs.

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While surfing the net some time ago, I came across a list of tips titled “33 Ways to Stay Creative.” I found it very inspiring and decided to adapt the original to the world of writing. In addition, I added a brief explanation to each of the points on the list. As a result, I have the following 23 tips to becoming a more creative writer. I hope you enjoy them.

1. Make Lists

Sometimes we feel overwhelmed in thinking there are hundreds of things that must be done. However, if we write them down in a list (differentiating between tasks and micro-tasks), we realize it’s not such a big deal. In fact, they can be finished one at a time and crossed off our to-do list. This leaves the brain better organized, we feel more relaxed, and we can make space for creativity.

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I’d like to share a tool with you that has helped me end procrastination forever. It is a writing log where you take notes about each writing session, and in this way, you can discover which time of day and circumstances are best for your productivity as a writer.

You may already have an idea (or think you have one like I did) of your best time to write, but I recommend you try this tool anyway. The results might just surprise you.

Before I started keeping a record of my writing sessions, I was convinced that I was most productive between 11 am and 12 pm. I also believed my pace slowed down after two hours of straight writing. Well, I’ve discovered that’s not so! Thanks to the writing log, I realized that I’m just as productive in the morning as I am in the evening. Not only that, but my pace seems to improve after two hours of non-stop writing! If you want to keep track of your writing, you’ll find a useful template in pdf format later in this guide. However, let me first offer you some advice on how to make the most of this exercise.

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Of all the tips authors offer to new writers, the one that is most often repeated is, “If you want to learn to write, you must write. But more importantly, you must read.” I agree, but let me point out there are many ways of reading.

As writers, we shouldn’t simply do the surface reading most readers do – at least not all the time. We should go a little further and try to unravel the literary techniques behind the story. But how are we supposed to do this?