Choosing Your Audience

For Whom to Write

I find choosing an audience so difficult. When I’m inspired, I tend to just start writing. But the thing is, different age groups, genres, targets require different writing styles.

I’m not going to talk about the biting cold, stinging his cheeks when I’m writing a little kids’ book and I’m not going to say ‘they walked and they walked and they walked until they got to the top of the hill’ for a young adult novel.

Similarly there are different topics and subject matters that should appear in some books and not others. It’s unlikely that a teen book would be about your ‘first ever day at school’.

So, how does one choose a target audience, and should one stick to that target audience?

My Favourite Authors

The Authors I Love
Please forgive me, I’ve used a stock image here. I will use images of my actual self at some point, I promise.

Writers really need to be readers too.

I don’t really have a particular genre I like to read. I seem to stumble upon books I really love and then end up reading everything the author has written.

Mainly because everything else they’ve written is pretty good too.

This happened to me when I discovered Sir Terry Pratchett. I found him in a train station.

A New Way to Think About Scene Structure

I Found This Amazing Article!

I am following Angela Ackerman on Twitter and she posted this amazing article about how to rethink scene structure.

It’s really helped me to rethink how I’ve written some scenes in my latest books.

You’ll have to read it to really appreciate it, but what she’s saying is that each scene has it’s own question and what happens in the scene is the answer to that question.

Is the baddie hiding something? Yes or no.

Is the prince going to climb into the castle? Yes or no.

I strongly suggest reading the article as it’s rather good and easy to follow.

It’s something I’ve been thinking about my writing too. Why am I writing this scene? What do I want this scene to do to the plot?

I’ll Be Back!

My apology for a lack of posts

Hopefully, I will be able to post as much as I would like to however, it is back to work after the school holidays. I may not have as much time as I would like.

There might be a lack of posts. Be assured that normal service will resume in half term.

I hope you enjoy the posts I have written in the mean time.

More on World Building

The Specifics

Let’s get down to the nitty gritty. You have decided that your world needs a lot of detail, if not for the plot but for yourself, to give yourself an idea of how it all works and fits together.

You need the rules.

You have decided that your world will take place in a pre-technology magic land, or it will take place in the modern day. Maybe it’s hundreds or thousands of years into the future. But whatever it is, you’ve got it. Now you need the specifics.

Let’s get on with it.

World Building

The Tricky Bit
For a novel to be popular, I think, people want to lose themselves in the world behind it.

For example, I love the Discworld novels, by Sir Terry Pratchett. I have often dreamed of going to Ankh Morpork to explore the streets and meet the characters who live and work there. I imagine Angua giving me a suspicious look, and Dibbler offering me one of his delicious pies. I imagine the smell of the Anhk as it slides its way through the city and the tower from the Unseen University reaching up above the rooftops.

In the Harry Potter books there is a whole wizarding world. They have a sport, newspapers, modes of transportation, education institutions, there world is real and substantial. A reader can imagine themselves living there, and thanks to the magic of cinema, they can even visit the set themselves.
So, a world that is believable is essential.

This is how I build mine:

More About the Characters

What are they all about?

In a previous post I talked about the teenagers in my science fiction worlds. In this post, I’d like to focus on my fantasy characters. They are a little younger than my sci fi teenagers, their journeys are a little different.

In contrast to the teenagers who are hard and brash and want to be antagonistic just for the sake of it, the younger characters are more in awe of the magical worlds around them.  They see through simpler eyes, not childish eyes, but eyes that don’t angst yet.

But, who are they?

About My Characters

Mythical, Science Fictional or Just Believable

I would love to think that the characters in my books are believable. But to me, they are absolutely real. I sometimes call my son by my lead protagonists name or write my daughters name when I’m writing about my female lead. These characters are a real to me as anyone else.

So, who are they?

Creating Your Online Presence

This is all new to me!

At the risk of sounding incredibly old, creating an online presence is a bit tricky. I’m not entirely sure what to do.

But that’s ridiculous. I have an eReader myself, needing to save space and carry lots of books about at once. I’ve been on MySpace and Facebook for as long as they’ve been about. I look up celebs online, using Wikipedia or Twitter. I’ve even communicated with a few of my favourite authors through tweets, (Hi @DjangoWexler!) Which clearly shows that I know having an online presence is important.

But where do you start?