GiraffeCrafts

Originally Posted on Knitted by God's Plan One of the most important parts of a book are the characters. If you don't have a character your reader will fall in love with, they will put the book down and not touch it again. So, one of the biggest challenges an author has is how to create a character that will keep the reader from putting the book down. Now, that's a pretty tall order. You've got to create an entire person and effectively bring the character to life through words. How are you supposed to do this???? The first thing you have to do is define your character. Give your character a name, a brief backstory, a basic appearance, and a core personality. For example, I'm going to create a character named Julia. I think she is a little girl of ten or twelve who discovers a strange egg in her backyard ... which glows red. As for basic appearance, I think she's of average height, has blue-green eyes, ginger hair, and freckles. Lots of freckles. As ...

Originally Posted on Knitted By God's Plan Since, last week, I told you you can't steal someone else's story, I'm going to talk about other places you can get a story. Now, I can't tell you that these work 100% of the time, and I can't tell you that they are all the ways you can get story ideas, because neither is true. These are just some methods that have worked for me. 1. Books you've read. Now you're looking at me like I'm crazy. Last week I told you that you can't take ideas from books you've read ... and now I'm telling you that ... Relax. You CAN get ideas from books you've read. You see "There is nothing new under the sun." Suppose you're reading a book about people who ride eagles, and you really like the idea, and you want to write a book about people who ride eagles. Now, there are hundreds and hundreds of books about people who ride eagles, so if you write a book about people who ride eagles, it woul...

Originally Posted on Knitted By God's Plan As a young writer, I am a firm supporter of other young writers. However, there are many young writers out there that haven't a clue as to how to go about writing their books. I have decided to write tips that I have learned from my own experience, and show some pitfalls that young writers (and any writer at that) should avoid. Today, I am going to talk about plagiarism. Plagiarism is taking another persons work without their permission and writing it as if it were your own. It is against the law, and doing so can make you end up getting sued or worse. Now, I understand, plagiarizing is very tempting. It is so much easier to use someone else's predefined characters, and someone else's predefined plot, and someone else's predefined world. I myself have done so. I once had a play I was writing that was basically a rewrite of a book I absolutely loved. Sure I had my own characters, but it was still the same p...