Story Starter

Welcome!

Having trouble coming up with ideas for a story? Having trouble writing it? Welcome to Story Starters, where there's all you'll need for writing a novel in three of the most popular genres of fiction, as well as storywriting in general.

My name is Jeffrey Stanley, the developer of this website. I have been writing for my entire life - I'm 15 as of 14/12/2015 - and have a particular affinity for English Lit. and Lang.. When I was about 6 I wrote an enormous series of fantasy-action books entitled Wolf Squad, where 6 young adults get superpowers and can grow wolf ears and tails at will. Out of 80 instalments I never finished one.

Currently I am writing a book entitled We Are Gods, set in a dystopia. Six teenagers hold the keys to the world's restoration, but not in their purest forms. To unlock them they must travel around the globe, encountering problems and dangers and risks along the way.

General Storywriting

A good story needs a good plot, and good characters. If the plot is lacking or cheesy, or if the characters are too perfect or too flawed, then the whole story falls flat. There is an art to storywriting, and here's some advice on how to perfect it.

Action Genre

Action often, if not always, goes hand-in-hand with adventure. Now, writing an action novel does not mean you have to assault your main character with a barrage of beastly barriers blocking his path to victory; he has to have a rest some time. Like all other stories, you have to build up to the main problem gradually, perhaps throwing one or two minor difficulties in there for the road.

Fantasy Genre

Fantasy almost always has some sort of unusual, not-seen-everyday stuff here and there. Magic is probably the most popular, what with Harry Potter being so revered as the best magic-based fantasy series. However, if the magic in your story solves everything with a bippety-boppity-boo, it's not very believable. There needs to be some sort of risk to it, like if you use it for too long your nose starts to bleed, but for goodness' sake please don't kill your main character just by using magic unless you explicitly show that it backfired.

Romance Genre

My mother is an esteemed romance author under the name of Christina Hollis. If you've read her books you will know that she likes to get the hero and the heroine together ASAP, because otherwise all you're doing is writing a third-person journal of the heroine. Though this is true for all genres of books with more than one main character, this is particularly important for the romance genre, as you want to get the good stuff down quite early on so that the reader isn't bored of the lovey-dovey gooey-eyed Rapunzel spin-off.