Here’s A List Of Things To Keep In Mind When You Go From Writing As A Passion To Writing As A Profession

There has never been a better time to write fiction. If you were to Google the term “how to write a fantasy novel,” you would come across a horde of results, demonstrating how the once fringe genre has turned into a popular pop culture cohort.

The genre is evolving every day, and what’s more, the public doesn’t seem to get enough of it. So if you’re an aspiring author wondering how to start off your career in professional writing, you’re in the right place.

Here, we will take a look at the top eight tips aspiring writers wanting to go professional should keep in mind before writing their feature piece.

1. Research Potential Book Markets

First things first; writing a book, at the end of the day, and selling it is still a money-making venture. And should you want to be any good, you have to see what the present prevailing writers are doing right.

Give heed to what genres are trending, and what are writers doing to make their work so popular. Are fans falling in love with storylines or complicated characters?

While it is essential that you come up with your unique ideas, digging around for formulas that make others successful will not harm you.

2. Try a Fresh Perspective

The manner in which your story unfolds will have a major influence on how it plays in the mind of the reader. First of all, you ought to determine from what perspective the reader can encounter the plot.

Will the audience experience the story through the eyes of a single character or multiple characters? Will the story be written in the first or third person?

The point of view employed by you will allow you to construct the story according to a timeline you desire while foreshadowing future occurrences in the plot or harken back to an earlier time.

This lets you increase the suspense in the story and surprise the reader from time to time. Deciding the point of view can affect how your story progresses, and hence it’s vital to make this decision early on.

3. Update old fantasy tropes with new details

There’s no rule to say you can’t have familiar creatures and genre tropes in your fantasy series. For instance, the magical world of Harry Potter has a lot of these, such as brooms, cauldrons, robes, wands, etc.

However, what sets these tropes apart is their reimagination. Cauldrons are used by students to learn magical chemistry (the art of potion-making), while robes are a school uniform. Such small details breathe a new lease of life into old fantasy tropes.

4. Plot out your story before you begin

Fantasy genre stories are always complicated and dramatic, and it’s why you should be plotting them all before. This is vital because you wouldn’t want to make a mess of your other storylines or get to the end of the book to find that you have forgotten to tie in the main plot point.

You’re going to know your world a lot better if you plot out your story beforehand. After you have plotted out your story, you can use the structure of the plot to demonstrate how you want to create your universe.

5. Find fantasy in unexpected places.

If you’re writing a fantasy series where your characters travel between parallel worlds, try to find fantasy in unexpected places. Take, Narnia, for example. In the story, the main cast enters the magical world through a wardrobe.

Surrealism in real-world scenarios like this inherently makes your world believable. Narnia’s magical passageway is something as mundane as a daily commodity that exists in most people’s homes.

While it’s outlandish, it’s also hard to fall through the wardrobe into the magical land, and this detail keeps it believable.

5. Keep your story relevant through real-world themes.

Your thoughts about governance, history, ecology, technology, crime, discrimination, misogyny, and numerous real-world problems can be explored in an eye-opening fashion. This way, you can explore these topics from your own viewpoint.

If anything, in particular, is bothering or intriguing you in real-life, you can tie it in and explore it through your story. This will also help with the worldbuilding of your story.

6. Give your world a set of internal rules

In order to make your universe feel true and practical, you also want to make sure it is bound by rules; it could be an underlying rationale. This could include anything from the dynamics of your world to the things that make your world fantastical like magic, technology, or something abstract like “The Force”.

7. Ask questions while worldbuilding.

Your best and most important tool while creating a world is constantly testing and questioning yourself; worldbuilding is thorough and logical.

The reason fantasy is so popular because it feels real despite being inherent fantastical because you can read it as if it’s real. You want your audience to read the novel, recognizing that there are stories and adventures, and a world that resides well within the story they’re actually investing in.

8. Pick a good book and read it.

Read as many “good” books as you can get your hands on. When you read, you not only absorb concepts, but you absorb vocabulary, phrase structure, grammar, prose, and rhythm, and prose.

Reading novels with a structure or plot that you enjoy helps you discover what makes you love them. Besides the novels you love, read classics because they’re named so for a reason. More importantly, read literature that is hugely popular and have won awards.

The more you read and re-read, the more you will begin seeing your own writing get better. Read the novels you appreciate the most to take a particular action.

Thereafter, it’s only a matter of re-reading these books and observing the attributes of their storyline, narration, characters, and the composition of the scene. Learn from the best and then make yourself so.

Conclusion

Making the decision to writing professionally is huge, and one that should be sought with careful planning and deliberation. Writing can transport audiences to faraway lands of fictional realities be it whatever genre they choose.

While the above pointers are by no means an intensive guide, they will serve as the guardrail for you to understand how to write an autobiography or a fantasy novel or a book from any other genre for that matter.