Online Reporter
WHEN writing, you need to understand how you can use personal pronouns, determiners and noun phrases to grab your readers.
The opening of your story must grab the reader’s interest.
If the reader loses interest and stops reading at the end of the first page, it does not matter how good the second page is.
Writers make choices about how much information to reveal to the reader and the ways in which they will reveal it. Here are some suggested questions you may ask when writing the opening of your story.
Personal pronouns (I, you, he, she, we, they) and related determiners (my, your, his, her, our, their) reveal little except the number of characters.
You can use these to withhold information from the reader, making them ask questions like “Who is this person?”
This can engage the reader’s interest by making them want to discover the answers. Another question you can bear in mind is: What do I want my reader to know about the setting for the opening of my story.
Remember, setting refers to the place or area where the story takes place. Is it a rural or urban area? In which country does the story take place?
The setting may not be the most interesting or attention grabbing feature of a story opening. Writers may give the bare minimum of information to point a picture of the setting, leaving the reader to concentrate on the characters or the action.
Better writers know the effect they want their opening to have on the reader.
They achieve this effect by deciding how much information to reveal about the characters, the setting and the action.
In a case of a spy story, there are two elements, which lead to a successful story, that is pace and threat.
The hero is constantly placed in dangerous and threatening situations — and often, as soon as they escape from one dangerous and threatening situation they find themselves in another. Writers use this high level of pace and threat to hold the reader’s attention.
How can I choose language to create a sense of threat? You can create a sense of threat through the details you choose to describe.
But you can increase the sense of threat through the language they use to describe the details. How can you use paragraphs to create pace in my narrative?
There are four reasons to start a new paragraph in your writing. When you change the subject or focus of your story. When you change to a new setting, when you change to a new time and when a different character begins speaking.
Better writers are very aware of the effect they want to have on their reader.
They choose vocabulary such as verbs very carefully to achieve this effect.
Vary the lengths of their paragraphs, using longer paragraphs to convey information and shorter paragraphs for dramatic impact.
There is something called a view point. The question people have is what is the narrative view point? As a writer, you need to understand what is meant by a narrative view point.
Understand the impact that the writer’s choice of narrative view point can have on your writing.
One of the key decisions you must make is about who will you use to tell the story. There are a lot of different ways in which stories can be told — and each one will affect how the reader responds. Make your readers learn about the characters you have in your story.
It was essential to discuss some literary terms, which come in handy in your English Language exercises. You learn about characters in your reading.
You learn facts about their lives, details about their appearance. Learn about their thoughts and their feelings.
Experts advise that before a writer starts writing a story, they must decide who will narrate it — from which point of view the story will be told.
This is called narrative viewpoint.
You ask yourself whether you want everything in your story to be told from one person’s viewpoint.
For example, a story written in first person narrative, you are told everything that happens in the story from the point of view of a character in the story using the pronouns I and we.
Choosing to write in first person narrative means the writer can describe the main character’s thoughts and feelings and point of view directly.
The writer may be more engaged with the story because they feel they are being told the story by someone who was there when it happened.
The writer cannot describe other characters’ thoughts and feelings — the reader must learn about them through the first person narrator, everything the writer wants the reader to see and hear must be seen and heard by the narrator.
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