Three Tips to Make Your Story Come Off the Page

I just finished the third chapter of my novel, and my heart is racing.

The main character took over my mind.

It was as if I was writing as HER.

(Btw, if you’ve read the book Speak, you’ll understand exactly what I mean.)

Part of this surreal moment for me as an aspiring novelist is because the scene I was writing about was relatable.

The other part, though, was because I allowed myself to settle into the story and feel my character come off the page.

This is how I achieved this feeling.

(Not giving advice, just sharing my experience. These tips are probably things that authors already know. I just didn’t know them and decided to write about them.)

I Allowed My Intuition to Guide Me

I’m writing the rough draft of my novel with a view to my intuition not the quality of my work. (The quality will come later.)

I believe that innate to each of us is a powerful intuition, instinct, and/or internal voice that guides us. It gives direction, and as I write my own book, I can feel it steering me as I go. It’ll say things like:

Keep going. Make a note here. Highlight this sentence. Come back to this later. Add this detail. Drop this clue. Change this detail later.

I follow its direction keep going with the story. (In the video, you’ll see spots where I’ve made notes to come out to later as an example.)

I’ve Settled Into The Story

The hardest part for me has been settling into the story. It’s taken a lot of painstaking effort to get to know my characters and develop a story that’s unique to them, but I haven’t given up. Once I had my outline written, I was more clearly able to see the story’s potential and direction.

Also, I have read several books in the past few weeks, and they’ve taught me so much about what I want in a story and what I don’t. This has really helped me shape my own identity as an author and settle into my book.

I Make the Story Feel and Look Like a Book

This is going to sound pretty crazy, but I had a trial version of the book formatting software Vellum a while back, and when I wrote in it to try it out I remember thinking, “Wow. This already feels like a book.”

So, I idea came to me that if I made the pages of my word document or google doc feel like a book, it would stimulate my creativity. As a child, I’ve always written in journals, which essentially are just unwritten books, so I was kicking myself for not realizing this sooner.

Now, when I go to write in google docs, I format the pages to look and feel like the pages of a digital book.

— Knikki Hernandez

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