If you’ve done any freewriting now is the time to develop a plot or a theme from those writings. Write down all your ideas for characters, events, and places. On indexcards flesh out your characters, tell about their hair color, eye color, build, education, job, hobbies. The more you know about your actors, the more believable they will be when you write your book.

Select a time frame and location. What do you want to write: mystery, historical, fantasy, or ethnic romance novels? Make that decision and then research the market and write to sell in that market. Study book covers, themes, and plots. What do the best sellers look like? Don’t reinvent the wheel.

In the first few pages of writing you must create intense interest. Book publishers and readers usually will not go much farther than the opening paragraphs. That old phrase,”if only I had known” did it’s job at providing suspense and interest. Can you think of an equally attention getting phrase? Of course you can!

Now, create your main character and endow them with human qualities. No one is perfect and they shouldn’t be either. Let their faults show. Fill out their index card with all the details of a living human being. Perhaps you can base your character on someone you know. Just be careful not to be too blatant writing your descriptions.

All characters must have a reason for being there. They should add something to the story. It may not be significant but they must help move the story along.And allow lots of dialog. Let your characters speak as they would in real life.

The main components to a romance novel are:
Interest = This is the boy/girl thing
Conflict = This is where they butt heads
Resolution = This is where all problems are resolved and they live happily ever after. Yes… give them a happy ending!

To the good part!! You could be at your own very first book signing in just a few months! That is not an outrageous claim. Thousands are doing it right now.

Ender’s Game is a novel by Orson Scott Card. Lauded with both the Hugo and Nebula awards, it tells the story of genius child Andrew “Ender” Wiggin who is reared to be the military savior of humanity. At the tender age of six, he is whisked off to battle school where warfighters tutor him in the lonely job of commanding Earth’s fleet against the alien “buggers” who twice attacked earth. I read Ender’s Game over a weekend. It was an interesting page-turner. While it took its time to get to a point, somehow the journey did not seem tedious. Card’s well woven vignettes of life in a future space based Annapolis for baby geniuses explores the difficulties of growing up by showing ordinary boyhood conflicts backlit by the terror of human extinction.

The author’s premise that a six-year-old could absorb in four years not just the operational aspects of command, but the human nuances of leading people under your command tripped my plausibility alarm. Even a genius needs maturity. This small flaw, though, is only a token criticism of an excellent book. The author barely whispers of faith, but still soulfully contemplates innocents forced inexorably to actions of overwhelming moral implication. Card’s characters’ moral spectrum run from white to ecru. By not resorting to blinding white goodness and inky black evil, the story’s tone is set to look at the great question of the book, “what price may we pay for survival?” These subtle shades better reflect those found in real life. What passes for human villainy are defensible actions, only reprehensible were it not for the plausible fear of destruction by the ruthless “other”.

For me this subtlety of moral conflict is the power of the narrative. Originally published in 1983 (I believe) it reflects the Cold War fear of extinction prevalent then. Our fear was annihilation of both person and freedom, and as we contemplated the former we became unsure if the latter were worth the risk. We knew the alien culture of Communism was incompatible with our bourgeoisie culture of freedom of thought, worship, expression and commerce, but brinkmanship with the fate of the world in balance over ideals invited ambiguity when weighing risks against outcomes.

Today we don’t face the theoretical destruction of millions, but the actual destruction of thousands. Our enemy employs a moral calculus equally alien to us. “Understanding” this alien culture and coming to peace would be preferable to waging war, but the utter incompatibility of the combatant’s mindsets lead to a defensible conclusion that only defeat of one will ensure the survival of the other. Card lays out the question as to how much goodness can be retained when destroying the “other” is the chosen path.