Fiction Writing Prompts for New Authors

By Mircea Ungureanu

I'm picturing you as a fairly new author. Maybe you've published in the past, maybe not. It's possible that you've written a great deal or perhaps writing is something that you've aspired to do but never really gotten into. It's even possible that you're one of the masters in the field and you're looking for an idea to turn into the next best-seller. Wherever you are, that's great, we can always use more books. For every book that you see published, even if it didn't appeal to you, there are people who felt that the book spoke to them; helped them sort through their lives and let them think more deeply about what was possible. Fiction Writing Prompts for New Authors lists some themes from Fiction, Science Fiction, Gothic Horror and Cosmic Horror among others and explores some plots for each as well as some suggestions on how these plots should best be used.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mircea Ungureanu
• Release date: Jul 9, 2016
• ISBN: 9781310672569

Mircea Ungureanu

I'm a new author who noticed that there weren't enough books on the fiddly parts of computer programming as well as the interesting but obscure parts of the internet in general. Things that haven't become popular or interesting enough to attract a multimillion dollar book deal but still waste hours of each programmer's time as they track down individual problems while slowly getting up to speed. I'm writing simple books to bring people up to speed faster and without all that pointless time wasting.

Book preview

Introduction

I'm picturing you as a fairly new author. Maybe you've published in the past, maybe not. It's possible that you've written a great deal or perhaps writing is something that you've aspired to do but never really gotten into. It's even possible that you're one of the masters in the field and you're looking for an idea to turn into the next best-seller. Wherever you are, that's great, we can always use more books. For every book that you see published, even if it didn't appeal to you, there are people who felt that the book spoke to them; helped them sort through their lives and let them think more deeply about what was possible. Fiction is important not just because it takes people away from their lives when they are upset or bored and need a distraction, but because it helps people consider old things in different ways, many social and scientific ideas were sparked in some way by what their creator read when they were young, that's what set their mind in motion to create.

It doesn't matter what stage you are in your writing career, because writing is a skill that anyone can develop through practice. What's important is to write and keep writing, reviewing where things didn't go well and doing them differently while keeping the themes that worked. The one thing that ties all writers together is their love of their craft.

Sometimes however a writer gets stuck. Maybe they have a few ideas, but none of them really get the imagination going like they wanted. What they need then is a push. This book is intended to be that push, a collection of writing prompts sorted by theme. Of course even with a push, writing won't always be fun and the other unspoken thing that ties all writers together is a willingness to power through even when they don't feel like it and edit it after. The first thing is to get the words down on paper. You can always edit those words later or even cut them completely if you want to take the story in a different direction; but the stories that appear perfect and fully formed on the page are few and far between. This book is hopefully going to make some parts of this process easier, but the elbow grease is all your own.

That being said it's my hope that these ideas will inspire you to write.

The Themes

Don't feel that the themes are a hard guideline to what you can and cannot write, if you think of something that crosses boundaries between multiple themes then that's even better. However for all authors it's worth remembering that themes exist for a reason and each of them is a reflection of a specific part of the human condition. The reason that various themes sell better in specific periods of history is because that's when the world drives the principles that those themes represent to the forefront of people's minds.

Some of the readers may not be aware, but in the late 19th (1800 to 1900) century there was a booming trade in fiction novels that discussed a hypothetical war between the great powers. Things like France and the UK going at it in a full scale war. This may seem an improbable topic for us in the current market situation, looking back with the benefit of hindsight, but it was something that sold so well and was written so often that it was worth placing into its own category. It would be too sarcastic to say something like of course it would seem unrealistic, the idea of such a war would only be complete science fiction given what would happen in the next few years. In fact as authors we can learn a lot from reading the fiction and science fiction (yes it really existed, the first real Science-Fiction book as we would normally think of the term would probably have been Somnium published in 1634) of the 19th and early 20th century.

Much like art and any other creative industry, you can ignore the old standbys if you want, but you need to remember why they became standbys in the first place.

I've also made an effort to expand on most of the ideas with a side commentary about how they should best be used. Don't feel constrained to go with my suggestions of course, but various plots do lend themselves to going in specific directions. Because of that I've attempted to insure that there are also clear suggested next-steps for any story ideas that appear to benefit from them.

Originality

You might be willing to ditch an idea because something similar has already been done. Don't. At last count there are over a million Kindle eBooks published on Amazon in English alone, not counting physical books. It is almost guaranteed that someone else has already written something very similar to what you're going to write. Don't be discouraged and write your story anyway. You're going to have your own take on the subject which may be better (or worse), but you're not going to