Are you an avid reader of fiction books and wish you could write your own story?

Are you passionate about writing your own novel and getting it publish but don’t know how?

Does the Blank page on your notebook or laptop in front of you scare you to beat?

Are you thinking of applying for a creative writing program in a university abroad but the hassles and expenses of student visa and school intuitions stares you down?

Do you need tutoring of some sort to birth forth the creativity roaring inside of you?

If this is you, you don’t need to worry about these hurdles any longer.

Join the Class for aspiring writers called ‘Naija Writers United’ on whatsapp is now open to all those who are passionate about taking the craft of writing seriously.

You are all invited to taking part in a daily interactive class with other members in teaching, sharing, and encouraging one another and buying and selling the works of members.

And our recommended textbook is ‘Understanding the Mechanics of Fiction writing’

To join the class on whatsapp you’ll need to get a copy of this book (only on this whatsapp number +2347033443215, where each phone number will be added to the NWU group.

The benefits of joining the ‘Naija Writers United’ group on Whatsapp +2347033443215

• Encouraging reading and writing daily

• Studying our textbook ‘Understanding the Mechanics of Fiction writing’

• Motivating members on constant writing exercises

• Sharing different daily writing process and approaches

• Critiquing of members’ works

• Readers Club

• Sharing of inspiring ideas, videos, images, audio materials

• Help build a community of buyers and readers of our works

• Hosting of Workshops where members get to meeting one another

• Making new friends


Understanding the Mechanics of Fiction Writing -Mastering the Craft of Storytelling


A guidebook into the nuts and bolts of writing fiction

‘[b]Understanding the Mechanics of Fiction writing’ is a research work on different teachings, opinions, suggestions, critiques and ideas about the art and craft of writing fiction

Is a well packaged educational book for aspiring writers who’d like to acquire the knowledge to unraveling the intricacies of the writing craft and streamlining their creative energy.

The book is 419 pages long and it contained almost all that is needed to learning the craft of storytelling.
For any one serious about writing fiction or want to take the professional route to a novelist career will benefit immensely from this book as I have.

‘Understanding the Mechanics of Fiction writing’


Teaches you how to: Become a Writer

• Taming the beast call creativity

• Finding the writer in you

• Inventing your writing style

• Finding a narrative voice

• Building words and prose

• Understanding various genres

• Developing a discipline reading and writing habit

‘If a story is in you, it has got to come out.’- William Faulkner

To Write Fiction Books

• Brainstorming on ideas

• Structuring those ideas

• Creating setting, tone and mood

• Developing characters

• Plotting the story

• Editing and polishing

• Reviewing and revising

• Publishing


TABLE OF CONTENT

Part I – For the Love of Writing

Introduction

Can You Teach Creative Writing

On Writing: A Letter to young writer

The Basics of Story Writing

Part of a Story: Introduction, Body, Conclusion

The Writing Rules

Writer’s Toolkit

Creative Toolbox

Writing Fiction (Getting Started)

Hook Your Reader

Practical tricks For Writing Your First Novel

Part II – Welcome to Class (Learning the Practical)

Voice, Style and Point of Views

Finding a Voice

Choosing a Narrative Voice

Don’t Find Your Voice- Use Your Voice

To Boldly Write in the Voice of a Child

Point of Views (POV)

Why Point of View is so Important For Novel Writers

How to Write from the Opposite Gender’s Point of View

Types of POV Narrative Techniques

Advantages and Disadvantages of First Person POV

The Advantages of Third Person Omniscient

How to Write in First Person

Advantages and Disadvantages of Multiple Point of Views

Narration, Description, Plot and Scenes

What are Narrative Strands

Writing Dual Narratives

Narrative Past and Present

Jumping Between Past and Present – The Payoff & Pitfalls

Examples of Narrative in Action

Scene

Plot

Story Structure

Structure Put in Practical Exercise

Settings

How to Design a Fictional Town & City

Character Development

First Rule of Creating Fictional Characters

How to create Authentic and Powerful Character

16 Archetypes to Create Unforgettable Protagonist

How to Create a Character Web to have Unforgettable Cast in Fiction

Examples of Character Profile

Examples of Character Profile (2)

Tips and Tricks For creating Memorable Characters

How to Create Compelling Characters in Fictional writing

How to describe Your Characters (Creating Believable Individuals)

The Importance of a strong Character

8 Ways to Write Better Characters

How to create a Protagonist (Who is different from you)

What is a Minor Character (Understanding the Minor Character’s roles)

How to Write Effective Supporting Character

The Difference Between Character’s Habits and Quirks

Mastering Facial Expressions

Write the Hard Stuff: Facial Expression

The ‘PEPSI’ Formula for creating characters

This is an interesting writing system and it’s called Pepsi.

P-Physical, how they look

E-Emotional, how they emotionally react to certain situations

P-Psychological, how they think

S-Societal, how do they fit in, are they known for anything in particular, are they popular?

I-Interpersonal, the relationships of the character and how they get along.

Dialogue

Rewriting The Rules of Dialogue

Words and Prose

Understanding the Importance of Word Choice

Clothe Characters Well – Choose Words that Fits


Types of Conflicts in stories

Character Conflicts


Writer’s Motivation

How Different Form of Arts Shaped a Writer

The Writing Process

Freedom of Self- Expression in Creative Writing

Make Writing Your Friend

Writing, Practice, Writing

Drafting Tips

Common Openings/Omissions in First Drafts

Editing and Polishing Tip


Reviews Tips

Publishing

Mistakes Writers Must Avoid

Literary Fiction Versus Popular Fiction

On Character Driven or on Plot Driven

Genres

How to Write Thrillers

How to Write Horror Stories

How to Write Comedy

How to write Romance Fiction

Mastering Suspense Writing

Literary Fiction vs Popular Fiction

Part III – Now, The Writer Has Arrive

Extra, Extra Opinions from Writers

List of Writing Terms

List of Books and Literature Programs on Lagos FM Station

Famous Writers Quotes


Famous Quotes

“I am a man, and men are animals who tell stories.
This is a gift from God, who spoke our species into being,
but left the end of our story untold.
That mystery is troubling to us.
How could it be otherwise?

Without the final part, we think, how are we to make sense of all that went before:
which is to say, our lives?

So we make stories of our own,
in fevered and envious imitation of our Maker,
hoping that we'll tell, by chance,
what God left untold.
And finishing our tale,
come to understand why we were born.”

Clive Barker

English Novelist and Author of Sacrament




Part I

For the Love of Writing


What the Nigerian Entertainment industry is lacking

“If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood” – Peter Handke

The Nigeria Entertainment industry is yet to consolidate on her final missing limb. The American entertaining book world, the source of inspiration for many Hollywood’s masterpiece, is a billion dollars industry providing jobs and opportunities for many across board.

Just like the revolution that have exploded the Nigerian music and film industries onto the global scene, we believe a convergence of fiction writers, editors, readers, critics, publishers, and booksellers into a strong unit will birth a new beginning for a sleeping industry that could provide jobs for Nigerians in the book world.

It’s time Nigerian novelists plug in the last limb into the entertaining industry with our very own blockbuster thrillers, comedy, romance, horror, adventure, drama stories…etc

Let The Revolution Begin!!!


Extract


Introduction

The Big Question - Writers Ask Writers: Why do we write?

Why we pursue writing in the first place.

I feel the compulsion to write all the time, but explaining why or where that comes from feel like explaining why I walk on my feet and not my hands. So here are a few reasons I could come up with, and then I will pass you over to my fellow writers

1. To Understand and Preserve My Own Experiences

When I started writing, as many writers do, I kept a journal. Writing was a way to commandeer my own experience as a young man: to try to condense and understand all the things I wanted for my life. When I began, my life didn’t feel very interesting, but I wrote small things down because I wanted to preserve them, like pressed flowers long-forgotten, so that one day, my future self might look back on them and understand how I had changed (or remained the same).

2. To Experience a Life Other Than Mine
I don’t remember precisely the first time I sat down to write fiction. I remember the result: a cliched novel about a Math professor and an artistic dreamer who fall in love. It was inspired by a Keats poem, and explored the clash between the arts and the sciences and whether they can ever be compatible.

The thing I do remember is the joy of being lost in another person’s head. Writing offers you the chance to imagine a life wildly different to your own, and being a dreamy teenager at the time, any life seemed more interesting than my mish-mash of school and home. It also gives an outlet for that overactive part of your mind, which if left to its own devices can become destructive rather than creative. If that latent imaginative energy is trained on my own life, I find that I overanalyze aspects of my life and make myself unhappy. There is a sense of relief in directing that energy towards creating a life for my characters.

3. To Understand Others
I have always been an observer. I like to take stock of my environment and the people I meet. I have always been a big reader as books offer an insight into other people that you rarely get from talking to them. People have so many defenses, even against themselves, and fiction is one of the only things I know of that gets beyond them, showing a person’s true motivations (even if they’re not real!). When writing my personal statement to get into universities, I remember trying to articulate this as a reason why I wanted to study English Literature. Reading obviously is a huge part of the job of a writer, and I began writing partly because I wanted to get under the skin of character and recreate this experience for someone else.

4. To Challenge Myself
During the transition from the gawky teenager writing angst in her diary, to the person who writes novels, a remarkable thing happened. I found an immense satisfaction in setting myself the challenge of imagining I was someone far removed from my own experience and seeing if I can achieve it successfully. With my first book, it was Marta, who depending on your interpretation is either deeply traumatized by an experience she has had, or is suffering from a mental illness. With my new book, it is Rook, a photographer who is looking back over his experience covering the Vietnam War. When I begin, I know very little, and the joy of writing for me is in researching to build up a picture of the setting, character, place and time, and then trying to keep all these aspects balanced with the plot, or what actually happens in my story.

5. For the Lifestyle
The final reason why I write is because I love to work for myself: to choose what I pursue and set my own workload. I can be a hard task-master, and sometimes it feels like I have homework all the time. But the flexibility of working from home, of being able to travel, and of feeling free are worth the somewhat stringent boss I can be to myself. Even when I was younger, I idealized this lifestyle and freedom, and it was this that attracted me to the writing life. I knew enough from reading about other writers that it was rare to become rich through pursuing this aim, and all I want for myself is that it is a sustainable career so that I can continue to work at it.

I would be lying if I denied that part of the reason I wanted to be a writer was to be published. I dreamt of seeing my book in a book shop, of holding it in my hands. It wasn’t my main motivation, but it something I held like a freshly laid egg, warm and perfect in my hands, while struggling through How To Be A Good Wife. And all the things that came after it happened were as wonderful as I had hoped they would be.
It does happen. First novels are bought for extraordinary sums; effective marketing gets the book into readers’ hands, readers respond to it and (cue sparkle of stars) that’s a career. The day job’s given up, you travel, you have that which is more prized than either – time to write.

It’s a story with all the magic of the lottery. It could be you. It gets you through sweeping out the fireplace, anyway. And because life is composed of rather more fireplace sweeping than most people like, fairy tales assume a greater portion of our thoughts than is healthy.
We lap them up and are supplied with more. But the supply of fairy godmothers - and indeed of princes – is a limited one, and real life fairy tales are rarely cut from whole cloth.

There will be days of clear and glorious and full of flowers, and times when you can’t see the path. But whether, as a writer, you’re aspiring, published its same path.

On the Importance of Reading

We all start out as readers before we begin to write — even non-writers. But continuing to read is more important to writers than to anyone else on the planet. You must read. And these writers tell you why.

If you don’t have the time to read, you don’t have the time or the tools to write. – Stephen King

If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful. I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting. I wake early and hear my morning voices leaping around in my head like jumping beans. I get out of bed to trap them before they escape. Ray Bradbury

I really think that reading is just as important as writing when you’re trying to be a writer. Because it’s the only apprenticeship we have, it’s the only way of learning how to write a story. John Green

The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading, in order to write; a man will turn over half a library to make one book. Samuel Johnson

Reading usually precedes writing and the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer. Susan Sontag

You are what you read. Esko Valtaoja


‘Can you teach Creative Writing?’

There have been and will continue to be well-publicized arguments about whether something so individual can or should be taught. The answer, though, should depend on what we mean by “taught”. Creative ability can’t be learned by rote, or recited like a times table. However, good habits and stimulus from a good teacher will provide an introduction to key techniques that encourage the student to move forward towards their own discoveries.

‘Can you learn Creative Writing?’

You can always become more fluent in your own voice. If you are a writer, at any stage in your career, you should never stop learning. The longer and more successful the career the more true that is, so if you’re a relative beginner you have no excuse not to be learning creative writing.

OBSERVE the world around you.

Like Sherlock Holmes in his deductions, you get more out of making no assumptions than trying to blend the world to fit your expectations or hopes. Everything is observation, from self-knowledge and emotional intelligence to describing a physical horizon or emotional landscape. Your notebook will keep what your brain cannot. The only kind of immortality in our grasp is ideas.
Perception drives reality. So pay attention.