START HERE - story telling for beginners

1. Create a story folder on your desktop and name it the title of the new book.
2. Write/type your plot in point form in your word processor/notebook and save it in your new book folder.
3. Write your story points as you think them. Order isn’t important yet and the story will evolve in unexpected ways as it moves forward anyway.
4. Don’t get too complicated yet because detail at this stage will hamper creativity later.
5. Once your plot is recorded, then you can re-organize to get the sequence right. 
6. Having your plot outlined and sequenced, you need a place for the story to happen.
7. Decide on the place and create a subfolder. Call it Location 1. This is where you’ll accumulate important reference information about the location where your story takes place. You need to save the details for later 
8. Whatever the place is, you need to know all about that place. Make a folder for that place and a new page. Describe the location. If the location is in a castle, you need to know a lot about castles. If you don’t your readers who do know about castles will know you have not done your homework and won’t read further in most cases.
9. To get to know about castles, you’ll need to consult books and online resources, take digital tours and study the geography surrounding the castle, house, apartment building, cave. You need to be an expert and know the structure and the terrain in your location because how your characters move through the scenes will depend on you understanding how and why your characters are going to do what you want them to. You have to get this right from the start of each scene so that you don’t find your character in a later scene going through a doorway that wasn’t there earlier.
10. You don’t have to imagine your new world in its entirety but it helps to have a pretty good idea of the geography, the weather, time of day, maybe even the date. You can’t know everything at the outset because the character itself will be finding out the details at the same time you are. But your character has to find out those details in a believable way and exist in a believable place even if that place is a vacuum. Even though you’re writing fantasy, even fantasy has a foundational reality or base from which to grow. You grow your world first by understanding how real things are and work so that you can break the rules and not lose your reader in impossibilities.
11. Plots are growing life forms of their own. They are living worlds within our minds just like when you read someone else’s book and get get so deeply involved that you feel like you’re submerged in it. Only, because it’s your book it’s better and in the writing of it, you start to find out who you really are. Not only do you find out who you really are, but as you craft the story, you literally write your own future and the personality you will become yourself. You can’t write a fantasy novel and not reabsorb the flavour of your own ideas. You write the good, the bad, the ugly and the horrific. You can’t write any of it without becoming for a time, what you’re writing about. That’s the kind of intimacy you achieve as you write. The process teaches you how to deal with people and situations. Those people and situations appear like magic as you develop your storyline. Each of those things push the storyline in different directions that give you choices with options. It’s an amazing process the ordinary person can never experience. It’s a process that unlocks your mind.