Star Wars Writing Tips and Tricks.

Story Pacing.

This is honestly quite difficult.

Readers on Wattpad often only have a short amount of time for stories on here, typically reading them on the fly as they commute to and from work/school, during work/school breaks and during their own time at home. People want to get to the point quickly, but not so quickly that the whole story is over in three chapters and they can't even remember why they picked up the book in the first place.

People won't read shoddy work that they have to sit there and decipher for 10 minutes before they can string a single sentence together. They will move on to easier to read and comprehend works. The same for books that are too descriptive and too detailed. Most younger writers on here suffer from generic and short descriptors rather than being long-winded like older, slightly more experienced authors.

Story pacing refers to the rate of movement that a story has. Romances will typically be slower to develop and begin, whereas thrillers and action-adventure stories will tend to be faster paced to keep their respective audiences engaged with their content.

The typical sequence of a story includes action-packed beginning, slower backstory, tightening tension (can be more than one), action-packed climax and finally the resolution of the story's themes and plot points that tie up all loose ends. Unless it is being expanded into a series, in which case the ending can remain slightly open-ended.

This sequence is a guideline and ideas, thoughts, writing styles and abilities change over time and, as such, no strict rule/s on how to write a story is set in stone. Everyone has their own method/s of creating works to be published, and some styles work better for some genres than others.

Starting with the slow backstory is one way to turn readers away from your story. The beginning needs to hook in the potential reader, not convince them to leave before they even get to the story proper.

I recently watched a TV series called 'Terra Nova'. I loved it, I mean dinosaurs! (even if they looked a little weird...). This is the trailer.

The opening 30 seconds of the first episode explain the time setting and gives the reason for the show existing in the first place; the planet, so destroyed that breathing masks are required when outside habitation suites, is slowly killing the remaining population.

This backstory is further developed throughout the series, but the few lines shown on the screen before the first scene proper gives us the basic premise we need to understand the show and the direction it will be heading in.

It is followed by an action-packed beginning that tells us that overpopulation is a major problem in this version of Earth and each family is limited to two children, a boy and a girl, though our titular family, the Shannon's, have three, a son and two daughters which is the cause of the conflict and action-packed beginning of the show.

I quite enjoyed this show and really wish that it'd been picked up for a 2nd season, but this is just one example of a good introduction and action-packed beginning of a show before moving into the development of the characters and plot to go along with it.

This also works well for books, with the blurb acting as the few lines on the screen at the beginning of the first episode of Terra Nova. It gives just enough information to be understood and engaging to the audience as well as potentially hook them in to reader the rest of the novel.

For books, chapter lengths are another part of how a story's pace is affected.

I've usually seen the recommended chapter length in multiple books say that each chapter should be between 1,000-3,000 words in length before you publish. Wattpad will even ask you if you want to add more if your chapter takes less than a minute to read and is under 200 words.

If you are writing for an audience to quickly skim read through each chapter, then I'd say you want to aim for the lower range of the recommended word count, going for ~500-1,000 words per chapter. If you're writing to deeply engage your audience, then I'd suggest aiming for 3,000-4,500 words. Chapters over 5,000 words tend to detract readers who feel that it's too long or getting too long. Plus, a 5,500 word story on an iPod is ~50-55 pages long, ~48 pages on an iPhone and ~40-45 pages on an iPad.

Be warned that, at least for me, I look at how many chapters there are on the basis of whether or not I will read a story. I also take in to account whether it's completed, how long each chapter is (usually from gauging ch. 1-3), what its tags are, the cover and the description before committing my time to a story, no matter how genius the author may think that they are.

The first bite is always with the eye.

Next, we delve into common character archetypes that are frequently expressed in Star Wars stories.

Feedback is greatly appreciated, and further topic suggestions are always open!