Bethany Henry: Writing & Wellness

You don’t  need  a map for your book… but what if you want one? 🙂 Some authors and readers love maps and find them to be a favorite part of a story, and if this speaks to you then you’ve come to the right place! Creating our very own maps for a fictional location may seem daunting but really it doesn’t need to be overly complicated. And it can be good to do just for our own sake, even if the map never gets included in the final book! I personally like to create basic hand-drawn maps when writing just to keep myself organized 🙂 We’ll walk through some steps below on how to make a fictional map and then you can find additional resources to check out for further reading. How To Make A Fictional Map 1- Decide What Type Of Map You Want Figuring out what kind of map you want to make is an important first step. Do you want a simple outline of a single town? A traditional and ornate fantasy map of an entire continent? A modern looking map of a city block? Ideally we want the map to ...

We don’t want our characters to get too comfortable as they go about saving the world. They should never be following the plot like it’s as simple as A-B-C , instead there should be complications and struggles along the way. There needs to be doubt, changes, and uncertainties along the way. Basically instead of making it easy for our protagonist, we need to find ways to make it all go wrong. This may be where authors get that reputation for loving to make their characters suffer 😉 Because we don’t want things to be too predictable or boring! In case you’re having some trouble with causing trouble… here are four ways to introduce complications and make things generally harder for our characters. Raising Tension: 4 Ways To Make It All Go Wrong Bad luck Giving our characters too much good luck is contrived and should be avoided, but bad luck (as long as it isn’t too overdone and obvious) can be an excellent method of making life difficult for our protagonists. Maybe they can’t catch a br...

This week I’m guest posting over at Fiction University! I’m talking about  why and how to include mental health issues in our fiction , a topic I think is extremely important. So hop on over to Fiction University when you have three minutes, both to  take a look at my post  (yay!) and also to check out what else is happening at Fiction University! Happy writing, and I hope you’re all well! <3 Originally published June 4, 2021 on Bethany-Henry. com.