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.

Reading glamorous success stories can be so attractive and addictive. We look at brilliant musicians and say we wish we were gifted like that. We admire great art and lament we aren’t artistic. We read books, view sculptures, gawk at inventions, and marvel at math… and we think we could never do that. We think this brilliance and beauty somehow comes easily. That writers are magically born writers and the stories just burst forward effortlessly. That musicians and engineers and painters are gifted with something that makes their work simple and always free from trouble. We don’t want to think about the work that may be involved. Yeah, that’s right. It’s work. We’d like to ignore the non-glamorous parts and just think of the overnight successes, the prodigies, and the finished products. Yet most of writing is work that starts off messy. Most of it happens little by little, day by day. Even breakout success stories started somewhere. (Spoiler: it probably included a lot of work.) If we e...

If you’ve ever read much YA fiction you’ll notice that it’s pretty common for parents to be either dead or absent. There are a few contributing factors for this, but essentially it’s because in YA fiction, parents are a problem that writers need to somehow solve. The Parent Problem: The Parents Can’t Be In Control This is probably the number one parent problem in YA fiction: If the parents are present and in charge, that means that the teenage protagonist isn’t. And our protagonist needs to be the hero of the story. Alive and present parents are an issue for our stories because they could put a stop to our hero’s adventures (aka: no you can’t do that saving-the-world thing because it’s dangerous) or by taking the role of the hero themselves (aka: they are the more skilled and logical choice to fight the bad guy). Parents can also represent too much of a safety net, through which the hero knows they are never really in danger because their parents can always swoop in to save the day. We...

Let’s travel together by taking a look at some beautiful libraries and bookstores around the world! Yes, I want to visit every single one of these 🙂 Beautiful Libraries and Bookstores Around The World Prague Library, Czech Republic Image by  izoca  from  Pixabay George Peabody Library, Baltimore, Maryland, USA Image by  Falkenpost  from  Pixabay Xidan North Street, Xicheng District, Beijing, China Photo by  Chengting Xie  on  Unsplash Trinity College Library, Dublin, Ireland Image by  Rudy and Peter Skitterians  from  Pixabay Livraria Lello Bookstore, Porto, Portugal Photo by  Ivo Rainha  on  Unsplash Stuttgart City Library, Germany Photo by  Amelie & Niklas Ohlrogge  on  Unsplash Bookshop in Gurney Paragon, Penang, Malaysia Photo by  Geraldine Ng  on  Unsplash Seattle Public Library, Washington, USA Photo by  Sylvia Yang  on  Unsplash Library of the Theological F...

Today I’m outlining a case for making bad art and why that’s so important. Now I can be kind of a perfectionist by nature so this goes a bit against the grain- if you’re a perfectionist as well, just hang in there with me! It may seem silly to make bad art on purpose, but there are several reasons why is not only unavoidable but should sometimes even be encouraged. A Case For Making Bad Art 1- Bad Art Is Necessary We won’t make great (or even good!) art on our first try every time. It’s just not accurate to expect that of ourselves, even if we’ve been honing our craft for years and years. This means that as long as we are creating things, some of our art  will  be less than good. We don’t want this bad art to paralyze us, though! It’s simply a natural part of the creative process. We can all be perfectionists at times and it’s important we don’t let the fear of bad art stop us. Intentionally creating bad art can be excellent practice in letting go of perfectionist standards. 2...