GetDown to Writing Tip No. 4

Now that you've got your characters, their names and what makes them tick all sorted and you know how the story is going to develop, it's time to take the plunge and start writing.

Where to start? Every author starting off a story has sat down to a blank page. The good news is that you can start at the beginning, in the middle or do the ending first. What you have to do is to make the story interesting to your readers.
If you area a seat-of-the-pants writer, you'll write a couple of pages to start off the story : Red Riding Hood walking through the woods on her way to her grandmother's. Sounds pretty dull, doesn't it?  What if she feels she's being followed? Or she hasn't heard from her grandmother in a while, which is uncharacteristic. There's a rustling in the bushes, last summer's leaves crackle underfoot, a bird calls in the distance signalling that it has been disturbed by something. Now you're on the way to getting a bit of tension.
If you are a planner, then you will have outlined your chapters, so now you have to write what you planned. The same applies as for the seat-of-the-pants writer. You have to draw in your readers and make them wonder what is going to happen next.
More importantly, you have to make them care enough about Red Riding Hood to want to know how things work out.  I have read or tried reading to be more exact, stories with excellent plots but where the main character was so lifeless that I couldn't have cared less what happened to them.
Develop your characters, this is vitally important.  You can fudge the plot any way you like, but characters are what drives the engine.
So now you have written the first three pages or so. Tomorrow you may look at these and clap a hand to your forehead: what was I thinking?  Don't worry, this is all part of the process. Every writer worth their salt has to delete, change, add to everything they write. This gets easier as you go along, by the way.
So, off you go. Write and then write some more. Don't look back, you can change just about anything. You might find half way through Chapter Ten that another character steps out of the shadows, one that you hadn't actually planned on. This happened to me while writing my Christmas novella (Christmas at Castledarra available on Amazon around the middle of October) and I had to re-write chunks of the story.
The golden rule is that the story can be anything you want it to be. Give it your best, always. And enjoy every minute of its creation.
In my final tip on writing I will discuss getting published.