You’ve got an idea, perhaps you’ve even got the plot sketched out, and you have a few characters in mind. But how do you create a story that will have readers staying up all late at night wanting just one more chapter?

Here are my three tips on how you can bring more depth and emotion to your plotline and make your story come right off the page: understanding your characters, exploring your own personal journey, and getting inside your settings.

I swear by these.  I hope you find them useful – happy writing!

Who are they? Understanding your characters

Who are these people that you are going to be spending days with, and that you’ll be asking readers to invest in and care about? At the start of your writing process, take the time to really get under their skin.

I work with a character questionnaire I put together that’s about ten pages long. Filling it out for each of my main characters takes a while, but is always time well spent. Sometimes I have a plot in mind and I’m itching to get typing, but making the effort at this stage helps everything go more smoothly and saves so much time in the long run. If you know your characters inside-out, they become like real people and tend to act more consistently, in line with their values and beliefs. This makes everything run more smoothly.

On the first page of this questionnaire go all the characters’ physical details, so that I can keep tabs on those – hair, height, age etc. This is simple enough, but the fun part is that before long these start to trigger more interesting insights and can spark new ideas. If your character has a tattoo, where did she get it done? How old was she? How did her family react? I also use character boards like these, to build up a virtual scrapbook of images: http://pinterest.com/abbycbooks/

Next come other aspects: Is she healthy or not? What does he drink when he goes out? How would he spend a rainy day? Who in her family is she close to? How would he describe himself in a paragraph, and how would a close friend describe him? What is her biggest hope? And his nagging regret?

My favourite question, and the one that generally gives me the key to the story I’m about to write is:

What is the worst thing that could happen to this person?

I’m a big believer in putting your characters through hell in order to get the best out of them.

Which brings me to…

Who are you? Mining your own story

When coming up with storylines and characters, you’ll be taking inspiration from all sorts of things in  the world around you. I’m going to suggest that you start with a story that is truly original, a place that no other writer in the world has access to – your own personal journey. In my view, the key to any good story is emotion. And even in a light, happy story, I’d argue that you have to dip your toe into some difficult issues to keep readers engaged. We’ve all had times in life that have challenged us and one of the amazing things about writing is that these setbacks take on a new form – they become your fuel.

Spend an afternoon thinking back on the journey you’ve been on. Draw a horizontal line with the years along the bottom and chart your experiences as a graph – high points for times where you felt happy and successful and lower ones for the sad or difficult times. The low points might seem relatively minor, like failing a driving test, or teacher telling you your creative writing was no good – or something as serious as a period of illness, heartbreak, or losing a parent. The weight/importance of what happened as someone else might see it doesn’t matter – what does is how that event, at that time, made you feel.

Now think about what got you back up to a higher point on your graph. Was it the support of friends? Did your family help in ways you hadn’t expected? Was it learning a new skill? Voluntary work? Meeting a new partner?

One of the low points on my personal map was losing a job I’d worked hard to get and breaking up with a long-term boyfriend when I was about to turn thirty – it felt pretty rubbish at the time. But before I knew it, I was climbing back up on that little graph. The note I wrote about what helped me get back up says – support from friends, learning to surf, starting to paint again, getting hair highlighted, dancing. This helped shape some aspects of Anna and Imogen’s stories in Vivien’s Heavenly Ice Cream Shop. Understanding what your own challenges have been, remembering exactly how you felt, and looking at how you moved on will make your work much richer and more believable.

Where are you going? Get inside your settings

The internet is an incredible tool for writers, but it can make lazy tourists of us all. In just one click, we can visit any destination we like, walk down the roads on Streetview, read about the food and drinks on blogs and even hear the language. It’s endlessly useful for research and fact checking, but it’s no substitute for the real thing. Your readers will reap the rewards if you go and experience some of the places you write about first.

I saw this week that novelist Emily Barr was in the Arctic researching her new book and I’m so curious about how she will bring those experiences to her readers on the page. Of course not all of us have the budget, or time, or freedom from commitments to jump on a plane – but most of us could take a different bus or walk home. Perhaps get a cheap weekend train ticket to a part of the country that you’ve never visited before. Take a notebook with you when you’re visiting a relative in Cornwall, noting down sights, things overheard, smells and tastes – and voila, your weekend has becoming a research trip!

My key piece of advice here is to spend time alone. Going on holiday and visits with friends and family is great, but when it comes down to writing inspiration, it has to come from you, without the distraction of other people’s ideas and opinions. An hour’s train journey on your tod will give you the space to jot down ideas. When I was researching Vivien’s Heavenly Ice Cream Shop I got on a train to Brighton early in the morning and visited a quiet stretch of beach, taking note of what I saw – fishermen, rollerbladers – and the sights, sounds and smells – salty air, seagulls, doughnuts from the pier. I sketched and took notes. The shop itself is imaginary, of course – but if you’re asking readers to believe that a place exists, with meaningful events happening there, it often helps to anchor it in details from the real world.

Where will your next writing journey take you? I’d love to hear. Good luck!

Abby x