Plotting is the fun part of the book. It's really not rocket science. I know some of the writers on Wattpad don't really plot books ahead of time, but to me plotting and outlining is really important. It's where you know what exactly you want your characters to be like. Their physical characteristics, traits, personality, what type of clothes they prefer, how they speak, what is their relationship with their parents, do your main protagonist has friends or is he/she a loner?

It's very important to know everything about your main characters, treat them like your best friends. In fact, invite them over for lunch (that's going a little overboard, but I did just that). I invited them for a dinner and we had a nice chat, they did the eating, I did a lot of typing. And then my alarm went off.

It would also be easier if you have a celebrity in mind that you like; you could also copy his/her physical characteristics. Try not to make all the characters in your stories completely brunette, or completely blonde. I think that would confuse the readers. Personalities should also be different.

Planning your ending ahead of time is always helpful, especially for a Mystery/Thriller novel. When I wrote Psycho Billionaire, I already had the ending planned; the same goes for Jack in the Box. It often happens that when you are in the middle of the book, you would want to change your ending and that's completely fine; write an ending that you think is best for your story. Avoid cliché endings, or something that ends with a cliffhanger. Open endings are best if you can do a good job at it. For those who don't know what an open ending is, it's where you leave readers to assume the ending. They can think it's either good or bad.

Writing notes on word or your phone is a good way to start. I'm going to give a short summary example of how I wrote the plot for The Bad Boy & The Mermaid.

I didn't post the entire note because there were some major spoilers that I didn't want to reveal even in an example notes. When I'm at work (my nine hour job), sometimes when I'm jobless at work (jobless at a job, the irony ha ha), I carry a small notebook where I write down points. I'm going to show you some points from my physical book as well, written for my novel The Lunacy Of Tyler Lockhart. Please don't judge my handwriting because it sucks (I know). I just don't do much actual writing ( how funny is that? I'm a writer who doesn't do much writing) I'm more of a typing person.

I wrote this down (sorry if you can't understand my handwriting) so whenever I'm writing the book, I cannot miss any details about my characters. I couldn't share with you the outline of the chapters because there are like HUGE spoilers in them which I would hate to reveal.

Once you have the basics of the characters and outline of the story, you can start brainstorming for the 'MIDDLE' part of the book. It happens a lot of times that you know how the story starts, and you know the ending, but the Middle gets tricky. In that case, you have to sit and think about how you want to make this story so interesting that readers simply cannot put it down. It gets difficult, trust me. I've done a lot of trial and error. Believe it or not, before I started posting on Wattpad, I had over half dozen incomplete books just sitting in my computer BECAUSE I COULDN'T COME UP WITH IDEAS FOR SCENES! When the story wasn't moving forward I abandoned the books midway.

If you want to keep this inspiration, you have to find a story to write that's going to hold your interest.

Write a story that you want to read, literally. For a story to move forward, your protagonist needs a motive, and it's the character's motive that's going to drive them towards your story ending.

If you can't think of the MIDDLE parts when you start out, don't stress because as you write each chapter, the scenes will come to you and if it doesn't then you really need to do a lot of thinking and work on your outline.

Readers have asked me this a lot. HOW DO YOU WRITE SO MANY TWISTS (For my Thriller novels) and I have only answer to it.

I SERIOUSLY HAVE NO IDEA.

LOL. that's a bullshit answer, I know.

But here's the thing. For both Jack in the Box and Psycho Billionaire, I did story outlining before-hand. I didn't have all the details, but for Psycho Billionaire I knew I wanted to write about a handsome Billionaire who had the personality of a devil. I thought of it like a parody to all the cliche billionaire books on wattpad where the female protagonist's fall head over heels in love with the rich guy. That's all I had in mind.

Next, I thought of a way to keep my readers engaged and as I wrote the story I decided to put cliff-hangers at the end of each chapter, that way you keep your readers interested and they come back for more. At that time, I was on wattpad for almost two years and had about 100 something followers and 4,000 reads on my first book Damaged Beyond Repair. We will get to that in the next chapter, i.e how I managed to get from 100 something followers to 31,000 in 5 years.

Coming back to the plotting, it really depends on person to person how exactly you plan the story. I know some writers like to 'Wing it', which means they write anything that comes to their mind, and basically have no idea what the plot is going to be. They write as they go. Personally that doesn't work for me because I need to know where my story is going beforehand, especially for a thriller.

Winging works for Romance and Teen Fiction, but for Mystery and Thriller, you need planning. A murder can't happen without a motive, every single scene in the book should have a relevance. That also goes for the characters. I have seen a lot of stories with tons of characters that I can't remember the name of when I come back to read the book again and that's frustrating.

Keep you characters minimum, give them a backstory, a reason for them to be in the story. Make them relatable. Readers should either love your characters to death, or curse them to die. There's no middle ground.

That's all about the outlining and plotting guys. I hope it wasn't boring or just too much info.

If you have any questions about writing, drop them in the comments, I will either cover them in one of my upcoming chapters or reply in the comments section. You can also suggest topics that you would like to see in this book.

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xx Kash