Learn how to write stories that are compelling, well-paced and emotionally resonant with award-winning author Tessa Afshar.

Know your reader

This starts with a basic but crucial question: Who are you writing to?

• Faith: There is a very big difference between Christian and non-Christian audiences. As one literary agent noted, a writer who claims their novel can “speak equally to Christians and non-Christians alike” suggests they don’t know their readers.
• Beyond faith, you need to understand your readership fully: Are they women? Are they young? Are they older? What genres do they love? (e.g., historical fiction, romance)

You must know your readers before you start writing in order to create the right story for them.

How to start

The best way to learn how to write is to keep writing. And the second best way is to keep reading.

Whenever you tell a story—whether it’s a long story, or just a short narrative in the context of a non-fiction book—you’re going to tell two things besides your story.

World-building and backstory

You’re going to talk about the world in which the story occurs. For me, as a historical fiction writer, this is really important, because most of my readers will never have known that world, they will not have entered it. I have to create a world from scratch. As they’re reading a story, they feel like they are now inhabiting that world, they’re there.

You may be writing a contemporary story. Let’s say you live in Africa, and you want to tell a story about someone in a village. One of your readers is going to be someone who lives in a city, was born in a city, and that’s all they know. So you have to create that world of the village life for them in such a way that they can enter it and they can feel, “this is a world that I get, this is a world I connect with.”

So you have to build a world, besides telling a story.

To write compelling stories, you must also reveal the history or the backstory of your main hero, because that backstory is going to inform the story in some way.

The temptation to info-dump

That’s a lot of information: what your world looks like and what the history of your hero is.

As new writers, your biggest temptation will be to try and dump all of that information upfront and try to tell everybody what everything looks like, what went on before, then start your story.

That’s a big mistake, because those are facts that are going to bog down your readers.

The best thing you can do is actually save those things. Only every once in a while, give a thread, a little glimpse of backstory. Give a little bit of what that world looks like. Be very judicious in the use and in the release of that information.

This is also true for the short stories that you tell in the context of a non-fiction book.

For example, in my Bible study, I wanted to tell a story about my mom making a dress. She worked in the fashion industry at the time and she didn’t know who it was for. Later on, she saw Princess Diana wearing the dress.

I had to make a decision: Do I tell my readers about the fact that my mom went to school for this? How did she end up in this industry? Did I tell all of that?

And I decided no, I wouldn’t. I wanted the story to begin just with her working in fashion. I’m giving a little bit of backstory, but not too much, because I wanted to focus on the story itself, so that the readers would have an emotional experience.

At the end, it’s the point of the story that matters. The point of the story was that sometimes in life, God will give you something to do that has a profound effect—and you don’t know it at the time that you’re doing it.

Starting the story

The starting point of your story is really important. Where does your story actually begin? And what is the backstory? Many new writers of novels have about 20-30 pages at the beginning of their book that shouldn’t be there.

One example is my book, Land of Silence, about the woman with the issue of blood, the woman who bled for 12 years before she touched the hem of Jesus’ garment and was healed. And in that moment, Jesus looks at her and calls her daughter, daughter, your faith has healed you. It’s the only place in the Gospels where Jesus calls someone personally daughter.

So that was the question: Why does Jesus decide to call her daughter, to delay a very urgent situation in order to impart this knowledge to her, that he fathers her? The story begins with the moment when she stopped being a daughter, and why she needs to hear that she is a daughter.

That is the first part in terms of the technical: the starting point of your story, and also revealing your world, building your world and revealing the backstory in a judicious way.

Anything else that happens before that point—that’s your backstory, and you have to give it to your readers very carefully.

Pacing

Pacing is the speed at which your story unravels. You want the pace to be tight and steady to hold the reader’s attention. Modern readers expect to be hooked within seconds. They need to know by the second or third sentence what’s going on that will capture their curiosity and interest.

You can manage your pacing through several technical means:

• Cull unnecessary words. Use strong verbs, and limit adjectives and adverbs. E.g. Instead of using the weak verb “woke up,” change the sentence to use a stronger action word, like “The noise startled her awake.”
• Choose words carefully. If your language lacks a single strong word (like “plod” for walking slow), you might have to use an adverb, but whenever possible, use a better, single word.
• Use dialogue to speed up your writing
  • Ensure the dialogue is true to the character and their time/setting
  • Use humor and irony
  • Don’t repeat the character’s name constantly, as it clogs the writing and is unnatural
• Show action. (You must always do some telling, and be careful about what you choose to show.)

Creating tension

Tension is what keeps a reader’s attention from the beginning and throughout your story:

• Establish a situation of anxiety or danger. This can be an external danger (life-threatening, prison) or an internal danger (shame, embarrassment, disappointment, being left alone).
• Create stress by raising questions that your reader wants answered. g. Starting a book with “on my 12th birthday, my father discovered that I could read” instantly creates curiosity: Why didn’t he know? Is reading forbidden?

A hero to care for

For the storyline to capture a reader’s heart, they must care about your hero.

• You must write a hero who hooks curiosity from the beginning. By the end of the second page, the reader should like the hero and be invested in their life.
• Make your hero imperfect, but likable. Perfect heroes are annoying and difficult to relate to. The reader must emotionally connect with them, either by relating to their feelings or by feeling compassion for them.
• You can start with a less sympathetic hero, but you must masterfully build sympathy by revealing why the hero is flawed and then show their transformation.

Starting a captivating plot

A captivating plot is the external set of circumstances happening in the hero’s world that correlate with the hero’s internal life. This correlation is vital. If you write a scene that’s fun but doesn’t drive the story forward or affect the hero’s internal world, it’s useless and should be cut out. External circumstances must be emotionally anchored to your hero’s inner world for the story to progress and for the inner issue to resolve.

The plot begins when an initial event in the external world changes the hero’s life completely.

• The hero begins with a wound or brokenness. By the end of the book, the reader wants a resolution to that internal issue.
• This initial event sets the hero on a quest—either an inner journey or an external one.
• If the quest is external, it must hook into the internal world of the heroine. It deals with a deeper wound—in this case, a father wound and an identity wound.
• The journey isn’t just about the external search; it’s about the hero looking at herself in the mirror and seeing her brokenness.

Your plot must establish a motive that holds and is believable.

The external event that sets your hero on their journey must be believable and give them a motive that resonates with the reader. This motive is the engine behind the story.

Sustaining the plot

The initial hook is usually not enough to carry your story through a full-length book. You will need more things to sustain the plot:

• Introduce a new hook that results from the first circumstance.
• Make the original circumstance suddenly gain more importance.

You must up the ante behind the story. Your reader has to believe the hero’s motives justify their intense actions. You must give your story the appropriate motive that holds your plotline together.

When I first planned Jewel of the Nile, I initially wanted the heroine to go to Rome because she wanted to be an architect. My editor pointed out that this wasn’t universal enough. I changed the motive: the heroine did not know the identity of her father, and that became the central motive. Why this change? An absent father is a relatable issue that speaks to a wide audience.

Bring your novel to a resolution that is satisfying for your reader. Spend enough time to satisfyingly complete every thread. Don’t leave any loose thread hanging that would make a reader wonder, “What happened to so-and-so?” Give them a satisfying resolution.

An emotionally satisfying story creates an opportunity for healing

As writers, you have an incredible opportunity because studies show that stories literally change people’s brains.

Many people struggle to cope with their emotions—many don’t understand their feelings (e.g., expressing fear as anger), or have never been taught to identify, share, validate, comfort, or resolve their emotions. When you write an emotionally satisfying story, you give your readers all of these things, potentially offering some healing by the end of the book.

For instance, in my novel Pearl in the Sand (based on Rahab’s story), I posited that Rahab’s father sold her into prostitution out of helpless desperation. Rahab held this against him. By the end, I had to show forgiveness even though the father never apologized. He emotionally couldn’t accept what he’d done. Rahab had to forgive him without receiving an apology.

Readers found this deeply moving and healing. I was able to validate people who struggled to forgive, helping them realize, “I’m not the only one.” As the character Rahab achieved forgiveness, readers experienced forgiveness in their brains as if they had physically gone through it themselves.

That is how powerful a story can be in a life. The Lord has poured into you a very powerful calling as a storyteller.

Do you have any tools or strategies you use to plan out a plot?

I start with a central concept—either a character that’s really captivated me or a basic concept. I like to know where she’s broken from the beginning. What’s the backstory that’s caused this brokenness? What do I want resolved by the end? What are the things that are going to happen during that? That’s a big strategy for me—to know the beginning, the end, the brokenness, and that hook.

How to end a story satisfactorily—what do you mean? When is ending a satisfactory ending?

This is where you have to know your readers. The satisfactory part is that the heart of your hero has changed. There’s been some kind of a turning point, and your hero has now experienced an internal transformation. You want the satisfaction of that transformation, and that transformation has to come in a way that really makes sense.

How much time do you devote to research?

I spend quite a lot of time because in my genre, I have to not only know the world, I also have to know what the Bible says about this story. I spend quite a few months on it, but at some point, you have to start the story. Once in my own head, I feel like I have a certain amount of knowledge that the world is real, I start writing. And then during the writing, I will still do research.

Is it enough to know that just that my reader is a Christian or is it better to say my reader believes she knows the Bible but has not truly experienced it…?

I think in terms of like the publishing world, you are being very specific in terms of what, where is my reader at? Non-Christians do not want to read a book that talks about faith, religion, God. So you have to come at it much more subtly. In my world, the dichotomy is clear. Christian or non-Christian. We don’t have a dichotomy for nominal Christian.

In your experience, how much do you guide the characters, and how much do they surprise you?

I think I would say 50-50. I do guide them to a certain extent. And then there are times when I want them to do something, and they just plumb refuse. So sometimes the characters know their mind better than I do, and I just can’t make them do something. And sometimes they come up with an idea that I wasn’t planning for them to come up with, and they’re just very strong-minded.

Do any of the principles vary for writing memoirs or biographies?

I’ve never written a memoir or a biography, ut a lot of the principles that I gave you here also works for a biography. You still have to have that hook. You still have to know the beginning of your story, and you still have to know how much of the world to give them. You still have to be very careful with the kinds of words that you’re using. So a lot of it applies.

Do you think in trying to bring out our thoughts into our writing as Christian writers, we could lose biblical truth?

I think if you’re talking about fiction, this is an amazing opportunity to bring the Bible alive, to make the Bible relevant for people, and uphold the principles of the Bible.

Is it acceptable to write a novel in which the bad guys win and the good guys lose?

Sadly, the Bible has moments like that. That’s what the captivity is all about. If you leave your book at the end of that, there’s a lesson to it—and the lesson is, you can’t keep doing the wrong thing and expect to have a good end. You could have a good lesson in that sense.

Does it have to be always a happy ending? What if the hero loses or has a sad ending?

Absolutely, it doesn’t have to have a happy ending. A happy ending in the sense that we know where they are going, and they die without doubt; unhappy endings can have very happy endings, if that makes sense.

About Tessa

Tessa Afshar is the Publishers Weekly best-selling author of historical and biblical fiction. Her novels have won a number of awards, including the Christy and the INSPY. Her non-fiction, The Way Home: God’s Invitation to New Beginnings, based on the book of Ruth, won ECPA’s Christian Book Award in the Bible study Category, 2021.

Tessa was born to a nominally Muslim family in the Middle East and lived there for the first fourteen years of her life. She then moved to England, where she survived boarding school for girls, before immigrating to the United States. Her conversion to Christianity in her twenties changed the course of Tessa’s life forever. She holds a Master of Divinity from Yale University, where she was elected to serve as co-chair of the Evangelical Fellowship at the Divinity School for one year.

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