Making great fan fiction is sometimes very hard; it takes a lot of imagination and understanding of the character that you are writing about. Even famous authors and fan fiction writers get stuck once in a while.
Before writing you will have to decide what version of Lara you would like to have as the protagonist, this depends on what kind of story you want to make, for example the Angel of Darkness Lara is used for a dark story whereas the TR3 Lara can be used if the story involves a variety of vehicles and locations like in the game. However you can make your own Lara, you can approach this in many different ways.
Now that you have your artifact write out a list of locations Lara might visit. For example if Croft wants to discover a lost island called White Phoenix, she might travel to a museum and see an artefact mentioning it, she could travels to a gallery and she sees it in a painting as the background, or she saw it engraved into a stone wall in Croft Manor. After creating the first location make one or two more that Lara might learn more about the artefact/place, remember not to have the story too complex because readers might get lost. If you are still having problems about the locations write them down on paper and cut them out, fold the over and pick one at random, them make up a story about why Lara went to those locations could it be that she knows someone there or the artifact/painting/stone etc mentions the location?
The next stage for your fan fiction is the competition. Every tomb raider game has one. In Tomb Raider 1 it was Natla, Tomb Raider 2 it was Marco Bartoli. The competitor could be a human or a beast, make up a reason why they want it. It could be for a collection or it could be used as part of a weapon but the reason must be gripping to attract readers and to keep them.
Another thing you may want to consider is Lara’s partner. Croft may need help on her journey, for example in Tomb Raider Chronicles and Legend; Lara needed the help of Zip .
If you are making a Tomb Raider story, I think that the key thing that you will need, is to imagen the characters in the situation you want to have them in. So before writing take five to ten minutes to lie down and to think of the beginning of your story, or go outside and walk around. I found that old concept art that was made and never been used can be a great starting point if you can't imagen the locations.
In your story try not to mumble about the environments to much, but give some detail to the locations without going over the top.
For extra reading visit Katie’s Tomb Raider website for more information on how to plan create and publish your own stories. She is also making a book called “Writing Tomb Raider Stories: A Guide Book by Katie Fleming”, which is going to be a must read when released!
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