Posts tagged how to write

Here is why just because a famous author goes against commonly-held advice, you shouldn’t, too. Pick and choose which reasons suit your author.

1. They knew what they were doing. Instead of going against good advice just because they wanted to, they went against it because going against it suited their story in a specific, tangible way that balanced the drawbacks.

2. They came from a time period before people realized the advice was good.

3. They had so many great things in their writing that their flaws seemed minor by comparison. Had they followed the advice, however, their writing would still have improved.

4. They were trying something completely new and the good things and bad things about writing that new idea hadn’t yet been sorted out.

1.  ”I need my free time.”

A) Your writing time *is* your free time. B) Yes, but you’re probably giving yourself more free time than you really need.

2. “I can’t write 24/7.”

Yeah, but you can probably write more than your current hours to days of the week ratio.

3. “I need to check my Tumblr just one more time.”

Save that as a reward for when you get a high enough word count.

4. “I have to keep up with my social life by texting and e-mailing instead of writing.”

Nobody will fault you if you say you’re busy. Spending a half hour every night texting your best friend is one thing. Spending every second possible attending to your social life is quite another.

5. “Writers read, so I’ll spend my every waking hour reading instead of writing.”

Writers write, too. 

6. “Steps A, B, and C have to be done before I start writing.”

Rituals are fine if they last five minutes. Rituals are distracting and detrimental if they last two hours and only allow you to write every other Sunday.

7. “I can’t think of what happens next.”

Either take some time to brainstorm or revise what happened earlier to make it easier for yourself.

8. “I’m in a bad mood.”

Channel your bad mood into good words. If angsty thirteen-year-old poets can do it, so can you.

I see far too many tweens and teenagers trying out their first few stories who include a certain type of character: somebody who kills anyone who disagrees with them or says mean things to them. Then they make that person a mature adult.

???

It’s hard to find more immature character traits than “killing for petty reasons.” That pretty much takes the cake. In the stories you read, the evil king does stuff like that because he’s been spoiled rotten since birth. Nobody dark or mysterious or mature or intelligent or any of the other traits people love to give their favorite characters will kill for petty reasons. 

Your ending should be a scene, not an overview of how all your loose ends wrap up. If you don’t think you can dedicate more than a paragraph to the resolution of a plot point, don’t put it there in the first place.

A final chapter full of quick resolutions is just as bad as a first chapter full of backstory.

If you want a character to stick in readers’ heads for a long time after they finish your story, having a fleshed-out personality helps, but it’s not good enough. There’s an enormous difference between A) a character who is shy, tries to be brave around her boyfriend, wants to break free from society’s constrictions but is too lazy to do so, and can’t figure out how to care about strangers and B) the same character, only this time, she always wears a bright pink scarf and loves the study of insects.

Harry Potter has a scar, Katniss has a pin, John Egbert has a green ghost shirt, and Ash Ketchum and Finn the Human both have special hats. An item of clothing or extremely striking physical feature will stay in a reader’s mind far more easily than “defined cheekbones” or “large, blue eyes.” When you give physical description, try to give an unusual visual marker at least to your main character. Not necessarily to set them apart from the other characters or mark them as special within the story, but to set them apart from the hundreds of people your reader sees every day on their way to work or school.

Likes, dislikes, and obsessions make your characters pop off the page like no other character traits can. Sure, your protagonist is arrogant, but wouldn’t your story be more interesting if he were arrogant and liked pizza more than almost anything else? It doesn’t even have to be a plot point. Hobbies and interests make characters more human. Sadly, I’ve read many stories where the characters were only bundles of traits who only formed opinions about other characters and never on which TV shows deserved to be cancelled. Such characters are not fun to read about and probably need to be fleshed out more.

There are two ways to lose your momentum when writing a story: not knowing enough and knowing too much. Here’s how to keep going if either happens to you.

• Not knowing enough

Most of writer’s block comes from not knowing what happens next. You have point A down, point B lies somewhere over yonder, and between the two is an infinite wordless chasm.

I find the easiest way to prevent this is to stop and think about what I want in that chasm without my computer actually in front of me. The chasm won’t get filled with sentences; it can only be filled by entire plot points, which need outside planning.

If that doesn’t work, try making a list of all the things you don’t want to fill the chasm. Making the list will help you whittle your options down to what you do want.

When all else fails, try ending the chapter at point A, following a different character, and picking up the next chapter at point B. If A and B are far enough away from each other, you’ll still have to explain what happened, but interspersing backstory is easier than tackling narrative. This is the cheater’s way out, so don’t rely on it too much.

• Knowing too much.

If you have a good idea of what each paragraph needs to be, actually laying them out can get tedious. The idea is always more fun than the execution, and sometimes the former can completely clog up the latter with details.

Keep all of your main plot points. A good, detailed outline can help you  write faster. Make a concerted effort, however, to change the minor details. The false ambassador could be spineless instead of sarcastic and his pet could be a dog instead of a parakeet. Figuring out how to alter the small things can be as rewarding as thinking them up in the first place.

One of the best things about writing fiction is that you get to subvert all the terrible cliches that you grew up reading. Maybe, instead of holding a ten-foot sword, your hero is skilled in more practical maneuvers involving realistic weapons. Wonderful. But if this is a sword-and sorcery story, he should at least have either some kind of cool weapon or a good reason not to have one.

While it might surprise the readers if the secret CIA treasure your protagonists have been looking for actually doesn’t exist, it won’t surprise them in a good way. They will feel cheated unless something more interesting than them finding the treasure happens instead. If you don’t want a cliche in your story, and your readers are expecting one, either change it or replace it. Giving people nothing when they expect at least something does not make for good reading.

In a similar vein, if you have something in your story such as dead parents or amnesia, ask yourself if you really need to get rid of your character’s family or backstory. A family of complex characters who help drive the plot along is often more interesting than a protagonist who angsts about their deceased family for half the story.

• Rushing too fast. Your characters should have time to look around and talk to each other without being shoved into the next scene. It’s very easy to go too far in the other direction, so keep on your toes about pacing.
• Starting two or more sentences in a row with the same word. Don’t do this unless you’re making a point (eg: Ten men entered the chamber. Ten men were found dead in the morning.).
• Trying to fit in two versions of the same sentence. Don’t put “Ted watched him for a long time all night.” Put “Ted watched him for a long time” or “Ted watched him all night.”
• Not knowing proper grammar. Look it up before you write anything.
• Not finishing. Finishing is the most important part of writing. It’s fairly easy to start a story, and once you’ve finished, it’s fairly easy to edit, but finishing takes willpower.