Tag: advice

Top Three Writing Tips

I can’t believe we’re in April. April, despite being the start of Spring and warmer weather, is always a horrible month for me. Not only do I have two birthdays followed by death days (yeah, those suck hardcore!), but there are several anniversaries of deaths over the last few years, birthdays of those who have passed on. April is just an awful month.

But! I am still here posting and doing what I can to make it better.

Today, it’s my top three writing tips.

1. Write “This is the shitty draft” or something similar on a blank page to get started.

A blank page is terrifying, especially compared to the perfectly curated image in your head. I used to panic and freeze and not be able to write because “it would never be as good as in my head.” Hence, this tip. It turns off the expectation for the work to be “the best ever” and lets it just be what it is: a first draft.

2. Let the first draft be as bad as it needs to be.

Similar to the tip above, let the first draft be bad. My first drafts are full of notes that make me laugh, notes that make me cringe, way too many parentheses with stupid remarks like this:

Not only does it keep the writing from being too serious, but it makes me laugh when I read it back later and helps me remember how much fun I had writing in the first place.

  1. Have fun with it and play!
    This tip is a little difficult if you’re hard on yourself like me. I’ve always been an anxious kid, and an even more anxious adult so play has never been easy. Writing was where I could feel free and play. I could ask the “What if?” questions and really find the fun in the story.

Overall, there are so many writing tips that might or might not work for you. Do what works and discard the rest. We’re all ultimately on our own writing journeys.

I’m sharing what works best for me. But I hope everyone finds what works for them.

What’s your favorite writing tip?

 

What Failure Can Teach Us About Writing

Failure is something that can happen to any of us at any time. Failure is something that we all try to actively avoid, failing, being a failure, is something that we don’t ever really want to admit. Failure sucks, but it’s a part of life.

Lately, I’ve felt like a failure in several aspects. I’ve been pursuing my bachelors in nursing for several years now, and ultimately through several factors some I could and some I couldn’t control, I’ve dropped out. I’ve been writing a novel since November and have had the same goal for that novel since January of this year. I have a decent job, but I feel like I’m failing at having a personal life or working on any hobbies outside of work and sleep.

By several accounts, I could be considered a failure, school isn’t going well, writing isn’t going well, personal life isn’t going well, but there can be several different views of failure.

School– Yes, I have essentially dropped out with a “six month suspension”. At the same time, I have been telling the school for months that there is no way I can complete the projects that have been assigned in the small amount of time that was given, along with working a full-time job. I have wanted a break for months. Now I have it. Now I can try and relax more.

The Novel- This novel is something I have been working on since November and had the same goal since January. It’s been months, but I haven’t stopped writing, I’ve just been going at a slower pace. I’ve had the same goal, and haven’t reached it yet, but I haven’t stopped. I’m still writing, no matter how slow the process goes.

The Job- It will be six months that I’ve had this new job as of April 1st. In that six months, it seems as though my plans and hours and duties have changed almost hourly. I was trained under one company on all different shifts, scheduled on all different shifts, both days and nights and anywhere in between. Now we’re with a new company and new management and new hours and even MORE training. Yes, my social life and my hobbies are suffering, but at least I have a job. I just haven’t had a chance to settle and create a solid schedule yet.

Failure is everywhere, and anything can become a failure, if you let it.

Sure, I can look at school as a failure, but it’s been stressing me out since I first started and working through and gaining more experience I’m wondering if even being a nurse is what I want to do.

Sure, I can look at writing the same novel for months and months as a failure, but I’m still writing and doing my best to get through the novel. Everyone goes through slumps, and this might just be mine currently.

Sure, I can look at my social life as a failure with this new job and the extra hours and training, but I have a job and I’m learning valuable skills, and making connections. Sure, it sucks right now to spend half my week sleeping and working and the rest of it catching up on sleep, but it won’t be forever. Eventually things will calm down.

So what does all of this have to do with writing? Failure is everywhere in writing.

It’s when the project isn’t going well, so you give up.

It’s when you send out a piece and it gets rejected.

It’s when your work doesn’t get much views or reads, or acclaim.

Or it can be.

Giving up on that project that doesn’t work can make way for a better project.

Getting rejected can allow you to send your piece somewhere else, somewhere better.

Not getting many views, or reads, or acclaims can allow you to learn how to improve and get more acclaim on the next piece.

Failure is okay, as long as you use it to your advantage.

Failure is only failure if you don’t learn from it and keep moving forward to improve.

I’ve had a lot of failures in the past few months, of so it would seem, but I’m not going to let them stop me.

I’m going to keep moving forward.

How about you?

Writer Life Lessons #20: Save Your Research for the Second Draft

Imagine how much work we would all get done if we stopped to research every little thing in our writing to make sure it was factually accurate. I don’t know about you, but I would probably get no work done. I would be so into researching and making sure that every little detail was painstakingly accurate that I would never get any words on the page.

This is why you should Save Your Research for the Second Draft.

Let the first draft be what it wants to be. Finish a whole project and then do as much research as your heart desires. Get your ideas down and then find out if they are accurate. If you research after every scene, not only will you be burned out on research, but on writing as well. Writers need to write.

Sometimes in first drafts, we don’t always know exactly what we want to happen, so we just write something that resembles a plot and then hopefully edit the hell out of it later. If we as writers edit every little detail and research as we’re writing the first draft, we might not even use that research in later drafts and that was time we could have been using to write.

Don’t get me wrong, small bits of research, like how to spell or phrase things, is fine. As long as it is under 5-10 minutes (depending on your internet/data speed), then I think it’s fine. It’s when you get sucked into researching for an entire afternoon that it becomes a problem. So try and keep research to a minimum and writing to a maximum.

Happy Writing!

Tuesday How to: Write Developed Characters

 Hello Readers! Special Message here: If I seem short during this Tuesday,  blame WordPress. I had been working on this post for more than a week, almost 2000 words put into it, and then WordPress decided to be a butt and delete it all. So here is attempt number two!

Some writers will tell you that naming characters is the hardest part. To develop them all you have to do is write out their story and their arc, then edit it in later drafts. I think that it really depends on the character. Whether or not their arc is a wide sweeping arc or a simple event that sets their actions. Being a writer, and having several characters, I can tell you that sometimes their arcs come easy, and then other times it will be several drafts in and I will be staring at a blank page thinking “Who the hell are you? What the F*@K do you want?”

To write developed characters, with complete arcs and growth, there are three things to keep in mind: Backstory, Mid-story and post story.

Backstory

Backstory is important, but not always relevant to the specific scene you’re writing. You should make it match your character, but not too obvious that the reader feels like they were fooled. Unless your character is the luckiest person in the world, everything is not going to just fall into their lap. They have to work to get where they are when your story starts. They have to have failures and successes. Not just one or the other.

Depending on your story and your character arc, your backstory determines how your character will react to certain situations in your plot. If your character is in a bank robbery, whether they are a trained soldier, or a guy who adamantly hates guns and violence will change how they react to the gunmen.

Mid-Story

In the middle of the action, your characters decisions determine their growth and their arc. There are generally two reactions to growth in story. Your character can either accept the changes, or fight them tooth and nail. There are a thousand choices, several types of growth, but it all basically boils down to “I accept this” or “Not in a million years”.

The most important thing in Mid-Story character development is consistency. If your character encounters a barking dog at the beginning of the story and is scared of it, then if they encounter the dog again in the middle and are not scared, there better have been some kind of growth in between.

Post Story

Post Story is probably the least important development, but it is still important. Unless your character dies at the end of your work, or they are braindead, they still have to grow after the events of the story. Post story is more important if you are working on a series, but for stand-alone is still relevant.

Post Story is what happens “after the credits”. The hero has saved the girl (or vice versa), the evil baddie has been taken care of and all is well. So what are the hero/ girl’s plans after? Some choose to let the reader decide, hence the “Rides off into the sunset” ending. Still, some others add in small hints throughout the piece. Like for instance, your character loves knitting and is working on a blanket, but they are pulled into this elaborate plot against the president. “ALL I WANT IS TO FINISH MY DAMN BLANKET!” is repeated several times in your piece.

Post story they better finish their damn blanket.

No matter what your plot or your character arcs, do your best to keep them consistent and your characters will be well developed and readers will thank you for it!

Happy Writing!

Writer Life Lessons #18: Finish Your First Drafts

Progress is measured in several different ways. If you are an athlete, progress is measured by how well you perform at your sport or sports. If you are an artist, progress is measured by your art portfolio. If you are a writer, progress is measured by words written on the page, and the amount of pieces you finish.

Can you call yourself a writer before you finish a piece? Of course. If you are putting words on the page, or the screen, or whatever you write on, you are indeed a writer. Can you call yourself an accomplished writer? Sure! But do you have anything to show for it?

When I first started writing, by hand, in pencil, in spiral-bound notebooks, I used to read unfinished pieces to my best friend. Yes, I was a writer,  and yes, I wanted to feel accomplished. Some of those drafts I finished, but a lot of them I just left him hanging, waiting on the next cliffhanger, for the next chapter or sometimes even word.

The lesson for this week is: Finish Your First Drafts.

There are tons of quotes out there about finishing what you start, how blank pages are ugly and how you can’t edit a blank page. All you have to do is google the words “writing advice” or “writing quotes” and you’ll get a ton of advice on how to write, how to finish your drafts, and even how to edit them.

Yes, this advice (Well most of it) is true. To move on, to mark your progress and to grow as a writer, you need to finish your first drafts, or at least move on to a new project if you get stuck. There is nothing worse than looking at an unfinished piece years later and thinking “Now where was I going with this?”.

Yes, you can leave your pieces and come back, but eventually you should try and finish them. This is an area where I need to take my own advice, I have about three times the amount of works in progress than I do works finished. The point is: I do intend to go back to them once I finish current projects, or if I don’t continue them I at least plan to rewrite.

Finish your first drafts, even if they suck, because there is always room for improvement. There are some pieces that I look at, from several years ago, and when I reach the point where I stopped writing for whatever reason, I wish there was more there. Often times I think “I wish I could remember where I was going with this”.

You can take a break from pieces, but at least write a little outline so you know where you left off, or even a little note in the margins that explains what happens next. You will thank yourself when you come back to it later.

Finish your first drafts so you can edit them and make them shine later.

Happy Writing!

Tuesday How To: Finding Characters

Writing without characters is like riding a bike without wheels, you won’t get too far. Sure, there are pieces out there that have limited characters, but they at least have one aspect that has to do with the development of a personality or skills. Look at Disney/Pixar’s Wall-E. There is no dialogue for the first half of the movie, but Wall-E and Eve have personalities and show some growth before the rest of the characters are introduced.

Characters are easy for some people, and difficult for others. Depending on the piece, characters could come easily, or they could hide from you for the first ten or more pages. I have had several experiences with characters, from my first story with the protagonist that had more than ten names, to my most recent characters who grow and become more alive with every new draft of my novels.

So this first installment we are going to talk about finding  characters. So let’s jump to it, shall we?

Depending on what your current project is, you could already have your characters. If you write fanfiction, which is writing based on someone else’s characters and setting, you already have your characters. If you are writing from scratch, you might not have any characters, or maybe just a few.

How you find characters will depend on if you have an idea or not. Sometimes characters, or their names will come first, and then their plots or ideas come after. Sometimes you have the idea and you just want to shake your character and scream at them “Tell me your name!”. Either way, I would like to believe characters want to be discovered.

With an Idea

If you started with an idea, I think the task of finding characters is easier. With an idea, and whatever parts of a plot you already have, fitting a character where they are needed becomes a bit easier. For instance, say we have the idea for a plot surrounding a bank robbery. The character we need can either work with the idea surrounding a bank robbery or be against it. What I mean by that is: Our character can have several personalities depending on the plot. Is the character part of the robbery, or just in the bank when the robbery starts? Does our character try to stop it, or just cower in the corner, crying for their mother? Make the character fit what you need the character to be.

An example that I have used in the past is the Camp NaNoWriMo April session. I was writing a novel based on someone falling into the addiction of drugs. I could have gone the easy way and said the character was male, twenty-four years old, was traumatized as a child and addicted to alcohol, but that is what readers would have expected, that seems to be the stereotype of drug dealers and users. What I ended up doing instead was making her female, type A, in medical school, and selling drugs without using them. This made her interesting, and went against all stereotypes.

Without an Idea

Coming up with characters on their own is definitely hard. Without the backbone of a plot, characters could be anything. Sometimes, characters come to me with their full names and their stories, but most of the time it’s like an awkward first date trying to pull information from them. There have only been a few instances where I come up with the character before the idea.

One of them is Georgia Rose Howell. This is a name that came to me in a flash of inspiration without an idea attached to it. I have tried several times to add her to other working ideas, but she refuses. She seems to be holding out for her own work, but she won’t give me any more information than just her name. She’s like Groot in that way.

Me: What’s your story?

GRH: I am Georgia Rose Howell.

Yeah, eventually I’ll find a place for her, but for now, she’s just a fancy name.

Next week, we’ll talk about naming characters and bringing them to life.

Happy Writing!

Tuesday How To: Characters

Welcome to the next installment of Tuesday How To!

This month I will be telling you all about characters and how to find and develop them.

Let’s have some fun!

Writer Life Lesson #8: Work at Your Own Pace

Writing is hard. A lot of readers just think words on a page means instant book, but we writers know that is far from the truth. Writing takes editing, editing takes time and rewrites. Words rarely end up on the page and stay where they are in the first draft. Sometimes, the whole process of writing can be exhausting.

This week’s lesson is: Work at Your Own Pace

This month, I am working on Camp NaNoWriMo, and to be honest, it’s not going as well as I would like. I am supposed to be writing at least 1667 words a day, and my average for the first week is much lower than it should be. But I am not here to complain about how my novel is going this month.

Working at your own pace is important. Sure, some writers write a complete novel in a month, edit it the next month, rewrite the month after that, and on and on until they have a complete novel. That paces is just dizzying to me. Some months, I can barely even get 1000 words on a page let alone 1 word. Some months, days, and even years can just be plain hard. The usual advice is “Write Every Day” or “Write Through Your Doubts”, but those are general tips, by authors and bloggers that don’t know you personally.

There are instances where it is better to write at your own pace. I can think of several instances that I can think of where waiting and not forcing it is much better for my writing. There are several instances where if I had rushed it, the work would suck and need so much more editing later.

Sometimes writing is easy, but a lot of the time it’s not. Some days writing is the hardest thing in the world, and that is totally ok. Writing every day is best to build a routine, but it doesn’t always work. So try your best to write daily, but some days it just doesn’t happen.

When it doesn’t happen, don’t beat yourself up. There will be days, or sometimes even weeks, sometimes longer where you don’t write. When that does happen, try to figure out why you can’t or don’t want to write. Sometimes it’s as easy as “I am stressed” or “I am more interested in doing something else”. One that I face occasionally is “I don’t like where I left off on that page” or “I don’t know whay words to put down”. If you can’t find a reason or it’s just not happening, try and think about where you want to go with your piece or a scene that you want to write and jump around.

If none of that works, try writing one simple sentence. Whatever comes to mind, story related or not.

Happy Writing!

What is your general writing pace?

If you are participating in Camp NaNoWriMo, how is your word count looking?