Writing Tips for You!
1
I wrote this up a little over a month ago now, and wanted to share it with you all. Enjoy. Also, this is extremely raw. I haven't bothered editing it. So, you know, have fun dealing with that.
-=-
1. Use varying sentence and paragraph structure to control the way your reader feels. A lot of times I’ll see things like “Follow up long sentences with short ones and vice versa,” and while this is by no means wrong, I personally feel that saying something like this is far too general. For instance, in Poe’s Fall of the House of Usher he uses incredibly long paragraphs, sentences, and even words, constantly. Now, if some of the advice you might have seen says to specifically NOT do this, then why did he? Well, it’s because of the effect it had on the reader. FotHoU is a story that deals with themes such a physical and mental illness, so much so that some have theorized that any of the characters, from the protagonist to the two supporting characters, could be figments of the other’s imaginations. Everything from the imagery to the language has a very dark, despairing tone to it, and this is typified by the style of sentence and paragraph structure Poe used. Basically, Poe used such long paragraphs and sentences to make his writing, in that story in particular, feel disparaging, and at times overwhelming for the reader. He wanted the readers emotions towards the story to match the character’s emotions towards their situation, and he does so by controlling the length in which he write. All of this is to say: Know that using incredibly long sentences and paragraphs can be overwhelming to a reader, but it is possible to use this to your advantage. Don’t just vary your sentence lengths willy nilly, think about how you want your reader to feel and write accordingly.
2. Take frequent, short breaks. I will often times write a few hundred words, then stop, open a browser, and watch about a minute of a video, or scroll through Tumblr/Reddit. Writing can be an encumbering task, and it’s easy to get mentally exhausted relatively quickly. If you feel like you’re reaching a sort of mental boiling point then finish your current sentence, step away, decompress, and come back. Read over your last sentence, make changes if you need to, and then continue.
3. Keep your momentum! At the opposite end of the mental exhaustion, you might, at times, feel as though you are on a roll and you’re knocking out paragraph after paragraph. When this happens, try to keep up the pace. It means you’ve hit a productive stride, and that is healthy for your writing. However! This isn’t to say that if you get into a good motion, never take breaks. Always put mental exhaustion before finishing a chapter because the more your force yourself to write the worse the writing will come out. Pushing yourself to write past mental exhaustion is the sort of thing that leads to huge edits and rewrite, and is unhealthy for your development as a writer.
4. Set a goal when you sit down to write. For instance, every single time I sit down to work on a book or a story I have the general rule to write 1,000 words minimum. If you’re new then maybe set it for 200 or 300, and work your way up. Eventually you’ll find that even though you have a goal you’ll surpass it without even realizing it. My goal, as I said, is always 1,000 and sometimes it can be hard to even get that much, but other days I will end up writing anywhere from 2,000 to 10,000. Everyday is different, and the more you write the more you’ll be able to write within a day. Stephen King, for example, is said to write 10,000 words a day, as an eight hour job. He did not start out that way, I can assure you. He’s a professional and has experience. It took him years of practice to get to where he is. You and I, despite our talent, are no different. Discipline in the only thing standing between you as your are now, and you hold your own book in your hands.
5. Set a deadline, but don’t stress over it. I know, you might be a procrastinator, but let me tell you this: There is a difference between a deadline someone sets for your, and the deadline you set yourself. You can meet a deadline, but be reasonable. Work hard, and meet the deadline you set for yourself. Doing so will make you a more focused and diligent writer, as well as a more responsible person in general.
6. Don’t be afraid the write at least a little autobiographically. Ernest Hemingway is known across the world as one of the greatest American authors, and you want to know something? I’d be hard pressed to think of a single work of his that isn’t, in some way, autobiographical. Now, let me clarify. Writing something that is autobiographical is not the same as writing an autobiography. I’ll give you an example. A couple of years ago I went through some really dramatic and painful life changes, and in my mind, for about a month, I kept repeating the phrase “everything always changes” in my head, over and over. In the end I decided to sit down and start writing, and in the story I started then I instilled a great theme of “Change,” inspired wholly by my own life. Now does that mean the events of the book mirrored the events of my life? Not even a little. Still, the themes and events of that book were heavily inspired by things I was feeling at the time, and in that sense it was autobiographical. Another example is Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (Which is fantastic by the way, I highly recommend it.) in which a group of financially well endowed friends spend their days hopping from bars to cafes to clubs in France, and later in Spain. Now, the story doesn’t represent Hemingway’s life perfectly, but it does mirror bother feelings and a lifestyle that he did experience at one time. In short, write what you know.
7. The more you write, the less you will need to put yourself into the story. When I started out, sometime during middle school (I love telling stories before then, but this was when I started writing them down) all of my stories had me at the center, both in physical appearance, and in personality. I wrote stories about myself as the “Chosen One,” as an orphan gifted with magical artifacts, as the apprentice of the Grim Reaper, and as a demon hunter. However, as time went on I moved away from this practice, and putting myself into the shoes of characters that are nothing like me has become easier and easier. So, if you’re just starting out then don’t be afraid to be the hero of your own story. Learning to put yourself in the shoes of your characters to write them more genuinely is a crucial part in learn to write, and literally putting yourself into the story is a small step towards that skill.
8. Take advice on diction and style with a grain of salt. Poe was dark and emotional, Hemingway showed restraint and was at times bare bones, and Stephen King loves meaty descriptions. All three of them are wildly different, and yet all three of them are world renowned. You will, over time, develop a writing style unique to you. (I actually have a theory that your writing style might be extremely affected by the styles you read growing up. I’ve had my writing compared to that of an author I used to read a lot of, but this is irrelevant to the tip and is mostly anecdotal evidence anyway.) Own your style, be proud of it, and don’t feel bad if you can’t write the same way that some famous author your idolize write. I am hugely inspired by King, but my style is completely different from his, and I’m proud of it.
9. Finish a story! With each story you are able to finish with “THE END,” each story after that becomes easier to finish. Start with short stories, work your way up. You aren’t going to be writing like King or those fanfic authors that blow even popular writer’s word counts out of the water any time soon. Still, with perseverance and practice you can get there.
10. If a story, book, or other project is significantly longer to finish than any of your others then you will absolutely want to read back over the earlier stuff in that project. You will be actually be able to see things you did then, and know that your writing has evolved so much that you might write the same thing in a completely different style. I believe the opening chapter of my first book went through three different huge revisions before it was concurrent with the rest of the book, and I didn’t even change what happened in the scene, I just changed the way it was said. This is one of the most satisfying parts of writing, seeing how you’ve evolved over the course of just a single project.
11. Don’t feel guilty about using an editor, but don’t work about not using an editor, either. Editors are great, and they can catch errors and plot holes that you would never in a million years pick up on, and most writers use them, even big name, highly experienced authors. However! Your writing is in your hands, and you have absolutely no obligation to use an editor, and using an editor doesn’t always guarantee that your writing will be any better. Just know, if you don’t use an editor then grammar mistakes will be primarily up to you to hunt down, and everyone make grammar mistakes. My mother, who is the biggest Stephen King fan and owns all of his books, has even found mistakes in a few of his stories. No one is exempt from mistakes. (In fact, I’d bet five dollars you’ve already found at least three in this post.)
12. This one is a two-in-one tip. If your friend offers to edit your book don’t automatically say yes. It may seem like a good idea but most of the time when friend’s do this they’re just being nice and don’t realize the responsibility (and work) that editing involves. (If you are that friend, don’t feel bad. You’re an awesome person, just know that editing is a lot of work, and no matter how much you support your friend’s writing and I can promise, they care more about their writing than you will ever care about their writing.) This goes just as well for beta readers, and if you want a beta reader I highly recommend grand mothers. They’re incredibly supportive, and are so old that a lot of them read a lot anyways! Part 2: If you are thinking about saying yes to a friend or family editor, send them a exert of your story and ask them to edit it to see what the sort of changes they will makes. Specifically, give them a printed out copy and a red pen so you can see their train of thought while editing. Often times editors of this type will make big changes that you are totally not okay with because they think it sounds better. In such cases, you also need to be able to tell them it’s not going to work out and that you are incredibly passionate about the work and that it’s just not a good fit.
13. (I’m taking this from another post because it’s incredible advice.) Every sentence in your story should answer “Yes” to one or more of these questions: 1. Does this sentence say something about my character(s)? 2. Does this sentence say something about my setting? 3. Does this sentence say something about the current scene? 4. Does this sentence say something about the plot? Every sentence in your story should say “Yes” to one of these without exception. To extrapolate, when giving descriptions of character and their appearance, focus primarily on the details that are important to the character, and the reader’s understand of the character. Height, skin color, eye color, and hair color along with a brief description of body shape, bone structure, and just a short description of clothing is enough for someone to picture your character clearly enough. However, if their are any details that will become important or that say something important about a character then focus on those details and dedicate more time to them. (This is not to say that you shouldn’t give extremely details descriptions about everything, please refer back to tip #8. Just know that people don’t always like reading pages upon pages of irrelevant details.) That being said, even tiny things can say a lot. Spending time with a member of the supporting cast and giving them extra details can be a good way to flesh out a world, and describing certain likes and dislikes of your protagonist can, when done correctly, be a good way to tell the reader what kind of person they are without outright saying it.
14. Don’t stress about story length. Use the words and style that best fit what you want to say, and your story will be good. That being said if for some reason you wanted it to be a minimum then look over your plot and find places where you think you can fit more detail or scenes that could add to the story. However, the one trick to doing this is important: Always leave your reader wanting more. That’s how you keep the attention of your reader. Though, that’s not the sort of thing I can just tell your how to do. It’s a skill that comes naturally with writing.
15. Keep a book of ideas. I have a journal that has all of my ideas and the dates I came up with them. I will never write all of them, but it feels me with nostalgia to look over them from time to time, plus! I know I’ll never be lacking in ideas because of it. That being said, don’t feel bad for having a great idea and never writing it. Tim O’Brien has this fantastic quote from The Things They Carried When he talks about being a writer. I’m paraphrasing because I can’t find the exact quote, but he says something along the lines of when you sit down to write thousands of paths, each being a possible story, stretch out in front of you, and as a writer your job is simply to pick which one you want to follow. You can never write every story, and that’s okay. Just write your story. (Side note: Despite being a war story Tim O’Brien spend a lot of time talking about the nature of stories and writing in The Things They Carried and highly highly recommend checking it out of your want to learn more about the philosophy of writing.
16. Explore other types of writing. Poetry, reviews, plays, anything and everything. You may find yourself more suited to a type other than stories. Also, exploring these types of writing is a good way to improve in experience as a writer, helping you become a better and more prodigious writing in all respects.
And that’s it. I hope this finds all you writers out there well, and if you’re not a writer I hope this implores you to try writing. It’s a hell of a good time.
-=-
1. Use varying sentence and paragraph structure to control the way your reader feels. A lot of times I’ll see things like “Follow up long sentences with short ones and vice versa,” and while this is by no means wrong, I personally feel that saying something like this is far too general. For instance, in Poe’s Fall of the House of Usher he uses incredibly long paragraphs, sentences, and even words, constantly. Now, if some of the advice you might have seen says to specifically NOT do this, then why did he? Well, it’s because of the effect it had on the reader. FotHoU is a story that deals with themes such a physical and mental illness, so much so that some have theorized that any of the characters, from the protagonist to the two supporting characters, could be figments of the other’s imaginations. Everything from the imagery to the language has a very dark, despairing tone to it, and this is typified by the style of sentence and paragraph structure Poe used. Basically, Poe used such long paragraphs and sentences to make his writing, in that story in particular, feel disparaging, and at times overwhelming for the reader. He wanted the readers emotions towards the story to match the character’s emotions towards their situation, and he does so by controlling the length in which he write. All of this is to say: Know that using incredibly long sentences and paragraphs can be overwhelming to a reader, but it is possible to use this to your advantage. Don’t just vary your sentence lengths willy nilly, think about how you want your reader to feel and write accordingly.
2. Take frequent, short breaks. I will often times write a few hundred words, then stop, open a browser, and watch about a minute of a video, or scroll through Tumblr/Reddit. Writing can be an encumbering task, and it’s easy to get mentally exhausted relatively quickly. If you feel like you’re reaching a sort of mental boiling point then finish your current sentence, step away, decompress, and come back. Read over your last sentence, make changes if you need to, and then continue.
3. Keep your momentum! At the opposite end of the mental exhaustion, you might, at times, feel as though you are on a roll and you’re knocking out paragraph after paragraph. When this happens, try to keep up the pace. It means you’ve hit a productive stride, and that is healthy for your writing. However! This isn’t to say that if you get into a good motion, never take breaks. Always put mental exhaustion before finishing a chapter because the more your force yourself to write the worse the writing will come out. Pushing yourself to write past mental exhaustion is the sort of thing that leads to huge edits and rewrite, and is unhealthy for your development as a writer.
4. Set a goal when you sit down to write. For instance, every single time I sit down to work on a book or a story I have the general rule to write 1,000 words minimum. If you’re new then maybe set it for 200 or 300, and work your way up. Eventually you’ll find that even though you have a goal you’ll surpass it without even realizing it. My goal, as I said, is always 1,000 and sometimes it can be hard to even get that much, but other days I will end up writing anywhere from 2,000 to 10,000. Everyday is different, and the more you write the more you’ll be able to write within a day. Stephen King, for example, is said to write 10,000 words a day, as an eight hour job. He did not start out that way, I can assure you. He’s a professional and has experience. It took him years of practice to get to where he is. You and I, despite our talent, are no different. Discipline in the only thing standing between you as your are now, and you hold your own book in your hands.
5. Set a deadline, but don’t stress over it. I know, you might be a procrastinator, but let me tell you this: There is a difference between a deadline someone sets for your, and the deadline you set yourself. You can meet a deadline, but be reasonable. Work hard, and meet the deadline you set for yourself. Doing so will make you a more focused and diligent writer, as well as a more responsible person in general.
6. Don’t be afraid the write at least a little autobiographically. Ernest Hemingway is known across the world as one of the greatest American authors, and you want to know something? I’d be hard pressed to think of a single work of his that isn’t, in some way, autobiographical. Now, let me clarify. Writing something that is autobiographical is not the same as writing an autobiography. I’ll give you an example. A couple of years ago I went through some really dramatic and painful life changes, and in my mind, for about a month, I kept repeating the phrase “everything always changes” in my head, over and over. In the end I decided to sit down and start writing, and in the story I started then I instilled a great theme of “Change,” inspired wholly by my own life. Now does that mean the events of the book mirrored the events of my life? Not even a little. Still, the themes and events of that book were heavily inspired by things I was feeling at the time, and in that sense it was autobiographical. Another example is Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (Which is fantastic by the way, I highly recommend it.) in which a group of financially well endowed friends spend their days hopping from bars to cafes to clubs in France, and later in Spain. Now, the story doesn’t represent Hemingway’s life perfectly, but it does mirror bother feelings and a lifestyle that he did experience at one time. In short, write what you know.
7. The more you write, the less you will need to put yourself into the story. When I started out, sometime during middle school (I love telling stories before then, but this was when I started writing them down) all of my stories had me at the center, both in physical appearance, and in personality. I wrote stories about myself as the “Chosen One,” as an orphan gifted with magical artifacts, as the apprentice of the Grim Reaper, and as a demon hunter. However, as time went on I moved away from this practice, and putting myself into the shoes of characters that are nothing like me has become easier and easier. So, if you’re just starting out then don’t be afraid to be the hero of your own story. Learning to put yourself in the shoes of your characters to write them more genuinely is a crucial part in learn to write, and literally putting yourself into the story is a small step towards that skill.
8. Take advice on diction and style with a grain of salt. Poe was dark and emotional, Hemingway showed restraint and was at times bare bones, and Stephen King loves meaty descriptions. All three of them are wildly different, and yet all three of them are world renowned. You will, over time, develop a writing style unique to you. (I actually have a theory that your writing style might be extremely affected by the styles you read growing up. I’ve had my writing compared to that of an author I used to read a lot of, but this is irrelevant to the tip and is mostly anecdotal evidence anyway.) Own your style, be proud of it, and don’t feel bad if you can’t write the same way that some famous author your idolize write. I am hugely inspired by King, but my style is completely different from his, and I’m proud of it.
9. Finish a story! With each story you are able to finish with “THE END,” each story after that becomes easier to finish. Start with short stories, work your way up. You aren’t going to be writing like King or those fanfic authors that blow even popular writer’s word counts out of the water any time soon. Still, with perseverance and practice you can get there.
10. If a story, book, or other project is significantly longer to finish than any of your others then you will absolutely want to read back over the earlier stuff in that project. You will be actually be able to see things you did then, and know that your writing has evolved so much that you might write the same thing in a completely different style. I believe the opening chapter of my first book went through three different huge revisions before it was concurrent with the rest of the book, and I didn’t even change what happened in the scene, I just changed the way it was said. This is one of the most satisfying parts of writing, seeing how you’ve evolved over the course of just a single project.
11. Don’t feel guilty about using an editor, but don’t work about not using an editor, either. Editors are great, and they can catch errors and plot holes that you would never in a million years pick up on, and most writers use them, even big name, highly experienced authors. However! Your writing is in your hands, and you have absolutely no obligation to use an editor, and using an editor doesn’t always guarantee that your writing will be any better. Just know, if you don’t use an editor then grammar mistakes will be primarily up to you to hunt down, and everyone make grammar mistakes. My mother, who is the biggest Stephen King fan and owns all of his books, has even found mistakes in a few of his stories. No one is exempt from mistakes. (In fact, I’d bet five dollars you’ve already found at least three in this post.)
12. This one is a two-in-one tip. If your friend offers to edit your book don’t automatically say yes. It may seem like a good idea but most of the time when friend’s do this they’re just being nice and don’t realize the responsibility (and work) that editing involves. (If you are that friend, don’t feel bad. You’re an awesome person, just know that editing is a lot of work, and no matter how much you support your friend’s writing and I can promise, they care more about their writing than you will ever care about their writing.) This goes just as well for beta readers, and if you want a beta reader I highly recommend grand mothers. They’re incredibly supportive, and are so old that a lot of them read a lot anyways! Part 2: If you are thinking about saying yes to a friend or family editor, send them a exert of your story and ask them to edit it to see what the sort of changes they will makes. Specifically, give them a printed out copy and a red pen so you can see their train of thought while editing. Often times editors of this type will make big changes that you are totally not okay with because they think it sounds better. In such cases, you also need to be able to tell them it’s not going to work out and that you are incredibly passionate about the work and that it’s just not a good fit.
13. (I’m taking this from another post because it’s incredible advice.) Every sentence in your story should answer “Yes” to one or more of these questions: 1. Does this sentence say something about my character(s)? 2. Does this sentence say something about my setting? 3. Does this sentence say something about the current scene? 4. Does this sentence say something about the plot? Every sentence in your story should say “Yes” to one of these without exception. To extrapolate, when giving descriptions of character and their appearance, focus primarily on the details that are important to the character, and the reader’s understand of the character. Height, skin color, eye color, and hair color along with a brief description of body shape, bone structure, and just a short description of clothing is enough for someone to picture your character clearly enough. However, if their are any details that will become important or that say something important about a character then focus on those details and dedicate more time to them. (This is not to say that you shouldn’t give extremely details descriptions about everything, please refer back to tip #8. Just know that people don’t always like reading pages upon pages of irrelevant details.) That being said, even tiny things can say a lot. Spending time with a member of the supporting cast and giving them extra details can be a good way to flesh out a world, and describing certain likes and dislikes of your protagonist can, when done correctly, be a good way to tell the reader what kind of person they are without outright saying it.
14. Don’t stress about story length. Use the words and style that best fit what you want to say, and your story will be good. That being said if for some reason you wanted it to be a minimum then look over your plot and find places where you think you can fit more detail or scenes that could add to the story. However, the one trick to doing this is important: Always leave your reader wanting more. That’s how you keep the attention of your reader. Though, that’s not the sort of thing I can just tell your how to do. It’s a skill that comes naturally with writing.
15. Keep a book of ideas. I have a journal that has all of my ideas and the dates I came up with them. I will never write all of them, but it feels me with nostalgia to look over them from time to time, plus! I know I’ll never be lacking in ideas because of it. That being said, don’t feel bad for having a great idea and never writing it. Tim O’Brien has this fantastic quote from The Things They Carried When he talks about being a writer. I’m paraphrasing because I can’t find the exact quote, but he says something along the lines of when you sit down to write thousands of paths, each being a possible story, stretch out in front of you, and as a writer your job is simply to pick which one you want to follow. You can never write every story, and that’s okay. Just write your story. (Side note: Despite being a war story Tim O’Brien spend a lot of time talking about the nature of stories and writing in The Things They Carried and highly highly recommend checking it out of your want to learn more about the philosophy of writing.
16. Explore other types of writing. Poetry, reviews, plays, anything and everything. You may find yourself more suited to a type other than stories. Also, exploring these types of writing is a good way to improve in experience as a writer, helping you become a better and more prodigious writing in all respects.
And that’s it. I hope this finds all you writers out there well, and if you’re not a writer I hope this implores you to try writing. It’s a hell of a good time.
2
Yanker
I read hentai for plot
This deserves to be in a place better than the dead subsection of a hentai forum, haha
1
Nice.
To generalize this, get to know the various tools of writing. They all have their uses, and applying the wrong tool for the job won't get it done.
To clarify what AxisLight is saying, a high word count isn't everything. Short stories aren't a lesser achievement than novels because they're shorter. A good short story takes just as much skill to write as a good novel.
All of this is to say: Know that using incredibly long sentences and paragraphs can be overwhelming to a reader, but it is possible to use this to your advantage. Don’t just vary your sentence lengths willy nilly, think about how you want your reader to feel and write accordingly.
To generalize this, get to know the various tools of writing. They all have their uses, and applying the wrong tool for the job won't get it done.
9. Finish a story! With each story you are able to finish with “THE END,” each story after that becomes easier to finish. Start with short stories, work your way up. You aren’t going to be writing like King or those fanfic authors that blow even popular writer’s word counts out of the water any time soon. Still, with perseverance and practice you can get there.
To clarify what AxisLight is saying, a high word count isn't everything. Short stories aren't a lesser achievement than novels because they're shorter. A good short story takes just as much skill to write as a good novel.