2. Belief creates conflict. Your characters believe
something and act according to those beliefs.
3. Be specific. Remove generic words that don’t inject
images in the reader’s minds. Use specific exotic nouns to draw the reader into
your description.
4. If your characters don’t care then we don’t care about
them.
5. No one is truly evil, even the devil thinks he's the good
guy from his perspective.
6. Inject the five senses into descriptions to pull the
reader into your world. Sight, smell, touch, sound, and taste.
7. Cut the fat. Remove cluttering words.
8. Read your work out loud. Fix what doesn’t sound
right.
9. End sentences on powerful words. Use them to create
theme, tone, and mood.
10. Use the end of scenes to create momentum and propel the
plot and characters forward. Use dramatic reveals, cliff hangers, and dramatic
revelations.
11. A person is what he/she does not what he/she says.
Actions make the character not words.
12. Avoid stating emotion. Mad, scared, and happy are
telling not showing.
13. If you can't be witty, poetic, funny, or artsy with your
sentences then use as few words as possible to get your point across. K.I.S.S.
Keep it simple stupid.
14. Readability is the number one priority. Making it good
comes later. If great writing is confusing to the reader then it's not great
writing.
15. Withholding information is just as important as giving
it. Mystery is a good thing.
16. Small details add reality, a sense of place.
17. Characters must change. Those who can't inevitably die
before the story is through.
18. Character conflicts must be both internal and external.
Your Characters should struggle with themselves, fears and desires, and with
other characters.
19. First impressions are everything. Characters
introductions should be memorable.
20. Don't sweat the opening. The only job your first
sentence has to do, besides tell a story of course, is make the reader read the
second. And the only job the second sentence has to do is make the reader read
the third. You can see a pattern here.
21. The key to writing characters of the opposite sex and people of
different ethnic groups right is writing more than one of them.
Eventually you’ll run out
of stereotypes.
22. Nuke the passive
voice.
23. Limit the use of words that end with –ly… severely.
24. Know your target audience. Research the sales of your
specific genre, you may be surprised who’s buying.
25. Always raise the stakes, never decrease them.
26. Only let your audience know where the story is going if
they don’t want to go there. Destiny is always a bitch.
27. Transport the audience to another time and place. That’s
what they’re paying you for.
28. Start a scene as far into it as possible and end it the
first chance you get.
29. Sequences build pace. Use long scenes, paragraphs, and sentences to slow down pace
and short ones to quicken it.
30. Avoid too many eye/seeing words: gazed, peered, looked,
scanned, observed etc.
31. Avoid confusion with words and sentences, misspellings,
changing of the word’s meaning (death vs. deaf)
32. Avoid description that doesn’t make sense or the reader
might take literally: His eyes rolled around the room.
33. Shadows create drama.
34. Easy on the adjectives.
35. Avoid other words for “said”. Great dialogue doesn’t
need much help... he scoffed.
36. Easy on the exclamation marks!!!!!!!!!
37. If you didn’t feel emotion writing it, neither will your
readers.
38. Writer’s block is a good thing. It means there is something
wrong in your story. Find out what and fix it.
39. Write to your strengths and manage your weaknesses. No Olympian
is great at all the games. Focus on being the best in a narrow aspect/field in
your chosen profession.
40. Be so good they can’t ignore you.
41. Read lots and write lots, every day if possible.
42. Second drafts should be 10% shorter as a general rule.
So says the King.
43. Polish, polish, and polish your work.
44. Avoid negative information. Negative information tells
us what did not happen, rather than what did happen. It offers the reader no
concrete information or images. She didn’t smile. It wasn’t cold outside. He
almost cried.
45. Reactive heroes need relentless villains. And at some
point in the story the hero must become active in pursuing their destiny/dreams/goals.
46. Avoid weak, silly, and confusing similes and metaphors.
47. Use participial phrases with care so they don’t sound awkward
to the reader.
48. Show, don’t tell the reader information whenever
possible.
49. Develop and follow your voice, it’s all you’ve got that separates
you from the crowd.
50. Telling a great story always trumps simply writing well.
51. When you think you’ve finished, sit down for another
draft.
52. Butt in chair, the secret to getting work done.
53. Never try to publish something you wouldn’t read out
loud to a group of strangers.
54. If you write for children you should be reading to them
on a regular basis. Volunteer to read at the local library or school if you’ve
got none of your own. It pays to know your audience.
55. Don’t chase the market. Writing and publishing are slow beasts,
moving at a snail's pace. And trends come and go like cheetahs.
56. Be careful when satirizing something or someone you hate.
It can come off as childish, mean-spirited, and people usually see through political
bias and tune out. Intelligent satire comes from a wide array of emotions,
including admiration.
57. The early bird gets the worm. Morning people tend to get
more done, this includes writing.
58. Stay healthy, eat right, and exercise daily. Avoid drink
and drugs and other known baddies. You need your eyes, hands, heart, and brain
to write. Treat them with respect.
59. Don’t buy the Big Break lie. Real achievement/success
does not come out of thin air or divine luck but from years of hard work, dedication,
passion, persistence, networking, and grit. Getting published is not like
winning the lottery.
60. Don’t be a schemer. Dreams require action to make them
real. Tiny wood elves will not sneak into your house at night and write your
book for you. Only you can do that.
61. Great writing is remembering the details. What details
do you remember about your most vivid memories and dreams and why? Use them in
your writing.
62. If it’s a chore writing it then it’ll probably be a
chore reading it. Writing is hard work but you should also have fun. Enthusiasm
is a must, or writer’s block will set in.
63. Don’t just “write what you know”, write what comes out naturally
and fills that blank page, because you’re going to need to fill a lot of them.
64. The only sin in writing is being boring. And the penalty
is death by yawning.
65. Structure fuels creativity. Staring at a blank screen
does not. Outline, write a spine, use index cards, and take notes. These things
are useful tools in the writer’s toolbox.
66. Dialogue is a form of dramatic action that is said for a
reason, to obtain an objective of the character.
67. Avoid being “too on the nose” when writing dialogue.
Often the most dramatic bits of dialogue are the words not spoken but implied.
68. Cutting creates story. The human brain adds the missing
connections between images, whether on screen or in the mind’s eye, and fits
them logically into a story sequence.
69. The villain who always loses becomes a joke. Avoid the
ultimate goal of taking over the world or destroying it, in each scenario the
villain must lose for the story to continue. Break down those goals into stages
or create different smaller ones. The tension rises if the audience doesn’t
know whether the hero will succeed or not.
70. Great sentences multitask. They move plot, reveal
character, set mood and tone, show the writer’s voice, and tell a story all at
the same time.
71. The best titles will make the story stand out and entice
readers. Bad ones are like inside jokes; you shouldn’t have to read the book
first to understand a title. Avoid the cliché so you’re not 1 millionth to last
on the Google search.
72. The best writing makes the reader forget they’re
reading.
73. Readers usually believe the unbelievable if the
characters on the page don’t. Suspension of disbelief fails if no one questions
the bizarre and fantastical.
74. Avoid the sudden info dump. Dish out exposition like a
formal full course meal, in small need-to-know stages.
75. You can break scenes into five parts: dialogue,
description, action, character's thoughts, and exposition. Balance is key, too
much of one and not enough of another can spoil the whole pot.
76. Descriptions of the mundane in fantasy worlds can give
them a sense of reality.
77. Start your story with the inciting incident, the reason
we’re sitting down for this story in the first place. Avoid prologues and first
chapters that have little to do with the main characters and story.
78. Secondary actions are not secondary. Subtle gestures and
activities reveal character personalities, thoughts, and feelings. Don’t write
about talking heads, in other words scenes about people just standing around
and talking with nothing but facial descriptions.
79. If the monster is only scary when the audience can’t see
it then it was never scary to begin with. Real monsters are terrifying up close
with the lights on.
80. Careful with too much or too little back-story. Rule of
Thumb: If you need back-story to understand a character enough to write them
then your readers need it too. Likewise if it’s not plot relevant cut it.
81. Easy on the semicolons.
82. The protagonist doesn’t always have to succeed at
his/her goal, but they have to genuinely try for the audience to get behind
them.
83. Keep your use of the verb "to be" to a
minimum.
84. Always pick the most economical/efficient path to telling a story.
85. Write in different mediums. You can learn lots from writing
screenplays, short stories, novels, poems, and comic scripts and expand your
writer’s toolbox.
86. Cut useless characters or combine them with others. One
three dimensional character is worth a thousand flat ones.
87. Avoid beginning and ending sentences with “it”.
88. Find your ending as soon as possible. And write towards
the finish line.
89. Don’t be afraid to take risks with your writing.
Experiment, experiment, and experiment.
90. Coincidences are only good for getting characters in
trouble not out of it.
91. Try out different voices and writing styles. Keep which
fits, throw out the rest.
92. Keep a student’s attitude and outlook. There is always
more to learn.
93. Have courage in the face of rejection and focus on
improving your craft. Even the most famous and legendary of writers have been
rejected at one time or another in their lives.
94. The worst reaction you can get from a reader of your
work is no reaction at all.
95. There can be multiple protagonists in a book, but only
one main character at any one given moment/scene in the story.
96. Only write in first person if your character’s voice is
irresistible and the story would suffer without it.
97. The best main villains are often the anti-thesis of your
story’s message and theme, the devil’s advocate to your hero’s ethical/moral
compass.
98. When all else fails have the devil walk in through the
front door.
99. Nothing happening in the present is ever as exciting as
the anticipation of what comes next.
100. Be careful what you wish for. Success can be a double
edge sword. Too much success can bring on serious writer’s block and fear of
not meeting past achievements. Harper Lee and Margaret Mitchell both struck
gold with their debut novels, unfortunately they never wrote another. Money and
fame can kill the starving writer’s motivation of putting food on the table.
Cheetahs in captivity never run as fast as the wild ones. Why? Because they
don’t have to.
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