Writing is a skill. It takes time to master. That doesn’t mean you can’t earn a living writing before you achieve an expert level, but you will need to refine your skills to have a career.
Here are 9 signs of amateur writing and how to avoid them:
In Part I of this series, we examined some ways to dig deeper into your characters’ motivation and figure out their stakes in the plot. Now let’s go even farther by asking your characters:
The only thing that matters in fiction is why. Why does what is happening matter to the protagonist and other characters? Why should we care? It’s not enough for things to happen to your characters. You have to know what it means to each of them and how it affects their lives. This means you need to know what makes your characters tick. Why they make the choices they do. Why they react the way they do. Why they don’t just walk away.
There are many habits a writer should develop. These are just a few. Let’s call them my top 15.
In the last blog, we discussed what first lines of stories need to include. Now we’ll look at ways you can improve your opening lines.
First sentences are paramount to stories. They are the first impression. The hook by which readers are tempted to continue on instead of tossing the book back on the shelf so they can keep looking. They are a portal to the story itself.
Life is emotional. So is business, whether you want to admit it or not. Sure, you might not be able to cry at your desk everyday or throw temper tantrums in the break room, but emotions do come into play in business.
Organizations use emotion to make you care about their products, services, and causes. They use it as a form of persuasion, which is the art of making you desire something you might not otherwise.
Not writing happens more than writing. Staring at the blank page. Struggling to get motivation to put words on the screen. We have all felt that way. It’s common. Its cause? Resistance.
Resistance keeps writers from writing. It stands in the way of every type of creative endeavor, whether its a painter who isn’t wielding her brush or a writer avoiding the page. It is the single biggest challenge in creating things that are whole and realized and finished.
Stephen Pressfield wrote in his book The War of Art that “it’s not the writing part that’s hard. What’s hard is sitting down to write. What keeps us from sitting down is resistance.”
He is not wrong.
In part one of this series, we talked about how and why film editor Walter Murch’s famous Rule of Six works equally well for novelists. Now let’s break down each of the six rules:
The Rule of Six is a list of the six most important types of cuts a film editor should make, according to famed film editor Walter Murch in his book, In the Blink of an Eye. Though written for film editors, his suggestions make sense for novelists too.
Writing should inspire, motivate, educate, illuminate, inform, persuade, and engage. To do this, it has to rise above the basics and become something more.
In the first part in this series, we explored two introductions used in the television series The West Wing as an example of how to elevate writing from the barely functional to an art. Now let’s break down some practical steps you can take to elevate your writing.
Ten ways to improve your writing: