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Top Tips For Writing

My poor characters ... :rolleyes:

The advice about not having too many characters is very good btw. I think I'm just on the right side of that rule though :cool: Minor characters are good in terms of moving the story along but they can get quite confusing!!

I just feel REALLY sorry for some of my characters, I've been looking back at the story and I mean one of my characters has OCD but that isn't even the worst of it. Another one's whole family gets killed in the story, two more (well, one of them isn't in the current story) had to escape various (real life) wars as kids, one of them was abused, another (minor) one's child gets killed in the story ...

Im such a lovely person ... :rolleyes:

I actually feel really guilty about some of it, I hate killing my characters, even when they haven't really had that big a part in the story. One of my main characters has to die in the second story, and I have to write about another of my characters' increasingly controlling and possessive relationship (without giving too much away) and I'm not looking forward to it at all.
 
zoooo said:
I really couldn't do the stopping mid sentence thing, although I can see its appeal. What if I forgot a really good ending to it?! :O
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Well yeah exactly ... :D

Another good tip is that when you haven't got anything to say, write about the characters' thoughts, on anything, what they think about the world around them, what they think about themselves, what they think about flowery wallpaper on the walls or whatever. It's really good if you've run out of ideas and you will probably get some new ideas while you're doing it. It's also really good way of getting to know your own characters better ...
 
Definitely true about not having too many characters. I mean, you can have loads of characters, but only a few main ones. Also, don't try to say everything, ever, in one book. I think these are mistakes everyone makes early on...
 
Remember, if you're worried about your pacing, plots, characterisation or dialogue, you're already a much better writer than most people who submit novels to publishers blithely unaware of the need for any of the above to have some thought put into them.
 
I write non-fiction, but I suppose a lot of the practical tips are much the same.

IME the important thing is just to get started, get something down on paper. There's nothing worse than dithering about trying to work out how to start, achieving nothing and feeling guilty about it. It's a downward spiral. If you can't do the beginning, start somewhere else and get something written even if it's a bit provisional. You can always come back and change it, and the momentum you gain from a good few days' writing helps carry you through the more difficult bits. So I found whilst writing up my PhD thesis, anyway, and it's worked for me a few times since.

The other thing IMHO it's important to be aware of is your own style. At the risk of sounding swollen-headed, I think I'm a pretty good writer but I have a tendency to use the passive voice more often than I should, and I repeat words. Words like 'distinctive,' 'significant,' 'however' and 'therefore' get used far too often, and I have to go back and reword sentences and sometimes whole paragraphs to iron out the repeats. It's something I'm workign at changing, but bad habits die hard!
 
That's true Roadkill. Someone described one of my earlier things as pretty good, but 'overwritten'. With the thing I'm working on now, well both things, I've tried to tone that down and make it much easier to read.
 
Some things that help me in writing fiction (to add to the best advice of all, which has been stated by many excellent posters here - 'Just start!'):

Always bear the reader in mind. Think: Okay, what do they know by now? How do I expect them to be feeling at this point? What do they still need/want to know? Is what I'm writing essential to what I want to say or am I just indulging myself? Are they going to turn the page? Would I turn the page?

Be concrete. Favour verbs and nouns over adverbs and adjectives. English is rich in groups of verbs that express many different shades of the same action. For example: you can describe someone as 'walking briskly' or 'walking slowly' or 'walking aimlessly', but it packs more of a verbal punch to say 'trots', 'dawdles' or 'meanders' or any of the other many verbs we have at our disposal. In English you can cry with a dozen different adverbs, but you can also weep, sob, wail, sniffle, howl, whimper, snivel, blub etc. You can laugh, but you can also titter, giggle, guffaw, chortle, chuckle, snigger, cackle etc.

Having said that, there is a case where the opposite is true. I think it helps to stick to the verbs 'say', 'ask', 'reply' and 'go on' as discourse markers, and shy away from verbs like 'utter', 'respond', 'explain', 'declare'. The actual dialogue and the action of the speaker should be sufficient to express the manner in which dialogue is delivered.

Also, dialogue is not a game of ping pong. Rarely do people simply speak and respond, ask and answer. Dialogue is the expression of thought and emotion, and it helps me to think when writing it, 'What are these characters thinking right now? How do they feel?'

Once you are more or less 'finished', set your piece of work aside somewhere and don't even look at it for a considerable chunk of time - at least a few weeks. The actual act of writing is so subjective that sometimes you can't see the shape of the thing, or feel the flow, or sense the pace, or detect any obvious weaknesses, whilst you continue to concentrate on the detail of the wording. Leaving it aside for a while affords a valuable objectivity. I usually come back to what I've written, and what I thought thought smelt of roses whilst writing it, and thankfully think, 'What a crock of shit!'

Then, be brutal in your editing. One way I do this is to say to myself, 'Okay, this is fifty pages. Let's imagine I've been told that I have to get it down to, say, forty.' It does wonders for the tautness of something when you force yourself to be economical with words. No cheating! No decreasing the point size, changing the font or making the margins narrower. I find I can usually say what I want to say in far fewer words than I think I need on first draft.

Finally, get your commas right and in the, right place. There is a difference between 'the guy who helped me yesterday is my friend' and 'the guy, who helped me yesterday, is my friend.'

Now, if only I could follow my own advice, this would be a much terser post. Sorry, reader.
 
Just keep battering away.

I'm working on this idea right now, but it's coming to me in bursts. I'm getting down between 300 and 1000 words in one evening, all little pieces of the bigger jigsaw. I'm going to keep finding the pieces, and know that with perseverance i'll run into the eureka moment which will tie it all down and allow further writing to get it all linked up. I can't plot it's course, because there's so much it could do. Right now it's just characterising - establishing relationships - working on dialogue habits, idiosyncrasies. They've got to live in my head before I can give them something to do.

(Plus, and this is a big one - a lot of the characters are very, very similar to people I knew once - and the actions are very, very similar to what actually happened. But not so close I can just write the history, you need your own creative input on it)

It's a mess at the minute, but over the next period of time (so, forever) i'll cut it and shape it into something I like :D
 
lontok2005 said:
Also, dialogue is not a game of ping pong. Rarely do people simply speak and respond, ask and answer. Dialogue is the expression of thought and emotion, and it helps me to think when writing it, 'What are these characters thinking right now? How do they feel?'
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^This. It breaks my heart to do it but sometimes I have to force myself to edit out some of my characters' witty ripostes and bursts of inspired, wisdom-laden rhetoric. Because people, for the most part, don't talk like that. You might be writing exactly what the character is thinking, expressing perfectly his or her view of the world or the situation they're in, but then you remember that people are rarely able to convey their thoughts and feelings to others with true clarity. Sometimes you need snappy dialogue, but sometimes it needs to be vague and confusing or have two characters just talking at random intervals without listening to each other at all. As long as you know what's going on in the characters' heads, it should come across to the reader one way or another.
 
I think I write too much in simple English. Also I would welcome someone's opinion on this - do song lyrics in between chapters etc that are somewhat relevant to the plot make it seem tacky?
 
frogwoman said:
I think I write too much in simple English. Also I would welcome someone's opinion on this - do song lyrics in between chapters etc that are somewhat relevant to the plot make it seem tacky?
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Highly contextual mate. It works or it doesn't. I'd say that if the writing is good enough I'll allw misplaced lyrics. If the writing aint good the most apt lyrical quote won't save the chapter.

Steven Erikson does it so well (OK he writes as poets and songmakers within his universe)
But his Fisher Kan Tel cycle is standalone brilliant
 
Cheesypoof said:
drink lots of wine and take loads of drugs.
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Poor advice re drink. At least for me. I find that when I'm drunk, I completely lose the inability to write. Not just from a coherence point of view, it kills my creativity. E comedowns, on the other hand.

ETA: Meant to say "E comedowns, on the other hand, can be quite creative, in a moribund kind of way"
 
RenegadeDog said:
Poor advice re drink. At least for me. I find that when I'm drunk, I completely lose the inability to write. Not just from a coherence point of view, it kills my creativity. E comedowns, on the other hand.
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i was kidding a bit. Lots of writers write more fluently when slightly tipsy, in my experience. Loads of my mates are writers, and i am too, and i definitely do it a little bit better after a glass of wine.

certain drugs can help too, but we aint supposed to say that as its one of those taboos society thinks is 'wrong' but it isnt!
 
Cheesypoof said:
i was kidding a bit. Lots of writers write more fluently when slightly tipsy, in my experience. Loads of my mates are writers, and i am too, and i definitely do it a little bit better after a glass of wine.

certain drugs can help too, but we aint supposed to say that as its one of those taboos society thinks is 'wrong' but it isnt!
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I come up with great ideas when drunk, jot them down then the next morning read it and think "wtf is all that supposed to mean?" :D

So then it's the old, "I won't write it down, I'll just remember the idea" patter which never seems to bear much fruit either lol.
 
I remember my brother telling me about trying to write on acid. He thought he'd written a 900 page opus. The next day he looked and it was two, completely random, words! :D :D :D
 
Some great tips here, I'm thinking of starting to write but would like to know what people think about creative writing courses. Are they worthwhile?
 
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