“ The most valuable lessons are those where the teacher is yourself”.
Stephen King
Being a new writer is hard. You don’t know where to start or how to continue your novel. There’s so much information out there that things start getting confusing really fast and we crumble under the weight of it all. I know how it feels, I’ve been there, on the edge of frustration and almost on the limit of giving up. If you are in the early stages of your journey as a writer, then do not stop reading this article, we have good tips you can start applying to your writing right away.
I know, you’re probably eager to write your first bestseller and be recognized worldwide… But, that can take time.
The world of authors cannot be simplified to sitting down and writing. All the books that you have read, ALL OF THEM, went through a process of revision, correction of errors, even many of the chapters that it had initially may have been eliminated, so, I want you to understand that starting a career as a writer will take time, dedication and study.
But, I don’t want you to be scared, let’s start step by step. If you are a newbie writer just starting in this world, all the tips that we bring you today will help you take a step forward in this career you’ve chosen.
1. Embrace your flaws
Everybody has flaws. Nobody out there is perfect. Not even the authors you admire and that have created awesome masterpieces. The learning curve for writing is very steep and it will take you, and everybody else pursuing this career path, a lot of time to reach a point in which you have mastered the craft and even then, there will still be a lot of things to discover.
Perfection will only come with practice and experience, failing and getting up again. Some people say that it takes an average of 4 written books in order to produce quality writing. This means that the first thing you’re going to write is always going to be let’s say… in the absence of another word… crappy. What to do then? Embrace the crap, write it out.
You have to write all that bad stuff at the top out so the really good juicy stuff can flow out. Always assume that you still have a lot to learn. Many writers out there think that the first draft they write is good and ready to send to a good publisher and that it’s ready to crack the market. I’m going to save you some disappointments in the future. No first draft is ready for publishing. First drafts are baby novels. The book is not finished. There are still a lot of things that need to happen to take that draft to a good place. But this is a normal process and is true for all writers out there that have ever published a book.
So, work in your craft continuously, always assuming that it is not perfect. Get other people in the writing community to read your work. Ask for their opinions on what you wrote and for ways in which you could improve that. The learning process never ends.
On the contrary, if you assume there’s not growing left for you, that you’ve reached the very best, then my friend, you won’t be spending time learning and working on your craft.
2. Skip the Boring parts
We tend to get lost in the details. Many newbie writers start writing a book by going through all the details of one day in the life of the main character. They include the whole routine: he woke up, brushed his teeth, had breakfast, went to work, blah blah blah, stop! I’m bored. Readers are not interested in this kind of detail. They want action, and when I say action, I don’t mean a shooting scene, Hollywood style. I mean conflict, intrigue, unanswered questions.
It is super important that the first chapter convinces, captures the reader’s attention. It’s the entrance ticket readers have to your world, your story, so, you have to make sure you nail it.
Read this article if you want to learn how to write the perfect 1st chapter!!
Try to start with something intriguing, for example, a girl running through the forest, fleeing from a group of hungry wolves, with this simple beginning you are suggesting two questions: Why was the girl in a forest in the middle of nowhere? Will the wolves eat her or will she escape?
This tip doesn’t only apply to beginnings. You have to apply it to the whole story. Are your characters traveling and nothing interesting really happens?, well I don’t need to know much about the travel, then. Just summarize that part into a couple of sentences and that’s it. Are they in the middle of an investigation, but they have no new clues for a few days? Same rule applies. Just move forward to the point in which something really happens.
And just like this, my dear friend, you will keep your reader interested and away from the typical ” hope the next chapter is better than this”.
3. Beware of adverbs
First of all, let’s remember what an adverb is. Adverbs are those words that describe a verb, an action. They can express quantity, place, time, mode, among others, but, specifically, the ones we should worry about the most are the adverbs of quantity (a lot , too much, little) and adverbs of manner (such as, and those ending in –ly).
It’s very common in amateur writing that instead of looking for the exact word, we just use any verb and modify it using an adverb. This practice makes our writing look lazy and unprofessional. Let’s look at this examples:
He walked fast/ He rushed
She talked loudly/ She screamed
He talked very low / He whispered
The truth is that using more powerful verbs helps you create a more intense moment for the actions in your book, they will give your characters more agency and your text will look cleaner and more elegant.
Of course, we are not saying that you need to exorcise your manuscript for adverbs, just make sure that their use is absolutely necessary and that you can’t express the idea by just using one powerful verb.
4. Avoid long descriptions
Don’t get me wrong. Descriptions are important. You need your readers to understand everything about your protagonists, how and where they live, and what kind of person they are, how they look like, thus they can fall in love with your characters. However, too much description and especially extended descriptions at the beginning of your novel (infodumps) can be boring, and will not attract the reader.
Readers don’t want you to tell them how cold the weather is, they want to feel it. Show them how your protagonist shivers and how she feels trapped in so many layers of clothing.
If you necessarily have to describe something, like a new location on the story or just the world in general, try to keep it short. Don’t use more than two paragraphs to describe the new place and don’t fixate on the little elements. Try to integrate the setting with the story and mention what is relevant when it is relevant to the story.
Check this article for more tips on how to become a better writer.
5. Consider your characters as real people
Treat your characters as real people, make them tridimensional. Do they have a job? family? a life prior to the events in the story? Make all of that a part of their story, simply because all of that is part of real-life and it matters to them.
Devote some time to developing your characters. Give them hopes, dreams and even fears they wouldn’t dare to say out loud. Make them relatable, living creatures, with flaws and virtues.
Something that has worked for me when I’m in a plotter mood is creating a character sheet for every character of my story. That doesn’t mean that we will spend hours working on every detail in their lives, or that I’m going to include all those details in the story. But make sure, that all of them have motifs to do what they do.
If you want to know more about crafting strong and compelling characters and are looking for a good character profile template check this article.
Some common mistakes are to have your love interest be only that, a love interest, and the fact that the sidekick lives to protect and support the main character. Real life doesn’t work like that. I know. This is fiction. But readers want characters they can identify with and there’s more to a person than being a good friend to someone or that someone’s love interest. Give them layers and unfold them to your readers.
6. Work on your dialogue
I don’t know if it has happened to you that you’re reading a novel and you get the feeling that some of its dialogues just don’t sound natural. They don’t feel like actual dialogues, and sometimes they are just out of place, the characters say something that in real life would have been simply nonsense or awkward.
Pay special attention to the dialogue in your novel, since it shows the progress of your characters’ relationship. Fill it with emotions and make them believable.
To achieve this. There’re a few things you can do:
- You could write all the dialogue first and leave all the dialogue tags for later. Sometimes dialogue tags come in the way and force you to stop your natural train of thought for a normal conversation.
- Listen to your friends and family. How do they talk? What words do they use to express certain emotions? Try to emulate them.
- Search for some apps that can read the manuscript back to you. That can help to determine if it sounds natural or not. You could also read it out loud.
7. Create strong conflicts
Writing a novel is writing the story of a conflict. There are different types of conflict, but that’s another topic for another blog post. What matters now is defining what a weak conflict is. You have a weak conflict, roughly, when it can be solved easily, with a simple decision or a change of mind. For instance, a man who falls in love with a German woman, but he hates Germans because he is a Jew who lost his mother during World War II, or a woman who was betrayed by her ex-boyfriend and now is afraid of loving again. These are examples of simple, weak conflicts.
Take your time; analyze the idea you have for your story. Ask yourself if the conflict is strong enough, if it can be fixed or improved. Create a strong conflict that would require much more work to be solved. Complicated resolutions hold the attention of the reader till the climax of the novel, and will make your story seem more real.
Summing Up…
Being a new writer means that we have a lot of things to learn. And that’s completely normal, since you are just at the beginning of a difficult yet exciting journey. It’s part of the process. Just stay consistent and learn as much as you can. Little by little, you’ll be able to look back and see all the progress you’ve accomplished.
Try applying these tips we brought you today to you writing. You don’t have to try them all at the same time, but you can consider which one(s) you think you need to work the most and start from there.
If you have any other tips that could help others, please, leave them in the comments.
