When you’re just getting started with writing, learning all of the rules and techniques can be tough. Even though Not Quite Sure is dedicated to the writers feeling unsure, we don’t think it’s fair to let you struggle alone. This post will hopefully provide you with advice on a range of problems to scare away your fears. Coming up: tips on how to beat writer’s block, editing tips, and developing your style. Each of these categories will be clearly marked, so feel free to pick and choose whichever area you need help with most, or just read the whole thing!
Editing
Editing is a whole beast, and it’s a hard thing to start unless you already know what to do. This section will give some advice, and explain the things you may expect to encounter while you edit. To begin with, I think we should establish a base sentence that you can use to practice all of the advice in this post. So let’s make a sentence! How about…
The blue river ran lazily through the valley.
Now, the first step of writing is to come up with your content, however bad it might seem in its first version. And that’s important to remember. A first draft is for getting the idea down and making the basics clear. Is there a blue river in a valley? Yes, yes there is. And if that’s what you need to express, that’s what you write. You may find it natural to include all the details right away, but it’s okay for a first, or further, draft to be a mess. That’s why it’s just a draft.
A second draft is where you start to refine the content, to edit. In the case of the example sentence, the river isn’t described very much, and neither is the valley. If you aren’t putting the focus there purposefully then that’s fine, but if this is a big setting in the story as a whole, you might want to describe it a bit more. Try visualising the space, or think simply about what it would like to be there. How do the key features of the setting look?
The valley was surrounded by snow-capped mountains. It was home to dark clots of earth and mud pits like quicksand, waiting to devour unfortunate bucks as they grazed. Down the middle, splitting it like an axe through wood, the river gushed, all the way to the sea. It shone blue on cloudy days, and pure white on those when the pale sun reared its head.
For a main setting, the additional details - while making the sentence into a paragraph - make a much more vivid picture for readers. Word count worries aside, making descriptions longer can improve your piece. A good way to test your descriptions is to pretend you’re drawing the thing based on what’s written. If you need to use your writerly knowledge of the world to make it look accurate, then you need more description. Unless, of course, you’re aiming to create a blank space where readers can put their own thoughts.
It’s also useful to consider the other senses. Is there a character who smells or feels something? Perhaps the wind makes them cold, or they approach the river and it brings new details to them.
Fish struggled to keep up with the current, and their thrashing bodies sprayed icy drops onto her. Her shudders distracted her from the stench of rot, which permeated the air around the countless bones picked clean by vultures. She swallowed her disgust and blinked away the tears drawn to her eyes by the sharp wind.
These are just some ways that you can make your world richer, and immerse readers. Other simpler ways are also useful to remember. Removing words like ‘see’ or ‘feel’ can change a reader’s perspective. For example, saying that a character sees something will have the reader imagining the character seeing it, but saying that it was there will have them seeing it for themselves.
She saw a monolith covered in vines, with carved sigils that pulsed with blue light.
or
A monolith loomed in the middle of the room, covered with vines and carvings of sigils that pulsed with blue light.
It is a simple change, but one that can be very effective. Another easy thing is to use the ‘simple’ words. Interesting adjectives are great, but showing off your vocabulary is not always the right thing to do. Using words that are often said to be overused - said being one of them - will help them blend into the page.
She persuades, ‘How can you say no to this offer?’ - ‘I guess I can’t,’ he admits. - She grins, promising him, ‘You won’t regret this.’
or
She asks, ‘How can you say no to this offer?’ - ‘I guess I can’t.’ - She grins. ‘You won’t regret this.’
How you write is entirely up to you, and if you enjoy using longer or ‘fancier’ words, absolutely use them! But it is a fact that simpler words fly under the radar, and can help you get a point across without slowing the pace of the story.
Filler words are also something to look out for. Words like ‘just’ or ‘that’, and most adverbs will find their way into your work but add little to it. Read through your piece, or even search for them. If they don’t change the meaning of your sentence then you can cut them. I managed to remove 150 words from my novel by cutting out one single word: just. It will sharpen up your work and is one of the easiest ways to edit.
Otherwise, editing has a few major things to care about. Pacing, character, plot and readability. The aforementioned tips are all readability related, but you can also make something more readable by making it interesting. This interacts with the other three elements. Plot holes are an infamous part of the writing community. Read over your work, decide if the plot you have come up with is interesting, does it make sense? And remember to pick wisely what medium you use to write it. Some stories work best in shorter formats, some in full length novels. Pick what works best, and don’t be afraid to realise that, actually, it isn’t good as a novel, or as a short story. Being able to confront these problems and move forwards with the solution is the best thing, and finding these issues means that you’re a good enough writer to know better, so don’t be embarrassed.
In terms of pacing, you want a story that is constantly moving but without being too fast. Action sequences are usually faster than conversations, but you get to play around with pacing to show the importance of some moments and how they feel for your character. If your character is panicking, things may feel too fast, or too slow, and adjusting the pace can make the reader feel their panic too. To demonstrate the differences:
The clock hand swung forwards, each movement punctuated by a tick. The man rifled through his papers, mumbling to himself and sighing when the paper eluded him again and again. Tick. Tick. She looked at the plant in the corner. The window was open, a breeze ruffling through the leaves and bringing in the hot air of the city. It was tinged with exhaust fumes, cars choking as their engines buckled under the sun. Choking. She tugged her collar and began to twitch in time with that grating ticking. Tick. Tick. He pulled the paper free and waved it. ‘Here it is.’
or
The hand jolted forward with a tick, tick, tick. Paper ruffled as his hands deftly searched for the right piece. Wind blew in through the window. Leaves rustled on the plant. It stank of stale, hot car fumes. She tugged her collar. Choking cars…choking. He pulled the paper free. ‘Here it is.’
Which of those seemed faster paced? Think about how you can use sentence structures to speed up or slow down the pace. Commas are where you take a breath, so more commas and clauses per sentence means a slower pace. Short and punchy sentences make something faster. You also want to make key moments a big deal, and unimportant ones less big. Spending a page introducing a character who is important to the story is better than using a page to introduce a random waiter. That said, John Steinbeck did the opposite of this in The Grapes of Wrath. Between chapters about his main characters, he included 2-10 page chapters that lingered on characters who would never appear again, and had never been presented to readers before. It showed how the characters he chose to focus on for the book were not the only ones experiencing the effects of the Depression. He explored how daily life was for people in different vocations and situations. It slowed the pace but let the story cover a much wider scope of humanity which lended to its brilliance.
After the plot, the main thing you’ll focus on in the planning stage is character. Character, interacting with pace, is something you want to get right. Characters that readers love are able to bring an audience to the end of the story. But a character a reader is supposed to hate can also make them want to see how the story pans out. To make a character work, regardless of whether or not readers root for them, you just have to make them realistic. Everyone has flaws, quirks and interests. Make a backstory, give them hobbies and specific speech patterns. If I was a character, I would say ‘like’ or ‘you know’ a lot, and would organise my life around my writing, reading and the F1 schedule. A character based on me might therefore say:
‘I’d love to hang out with you, I just have to, like, do it during the week. There’s a race this weekend and I wanted to finish my book first, you know?’
Weirdness of writing myself out of the way, I feel as if you get the idea about who this character is even if you don’t know much about them. They’re writing a book and clearly take it seriously if they’re avoiding hanging out with friends to do it. They’re also a race fan, who puts that before friends when they can. They’re a person with a life, and even if they’re just a side character, you understand a bit about them. The same goes for flaws. You don’t have to acknowledge that a character is flawed to the camera like you're in The Office. Simply show how your character is perhaps selfish, or materialistic, by having them speak about things, or through their actions. Making characters more than how they serve the plot is the way to make them good.
All of these things can be improved in the editing stages, by reading your work over and focusing on one at a time. Go from big to small; whole piece, chapter, paragraph, sentence, word. Make each thing better and better and don’t worry about how many drafts it takes. A super helpful thing to do is pass your work to someone who will read it and give feedback. Beta-readers are these such people. They can give feedback ranging from ‘hey, this is pretty good’ to ‘this line is confusing and could be punctuated better’ to ‘the use of this word evokes the wrong feeling for this paragraph’s intent’. Being comfortable sharing you work can improve it dramatically. It’s also not something that’s super easy at times, but the community should be kind - and have always been both gentle but helpful in my experience - so don’t feel too put off by sharing.
If that’s not your level of comfort yet, try taking a break. Read the piece over with fresh eyes after a week or so away and it’ll be a lot clearer. If you’re eager to work on it, try putting it on a different screen or print it out, etc. so you’re not seeing the same exact thing all the time until it becomes a blur. Reading it aloud and treating it like another writer’s work are good, too. It’s great to take breaks and change it up when you’re editing, and making notes on a second read through (not the first) can let you really figure out the changes before you start making them.
There’s a lot to editing, but hopefully this has helped you feel less overwhelmed with where to start. And there are a lot of resources online for editing your own work, so try to remember that you’re not alone when things start to feel rough.
Developing Your Style
The thing people constantly talk about when they love an author’s work, is how their style is. You might panic because, let’s face it, who really knows their style? I have one and I still couldn’t easily define it beyond me being a lover of commas. However, there are some things you can do to make your writing more you. The first is to get into the zone. That means that you feel like the writing is flowing out of you, rather than you forcing it to happen. It can be difficult to get there, but don’t worry too hard, it’ll just happen.
To develop your style, you need to keep writing. Find what feels natural and don’t care too much about how similar it seems or doesn’t seem to the writing you see elsewhere. It can help to read a lot of books, different types and also the same genre that you write. I personally love modern classics, modern literature holding my heart, but I also read classics and contemporary stories. I don’t pick by genre, though I have ones I prefer and am more drawn to, and I’ve noticed that the best books are ones that make me want to write. Your style will come through when your passion is there, and there’s no real way to make it happen, but you could try some exercises in writing. That basically means that you write in different styles and see if anything calls to you. Read a book you like and emulate that style. For Lewis Carroll’s style, you might use a lot of wordplay and absurdist ideas. You could use a lot of descriptive writing or very minimal descriptions. You’re flexing your writing muscle, and so you need to just keep writing different things and see what sticks.
Writer’s Block
To do all of the above (editing, developing your style) you need to write. But there’s this one things that gets in the way of that: the dreaded “writer’s block”. This is something that can take hold of you and refuse to be shaken off. But have no fear! Here are a few things to try to loosen its grip.
Look at something and write a description of it
This could be literally anything, from a single item to a whole landscape. It could even be a picture of something. But you will be using your writing skills to recreate it on the page and it’ll stop you from losing your touch, if nothing else.
Write a letter from a character to either themself or another character
This can be done with your own characters or someone else’s, but you’re trying to capture their voice and develop the conversational skills in writing without the pressure of adding to a draft. A letter can be discarded or used however you like, and is often easier to do as you can be descriptive or simply transcribe events. Note: letter to themself usually would mean a letter to their future or past-self, but could be to their current-self if your worldbuilding creates interesting situations asking for that.
Write about your character in a small segment that would never make the cut in your piece
To do this, imagine your character is going to the beach, or having a party. Anything that is completely superfluous, write that. You’re going to take away the pressure and simply write something because it’s fun and to develop your characters while you do it.
Ignore it
It might seem impossible, but writing through the block can sometimes make it go away. Your work may suck for a while, but if you push yourself over the hill, it’ll be smooth sailing on the way down. I’ve written some terrible words trying to just get through it, but it’s never as bad as it feels when you look back, and it’s fixable in later drafts.
Take a break
Sometimes, it’s a sign. Writer’s block could just be your brain’s way of telling you to take some time off. It’s great to write a lot and be consistent, but if you think about it as a job, it’s important to take breaks. You wouldn’t go to work in a factory every day for 8+ hours and then get confused that your body was getting tired. Your brain is a muscle that is exercised by your writing. Taking breaks is good and can clear away your block, or even prevent it in the first place. Place a game or go for a walk, maybe even read. Do anything else and see how it goes.
The main thing with writer’s block, is that it’s different for everyone. Some people feel blocked for a few hours, but you might get blocked for years. It’ll come and go, or maybe it won’t. Just do what feels right to you, and take the pressure off.
That’s all the writing advice for now, but tell us if you have any specific concerns and we’ll get back to you! We’re all about supporting writers, and we can’t wait to see what you’ve got to offer.
Happy writing.
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