Category: Writing Tips

One of the things I’ve found myself doing lately (mainly because I struggle to write sequels–but that’s another post) is that I’ll write a story and then come back and write the story that happened before it (decades, centuries prior!).

I might even just focus on a small detail like the broken-down truck in a driveway. How did it get to that state?

What this allows me to do is similar to having an ending to my story before I start, in that I know what will happen. But it’s different in that it is a different story–likely even a different tone or genre.

And this informs that story that I already wrote, so that when I go back to edit the first story, I have new details, new threads to weave into the existing story. It becomes a conversation between the two tales that allows the change for additional depth I likely had not considered when I wrote the first story.

Even if one of the stories ends up not being up to par, you’ve accomplished a different way of improving the other story by having the knowledge of one of those stories to help flesh out the other.

As a reader, my favorite authors often surprise me with thing I didn’t know.

While reading is primarily something I look to for entertainment, I like when the entertainment educates me or treats me to some fact I would not have looked up on my own.

Don’t stress over making sure it’s an obscure fact, many people and most people don’t know everything, and chances are something so trivial to you is news to someone else.

People like secrets, too. We don’t often read about the lives we are already living. We want to know how others live, what other people know.

The clock has struck 8 o’clock in the PM. You haven’t written all day–certainly intended to, needed to–but you didn’t. But you can’t stay up late, you’re all out of energy. You know whatever you force yourself to write you’ll have to rewrite. Why did you wait so long?

Most of us have all experienced that feeling that ‘now’ just isn’t the time to write something. We argue we don’t have time, we’re too drowsy, we just ate, or we need to wake up more.

Everyone is different, but when I’m making a run at a novel or other daily writing goal, getting it out of the way first thing really opens up the rest of the day. With the writing requirement fulfilled it takes the weight of stress off finding a time to write.

So, pour that hot tea or coffee and knock it out before the rest of your day (and your mind) decide ‘now’ is not the time.

Vermillion is this bright red color that looks like a fresh brick or how we’ve imagined the planet Mars for so long before a rover landed on it.

It’s a very specific red. It feels like it has teeth.

If you told me a character showed up in a shiny red car, my expectation would be a regular sports car–or just a new car. But if you told me he showed up in a shiny vermillion car, now I’m imagining something classic, something expensive, and the person stepping out of it might very well be hazardous to my health.

When reading, we pass over words we’ve seen a lot. They are unconsciously absorbed and exchanged for the next word. Words like ‘the’ ‘a’ ‘is’, they hardly register. And really you want those words to just serve their function, but when it comes to describing a scene or setting a mood, we need words that will trigger a response.

Basic colors like ‘white, brown, black, green, red, gray, blue, yellow, orange, purple’ will hold little sway in invoking the kind of imagery that wakes a reader’s mind and strikes them with that visual that transports them from written word to your scene.

Try using specific shades rather than sticking to the parts of the color wheel we all learned in kindergarten.

Of course, if you overuse those specific colors, they’re likely to lose their impact.