Category: Writing tips

23 fun ways to be productive despite writer’s block

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Image by Drew Coffman

After waiting for it all week, you’re finally settling in at your computer with a giant mug of tea. You open your novel-in-progress. You scroll to the blank space at the end. You stretch your fingers.

And nothing happens.

You don’t feel like writing. You’re still tired from the mad work week. Your brain hasn’t woken up yet. You need to start the laundry, balance the checkbook and scrub out the tub. And this scene is boring. And you’re not really sure what happens next. Well, you know what happens next, but you don’t know how to get from here to there and it’s just not coming!

No use in wasting time staring at your computer (or, more likely watching YouTube videos and checking Pinterest). Here are 23 fun things you can experiment with to make your novel better while you wait for inspiration to strike.

  1. Cut 50 words from the previous page.
  2. Find creative ways to eliminate five adverbs (seach “ly” using the Find tool to find them).
  3. Go back to the previous scene and add a detail that reveals something about a character.
  4. Outline your villain’s evil plan.
  5. Jot down five alternate titles for the book.
  6. Write five alternate first sentences.
  7. Try moving chapter breaks around. See if every chapter can end in a cliffhanger.
  8. Go back to the previous action scene (fight, chase, whatever) and experiment with shortening all the sentences. Try using more incomplete sentences.
  9. Find a place where you use a color to describe something (brown, grey, green, yellow) and replace/supplement the name of the color with the name of an item (e.g. chocolate, dust, moss, straw).
  10. In the scene in which you are stuck, think of the most ridiculous thing that could happen next.
  11. Think of the most surprising (but plausible) thing that could happen next.
  12. Have a chat with your protagonist. Ask if he would rather do something else.
  13. Turn on some music that matches the feel of the scene you are trying to write (heavy metal for a battle scene, classical violin for a death scene, etc.) and free write whatever comes into your head.
  14. Write a scene that comes much later but that you’ve been dying to get to.
  15. Find your longest paragraph so far and shorten it by a third.
  16. Pick a minor character (even one you haven’t named) and write a short story about them.
  17. Add scents to two of your scenes (the sweaty corn chip smell of a teenager’s bedroom, the sharp blend of bleach and urine in a public restroom, etc.).
  18. Pick another scene and remove all visual description, supplementing with only sound, scent, taste, and touch.
  19. Read a chapter of that book on writing that’s been gathering dust for the last few months.
  20. Find five verbs in the previous chapter and replace them with more descriptive synonyms. Bonus points if you can eliminate some more adverbs, too (“walking quickly” becomes “sneaking”).
  21. Find five places where you can cut out dialogue tags (he said, she said), without sacrificing clarity.
  22. Pick one character and give them a nervous quirk, like biting their nails or smoothing their mustache. Comb your manuscript for good places to add it in.
  23. You know those notes you make when you get a brilliant idea? The ones you hardly ever look at again? Reread them.

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Now you have no excuse. Go play!

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8 cool ways to get close to your characters

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Image by Okko Pyykko.

People who aren’t writers don’t know the extent of background work that goes into writing a novel—how much plot, setting and character development we write that never appears on the published page.

This is a list of a few of those things.

If you find you have a flat, boring, predictable character—or possibly an unpredictable one, whom you can’t force to do anything he is supposed to do—you probably just don’t know him well enough. Here are some icebreaker exercises to get you two acquainted.

  1. Outline a short history of his (or her) life. Born in this type of neighborhood, went to this type of school, had these types of friends, had this first job, was obsessed with this brand of beef jerky, etc. Include all the major emotional events—moving to another town, death in the family, spelling bee won, heart broken, etc. Check every scene in your novel against this history. Does the character’s emotional reaction match his background? (I recently realized that, in my novel, I had recreated the most traumatic event of one character’s childhood, but he endured it with no signs of inner turmoil: not even a flashback. Don’t let this happen to you! Don’t waste a good chance to add drama!)
  1. Write a traumatic scene from his childhood. Pick one part of that history and actually write it out. It can be as traumatic as his parents’ violent deaths or just losing his mom in the grocery store for five minutes, or seeing a scary movie. This’ll help you figure out his deepest fears and how he reacts to them as an adult.
  1. Describe his “emotional acre.” This tip from Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird. She says we are each born with a sort of imaginary acre of land we can do whatever we want with. Plant vegetables or hold an eternal garage sale, that sort of thing. Based on what you now know about your character’s life, figure out what’s in his emotional acre. What does he nurture, hoard, or leave to ruin? With that in mind, ask what he carries in his pockets (or her purse), or keeps in his sock drawer.
  1. Write a stream of consciousness piece from his point of view. Even if you’re not writing in first person (or if you are, but this character isn’t the narrator), step into his head for half an hour and look through his eyes and read his thoughts. Write down what you discover.
  1. Write what people say about him behind his back. How others see him will reveal a lot about him—even is it isn’t all true. How does he stand? How does he sit? How does his posture change when he is bored or nervous? Do people misinterpret his body language? What are the worst rumors about him? How much of it is true?
  1. Write his eulogy—as written by some of your other characters. What people say about him after his death can be even more revealing. Are they afraid to speak ill of him, or was he such a jerk that no one cares? Do they remember nice things about him they had long forgotten? Do they wonder how they’ll go on without him?
  1. Take the Meyers-Briggs personality test for him. Now that you’ve got a feel for him, answer this series of yes or no questions on his behalf. At the end, they’ll tell you his personality type, give you some essays about that type, and a list of fictional and real characters who have/had the same personality. Read it all!
  1. Give him breathing space. You may go through several drafts of your novel, the character shifting with each draft. His actions and speech will change as you learn more about him, and you may discover things about him that force you to alter your plot. Go with it. Don’t try to force him into a box. In a strange twist that parallels Judeo/Christian theology, if you don’t give your characters free will, they will be boring, soulless robots.

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What Meyers-Briggs personality type is your character? Tell me in the comments! (I’ve got an INTJ and an INSJ.)

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5 query-writing tips you can learn from my horrible experience

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Facepalm! [img by striatic]

Years ago, naively believing my novel was finished, I submitted a draft of a query letter to an online community called Writers Net for feedback. The query was horrible, and several people offered advice.

I wrote draft after draft based on a myriad of tips, but never seemed to make any progress. We all got frustrated, zingers were exchanged, more patient folk tried to explain again and again, and eventually I stupidly decided to go with an excerpt of the book, and left the forum. To my chagrin, you can still find the entire conversation when you Google my name.

But now that I have a successful query letter (if not a finished novel), I stopped to wonder what went wrong on that forum. To find out, I trekked back to the scene of the crime and reread 4+ pages of facepalm moments and harsh reminders of the gross literary inadequacies of my youth (which wasn’t even that long ago).

Here, I pinpoint where things went wrong—and explain how you can avoid the same mistakes.

 

1. We didn’t understand one another

We were all writing English, but I didn’t really understand what they were telling me and they didn’t understand why. I should have realized this when, after several drafts, I wasn’t getting any closer.

Lesson learned: If you need feedback, don’t post your work on a public forum (or blog) run by strangers. Get to know the people first. Read their other posts. Make sure you understand their semantics and respect their opinions before you ask them for advice.

 

2. Conflicting advice

Some said to focus on the protagonist, forget the alternate story; others said to focus on the way the two stories fit together. Some said to simply state the connection between the two; others said that was boring. Some even posted examples of successful queries that broke major rules. And since I didn’t know these people, I didn’t know whose opinion to choose.

Lesson learned: If getting advice from a group, don’t try to please all of them. See if you can identify and solve one general problem they all agree you have. (I had two: the hook was confusing and boring.)

3. I didn’t know what “show, don’t tell” meant for a query letter

I asked how “just tell us what it’s about” fit in with “show, don’t tell,” but they didn’t understand the conflict. I’ve since learned: Telling in a query letter refers to fluff language like “gripping,” “page-turner,” “heartwarming,” or anything that tells the agent how the book is going to make them feel.

Lesson learned: Don’t tell the agent how to feel – tell them the parts of the story that will make them feel that way. (Read more about showing vs. telling here.)

4. They kept telling me what was missing, but not what was needed

Chop a book down to two paragraphs and of course things will be missing. Anyone can point out what isn’t there, from the villain’s motive to what makes the protagonist relatable. But that doesn’t mean these things belong in the query. I kept cramming facts in, but the real problem wasn’t that it lacked information: it was just boring.

Lesson learned: Write down the most interesting (yet plot-relevant) facts about your characters, world, and story. Try building your hook around those things.

5. I attempted to tell what the story was really about

This is what everyone tells you to do, and what they told me to do. But it’s wrong.

Lesson learned: If your plot is complex, you cannot tell what it is “really” about. You don’t have the space. Instead, tell what the story seems to be about, in the first fifty pages of the book. (More on that in this post about hook-writing.)

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Have you ever had a bad experience with an online writing community? What did you learn from it?

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6 ways first person narrators can describe themselves

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Photo by Sodanie Chea

Photo by Sodanie Chea

If your main character is narrating the story, how do they describe themselves? You could just start in “I have long blonde hair and blue eyes,” but somehow it feels like the next part should be “and I like long walks on the beach.”

It’s awkward for a reason: normal people don’t walk around reminding themselves of their own hair color, eye color and height.

That’s why the mirror is such a bad cliché. I don’t know about you, but when I look in the mirror, I’m not thinking “I have brown hair and brown eyes,” I’m thinking “Man, my teeth are really starting to look coffee stained. I need to do a serious peroxide rinse.”

So unless your protagonist is surveying the results of his face transplant, try one of these alternatives.

1. Don’t describe him at all

Do your readers have to know what the protagonist looks like to understand the plot? If not, consider leaving it out altogether. After all, you want your reader to look through the hero’s eyes, not at them.

Especially if your character is only “average-looking.” Average-ness implies itself and need not be explained. That’s like saying water is wet.

2. Give it to your reader straight

This one is dependant on the style of narration. If you are actually telling the story to someone (with frequent quirky asides to your “dear reader”), rather than telling a story that someone else just happens to read, your hero can simply describe himself during introductions. But be warned: don’t try to force it if this isn’t your style.

3. Embarrass them

Make them self-conscious about a physical flaw. She only smiles close-mouthed because she’s embarrassed by the gap in her teeth. He wishes he had biceps like the head jock.

If you want to get all the important details in at once, have someone super good looking stare at them, to make them extra aware of all their flaws, like John Green does when The Fault in Our Stars protagonist Hazel notices hot boy Augustus is staring at her in their cancer support group, and she thinks about her jeans that sag in weird places, unbrushed pageboy haircut, and ridiculously fat chipmunked cheeks – a side effect of chemo. A laundry list, but the thought flow is logical and natural.

4. Compare and contrast with another character

“My daughter has my crooked smile, but her father’s blue eyes.” or, “We were the strangest pair you’ve ever seen. I was tall and stringy, he was short and pudgy. Standing next to each other, we looked like a lowercase ‘b.’ Or ‘d,’ depending on who was on which side.” These can even create a poetic effect, as you can simultaneously compare and contrast personality traits as well.

5. Use dialogue

Her best friend gently explains dark roots are out of fashion. His father remarks he really ought to cut his hair (he looks like a hippie). Her enemy asks if she’s a natural redhead. Use compliments (“I with I had your thighs!”) and nicknames (Shorty, Stringbean, Pineapple Head).

6. Show, don’t tell

Don’t try to describe the character all at once, but little by little, showing, not telling. If they are short, have them struggle to reach something most others could get. If tall, have them duck through doorways. If they are unattractive, make them self-conscious around people of the opposite sex. If attractive, have others flirt with them. This is a figurative mirror – your hero’s appearance is reflected in the way other characters react to it.

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How do you describe your narrator? Tell us in the comments!

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girl looking in mirror

Describe your main character without the tired old “looking in the mirror” cliche.

AIDA aftermath: 4 ways the last few blog posts have changed my novel

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bang head against wall

photo by Eamon Curry

In case any of you are agonizing over changes you have to make to your work in progress due to something you learned in the AIDA blog series, rest assured: I am drinking bucketfuls of my own medicine.

Title

I’ve been holding onto the same vague title for years. It sort of means something if you’ve read the book. Sort of. By itself it is unremarkable. I know I can do better.

First Chapter

  • Trimmed some fat from my opening scene – including most of my main character’s physical description – to make room for actual character development, punchier dialogue, and an extra layer of depth that makes the perfect precursor to the rest of the book.
  • Cut a net total of 1,304 words from that chapter.

Second Chapter

My second chapter is actually the beginning of the alternate story – one that connects to the main story but not perceptibly until much later. I offer no explanation at this point. We are simply following one character and one story in the first chapter, and an entirely different character in a different setting in the second. Mere days after realizing this egregious error, I heard one of my beta readers found it disorienting.

Why is it beta readers never seem to tell you what’s wrong with your work until after you’ve figured it out yourself?

Anyway, I added some explanatory narrative at the beginning to introduce the new story and hint at the connections without giving anything away. I also cut a few hundred words.

The Entire Middle of the Whole Bloody Book

In the midst of my quest for tips on writing a page-turner, I realized something life-changing and consequently left this sentence in my Evernote app:

ONE AT A TIME, DUH!

Translation: the order in which I introduced the five characters in the main story was all wrong. I’d made my main character the last to join the group, which meant she met all four others within paragraphs of one another, and I had to pour out oodles of backstory about who each one was and how they got there and where “there” was and what they all thought of each other and how they reacted to meeting her.

I was shooting myself in the foot with a bazooka.

So I’m both changing the order and spreading things out. She’ll spend a few days with the first person she meets, actually experiencing a couple of things I only summarized in previous drafts, and meet additional characters over the next few chapters – instead of over the next few sentences.

In short, I’ll be permanently cutting several scenes I’ve rewritten dozens of times, and adding other scenes I have never written before. I’m angry, excited, exhausted, and relieved all at the same time.

 

In case you missed it here’s a rundown of the whole series:

Attention

Interest

Desire

Action

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Has the AIDA blog series led you to make any painful changes to your WIP? Rant in the comments!

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