General writing tips Archives

How to improve your fiction writing

Writing is not an easy job. It involves lots of hard work and solitary hours bashing away at the keyboard, trying to create something interesting.

It can be lonely and frustrating, and you have to deal with other villains too, like writer’s block, self-doubt and procrastination.

I’ve definitely been there and dealt with all the common struggles writers go through (you can read about them in my previous blogs, From beginner to author – what I’ve learned, part 1 and part 2).

It can be a rough and bumpy road, this writing gig, but if you love it you’ve got to learn to deal with the bad stuff and just keep on going. Keep striving to be better.

But how do you get better?

In this blog I will share the many ways you can improve on your writing.

Practice

First and foremost, like any other skill, if you want to get better you’ve got to practice. It’s like building a muscle. If you want to get stronger, you’ve got to put in the work to get there.

Practice writing every day, or at least most days of the week, even if it’s just for five minutes. You can do this without having a writing project going on too. The more you write, the better you’ll get at it.

Want to write a novel one day but don’t feel confident in your writing skills just yet? Why not try honing your skills with writing prompts and/or short stories for six months to a year beforehand?

Write Now by Ellie Marney is chock-full of over 90 creative writing prompts for you to cut your writing teeth on.

Keep a journal

You can also practice writing by journaling every day. Sharpen your writing skills by describing a scene or a setting of your choice using all some or all of your senses – sight, sound, touch, taste and hearing.

Write down everyday observations, or just describe how you’re feeling on the day – this can have therapeutic benefits too.

Literature is also, a curiously intimate way of communicating with people whom you will never meet.
– Julian Barnes

If you want to try something a bit different in your journal, experiment by trying a bit of free writing.

This is just writing whatever comes into your head, without any pausing or back-editing. This is both good writing practice and a good ideas generator.

Some writers do a bit of free writing before they start working on their novel for the day.

Keep it simple

If a sentence is too wordy, it makes it hard to read. Are there any words or phrases you can leave out?

Can the language be simpler or more direct? Can one word say what you mean instead of two?

Simple sentences are much easier to read than complicated ones.

Kill your darlings

Are you over-explaining things and adding too much detail?

Get rid of anything that’s not necessary in your story – be it a character, storyline, paragraph, sentence or piece of writing.

You may have spent a lot of time working on it and become attached to it and it might hurt, but you must do it. You must kill your darlings.

This is where you’ve got to be ruthless for the sake of a good story.

Go over your writing and if anything doesn’t move the story forward or need to be there, get rid of it.

Vary sentence length

Make sure you vary the sentence length so that your writing has a nice flow.

Keep a notebook handy

Jot down ideas so that they don’t run away from you. Keep your notebook handy at all times, so you never miss an idea.

WEIRD WORD OF THE DAY: HANGRY. Meaning anger caused by being hungry.

Get feedback from others

It’s essential to get another pair of eyes on your manuscript, as you’re often too close to your work to be truly objective. It’s surprising how many little errors you can miss, just because you’ve seen your work too many times!

There are many ways to get feedback.

You can get yourself a critique partner whose opinion you respect, or get feedback from members of a writing class, or from beta readers.

Part of being a writer is learning how to handle criticism and use it in a positive way to improve your skills. Having said that, you don’t have to agree with every bit of feedback you get.

A thick skin is a necessary part of the process, as not everyone will like your writing or give your book a positive review. Learn to roll with it, and always get your book professionally edited.

Read widely and often

It’s essential to read a lot if you want to be a good writer, for several reasons:

It expands your vocabulary;
You acquire knowledge;
You gain a better understanding of language;
You gain inspiration and ideas;
It teaches you how to be a better writer through learning what works and what doesn’t;
You learn more about your chosen genre;
It enriches you on a personal level;
Studies show it even increases empathy.

Read outside your genre too. The reason for this is that you may discover useful things in other genres that you may not have found elsewhere.

For example, you may be a fantasy writer, but reading an occasional thriller may teach you valuable lessons about pacing and tension that you haven’t found from reading your regular stuff.

The more you read, the more information there is to draw from, and the richer your inner world will be.

Cut out unnecessary adverbs

My Macquarie Little Dictionary definition of adverbs is “a part of speech comprising words used to limit a verb, adjective, or another adverb, by expressing time, manner, place, cause, degree, etc.”

Adverbs are words that often end in ‘ly’. It’s okay to use adverbs every now and again, but if you’re using them all the time, you’re most likely using weaker word choices.

Think you’re using them too much? Then try other things.

For example:

Instead of writing ‘she was really beautiful’, write
‘she was gorgeous’.

Instead of writing ‘it was extremely cold’, write
‘it was freezing’.

The first sentences use adverbs, while the second sentences use stronger word choices.

Show, don’t tell

Showing an emotion, person, thing or event through your words is stronger than telling about the emotion, person, thing or event.

For example, consider this sentence:

Cecilia was a nice person.

Then this one:

Cecilia devoted every weekend to driving around the city, feeding the homeless from meals she prepared with her own hands.

The first sentence tells us that Cecilia is a nice person, while the second shows us that Cecilia is a nice person.

Showing is much more effective and interesting than telling, however, having said that, stories are a mixture of both showing and telling.

It’s a matter of getting the balance right, of deciding when to show and when to tell in your story.

Most of us live fairly sedate, mundane kind of lives, where that sort of life and death, the enormity of those moments, most of the time, thank God, is not part of our daily existence. And so, the story then becomes, in some ways, a surrogate for that kind of intensity of experience.
– A.J. Hartley

Read your story out loud

Reading your story out loud can really help you pick up bits of your story that aren’t flowing well.

Keep a thesaurus

Sick of using the same words all the time, and want to find something different? Then keep a thesaurus handy, a reference book for finding similar words. You can check out a free online thesaurus here.

Learn from others

Learn from the wisdom of others, who’ve done everything and made all the mistakes before you. You could do a course on writing if you prefer learning this way, through the countless online courses available out there, or if a course isn’t your thing, you can get great tips by reading books on novel writing.

You could try reading Creative Writing for Dummies by Maggie Hamand or Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott.

Why do everything yourself and learn the hard way, when you can take a shortcut and get valuable advice?

There is so much help out there, so make sure you take advantage of it, but at the same time feel free to disagree with advice that doesn’t feel right to you.

Use software to improve your writing

Software like ProWritingAid and Grammarly give you feedback on your writing as well as provide regular writing tips.

Scrivener helps you organise your writing work and research, so everything’s there at your fingertips when you need it. It does many other things too, including allowing you to order your scenes and move them around easily.

Striving to improve is an eternal process. Never stop doing it, and happy writing!

Finally, before I go, it’s time for – drumroll:

YOU SHOULD READ BEFORE YOU DIE: A TALE OF TWO CITIES. Published in 1859 by Charles Dickens, this historical novel is said to be one of the best-selling novels of all time. Set in London and Paris against the backdrop of the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror. A French Doctor named Manette is held in the Bastille as a political prisoner and is finally released after a long 18 years to join his daughter Lucie in England. Their lives later become entangled with two men that fall in love with Lucie, and they find themselves drawn back to Paris during the height of the dangerous Reign of Terror.

It’s impossible for me to talk about A TALE OF TWO CITIES without talking about the opening first sentence, which has become very famous. It’s beautifully written and intense and I LOVE it! Here it is:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

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