Tag Archives: writing advice

Blog, Writing Craft

Writing Tips to Transform Your Writing Routine

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Writing tips are useful only if you can use them. I know, that’s not very helpful, but neither is a lot of writing advice on the web. However, this post is going to offer you a few writing tips that will change your writing routine. I know this is true because each tip is actually tangible, practical advice that you can put to use each time you sit down to write.

Tip 1: Set a Schedule and Chunk It Out

The hardest part about writing is setting a schedule. It’s extremely difficult to sit down and just get to it, and there are many reasons for this. Very few of them have to do with loving or hating writing. It’s a motivation issue. We know we can get to it, but we just aren’t going to do it right now. Here’s a piece of advice: set a writing schedule. Writing is effective when it’s done in short bursts, which actually increases efficiency. Being alert and capable allows you to read with a clear head, edit precisely, and write with creativity and earnestness.

In practical application, this tip asks you to form a schedule for your writing project. If you are writing a novel, create a plan that involves you writing every day. Set the objective on the page with how much you are going to get done and what. Are you outlining? Did you start drafting a chapter? Are you writing character backgrounds?

Write it out over the course of a week, a month, or a year, but make sure it is clearly labeled and you know what your expectation is when you sit down. If you get done with a section early, don’t just ram yourself into the next section. Consider taking a day off. You are “chunking” your writing. That means breaking it down into digestible chunks instead of running headfirst into it miserably, expecting something to change. Additionally, you can use a host of apps to help you schedule and organize. PowerPoint and Google Slides, for instance, can help you map your novel and see it visually. Or, you could just use a good old sheet of paper and a pencil. Whatever works for you!

Here’s a tentative writing week setup with this idea in mind:

Five-Paragraph Essay: Argumentative

  • First Day: Research and find sources
  • Second Day: Draft 1/2 of the Essay
  • Third Day: Draft 1/2 of the Essay
  • Fourth Day: Revise for ideas and structure
  • Fifth Day: Edit for syntax
  • Sixth Day: Edit for grammar
  • Seventh Day: Peer review and/or publish

Tip 2: Find a Place to Write That Works for You

A writer’s room doesn’t have to contain a million leather-bound books. Nor does it need to look fancy or have a giant walnut desk. It just needs to be a place where a writer can write. In fact, it doesn’t even have to be a room. As long as you have a comfortable place to write, that’s all that matters.

When looking for a place to write, get rid of the notion that you need writerly attire and thick-rimmed glasses. After all, you just need to sit down and get the work done. In bed? While you are sitting in your recliner? At the kitchen table with the radio on? If it works, it works. We need to find places that are conducive to writing, and we have to remember that this has nothing to do with the mythological idea of the writer persona. Separate yourself from the idea of being a writer and actually write.

Tip 3: Use the Read Aloud Function

One often overlooked tool on most word processors is the “Read Aloud” function. Many authors and writers give the advice that you should read your text aloud to yourself to catch errors. My first writing teacher in college offered the same advice. This is because it actually works. Changing the modality in which you revise and edit can help you see things that you were unable to see before. It clears up missing conjunctions, misplaced modifiers, and missing punctuation real quick.

However, if you spend more time focused on your own voice than the errors, that could be a problem. As such, using the “Read Aloud” function on Microsoft Word (or any app, really) can be extremely helpful. Play the text and sit back and listen to what you have written. It’s very good at catching wonky sentences and missing words. Also, there are many apps like Microsoft Word that only execute a read-aloud function. Regardless, this writing tip may change how you approach editing overnight.

Tip 4: Use Templates and Mentor Texts

Whether you are writing fiction or informational works, you should consider using a template. What is a template? A template is a scaffold for a text that shows you the form and structure of a given piece. For instance, a template for an argumentative essay will have starter sentences for all five paragraphs and will show the layout of the essay. Run a web search for the keyword “Template” along with the type of essay, story, or text that you are working on at the moment. You will find immediate examples. Writing tips often employ vapid language about studying craft, but what does that mean? Here, that means studying a template to see the inner workings of a text. It may seem like cheating, but pushing to internalize structure is an age-old method of perfecting craft.

Moreover, one should consider using mentor texts to help guide them through the writing process. That is to say, if you are new to fiction, consider finding a story that fits the narrative you are trying to weave. Now, don’t steal the author’s words and story, but consider their layout, and investigate their moves. Very quickly, by paying attention to how they convey imagery and characteristics, you will be able to identify the text features that you need for your own work. Using mentor texts also helps in writing essays and informational works through the same process. Painters use images for reference, and you should use mentor texts for writing.

Tip 5: Write Trash

Admit to yourself that your draft is going to be terrible. There is no way around it. It is not going to be very good, because that’s what drafts are, after all. With that in mind, you need to sit down and start writing all of the trash that is on your mind. If you are writing an essay, just spit out all of the ideas as you move across the page. If you follow the writing process, schedule your writing, and identify a template, then you should be in a fine position to put garbage all over the page. Your job is to produce ideas and put thoughts into text. You can’t do it perfectly the first time, so sit down and get the work done, so that you can come back through and revise and edit.

Furthermore, writing is recursive, therefore you can come back to it when you want. That means you can clean it up when you want as well. Do not sit down and expect to spin gold—it will never happen. You must embrace writing trash in order to overcome those immediate deficits with writing—procrastination, imposter syndrome, anxiety, etc. In this way, writing trash will get you to the good stuff, which is revealed through revision and editing.

Conclusion

A good writer does what they have to do to get the writing done. This involves sitting down regularly and pumping out words, texts, stories, and whatever else crosses their brain. Writers also utilize all of the resources afforded to them and are not above any process until they have at least tried it once. Similarly, writers do not have to be in fancy rooms spinning gold. They just have to sit down and write it out, which can be done anywhere that is comfortable for them.

Simply put, a true writer is somebody who writes. They are not worried about whether they are considered a writer or not, whether they look like a writer, or whether they actually ever get to it or not. A true writer hones their skills and perfects their craft by any means necessary, and practical tips always help.

Blog, Writing Craft

Ray Bradbury’s Hygiene of Writing Advice

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Listening to authors give interviews often helps us understand their process. That is to say, spur of the moment questions can be revealing. Author and speculative-fiction master Ray Bradbury has a wealth of great interviews that help listeners understand his approach to writing. Ray Bradbury’s writing concepts are both ideological and practical. Often times, understanding the spirit of his advice is what will push you toward success.

In this post, we are going to look at a transcript of a talk he gave on a specific approach to immersing oneself in the world of writing. The talk was published by The Narrative Art channel on YouTube, and I have published the transcript here. In this dialogue, he talks about the most important texts to consume if you are a budding author. It is certainly an interesting dissection of his process and his take on the “hygiene of writing” is enticing. If anything, I believe you can take something from his talk for your own writing.

Ray Bradbury and “The Hygiene of Writing” Transcript

“There’s a lot I want to say because I recognize the need many of you have to be writers, and you don’t want to do the wrong things. So for at least five minutes, I want to talk about the hygiene of writing for you so you won’t do anything wrong in the next year.

The first thing that comes to mind is the danger of writing novels to start. I don’t know how many of you are writing novels now. If they’re going well, you don’t have to listen to me. But the problem with novels is you could spend a whole year writing one, and it might not turn out well because you haven’t learned to write yet. The best hygiene for beginning writers—or intermediate writers—is to write a hell of a lot of short stories.

If you could write one short story a week, it doesn’t matter what the quality is to start, but at least you’re practicing. And at the end of a year, you have 52 short stories, and I defy you to write 52 bad ones. It can’t be done. At the end of 30 weeks, or 40 weeks, or the end of the year, all of a sudden, a story will come that’s just wonderful.

That’s what happened to me. I started writing when I was 12, and I was 22 before I wrote my first decent short story. That’s a hell of a lot of writing—millions of words—because I was doing everything wrong to start. Of course, I was imitating. I had so many heroes that I wanted to be like. I liked H.G. Wells, I loved Jules Verne, I loved Conan Doyle—Sherlock Holmes, for God’s sake. Jeeves, I loved Wodehouse.

Well, you can’t be any of those things, can you? You may love them, but you can’t be those. I loved Edgar Rice Burroughs—Tarzan, John Carter, Warlord of Mars. Good Lord, wonderful stuff. The Wizard of Oz, L. Frank Baum. You know, I always dreamt someday I could grow up and write an Oz book, but it’s not to be—not to be.

So the main thing I want to start with tonight is to get you to write more short stories. Then you’ll be in training. You’ll learn to compact things. You’ll learn to look for ideas. The psychological thing here is that every week, you’ll be happy. At the end of a week, you will have done something. But in a novel, you don’t know where the hell you’re going. At the end of a week, you don’t feel all that good. At the end of a month—I’ve been through novels. I waited until I was 30 before I wrote my first novel, and that was Fahrenheit 451. It was worth waiting for.

But I was fearful of novels. I recognized the danger of spending a year on something that might not be very good. And your second novel might not be very good, or your third one. But in the meantime, you could write 52 or 104 short stories, and you’re learning your craft. That’s the important thing.

Read people like Roald Dahl. Get his books of short stories. Get the short stories of G. de Maupassant. Get John Cheever, who has done some very good short stories over and above his novels. Richard Matheson, in my own field.

Nigel, an author named Nigel Kneale—K-N-E-A-L-E. Nigel Kneale. Read his short stories. John Collier—one of the greatest short story writers of this century. And you know you’ve never heard his name. Try and look him up. He’s out of print right now. I’m trying to get him back in print next year. John Collier, English writer. He wrote brilliant short stories that deeply affected me when I was 22 years old.

The more quality short stories you read from the start of the century—Edith Wharton’s short stories, save her novels till later. There are many women writers who influenced me. Katherine Anne Porter, her novellas, all of the short stories of Wharton. The Curtain Is Green by Eudora Welty. Wonderful short stories.

The more of these you can take in—and stay away from most modern anthologies of short stories, because they’re slices of life. They don’t go anywhere. They don’t have any metaphor. Have you looked at The New Yorker recently? Have you tried to read one of those stories? Didn’t it put you to sleep immediately? They don’t know how to write short stories.

Go read Washington Irving. Go read the short stories of Melville. Go read Edgar Allan Poe again. Go read Nathaniel Hawthorne, a writer of fantasy in the science fiction field. Many collections of short stories, because they all deal with metaphor.

And the sooner you recognize the ability of seeing a metaphor, and knowing how to write the metaphor, and to make collections of them, the better off you’ll be. Then you’ll be ready for the novel.

Maybe some of you here tonight are automatically good novelists. So I’m not talking to you. You’re fortunate that you were born that way. But I discovered along the way I was a collector of metaphors.

Now, I don’t know how I can teach you to recognize the metaphor when you see it. But what you’ve got to do from this night forward is stuff your head with more different things from various fields. Hygienically speaking, I’ll give you a program to follow every night—a very simple program for the next thousand nights.

Before you go to bed every night, read one short story. That’ll take you 10 minutes, 15 minutes. Then read one poem a night from the vast history of poetry. Stay away from most modern poems—it’s crap. It’s not poetry. It’s not poetry. Lines that look like poems? Go ahead and do it, but you’ll go nowhere.

But read the great poets. Go back and read Shakespeare. Read Alexander Pope. Read Robert Frost. But one poem a night. One short story a night. One essay a night for the next 1,000 nights, and from various fields—archaeology, zoology, biology, all the great philosophers of time, comparing them. Read the essays of Aldous Huxley. Read Loren Eiseley, a great anthropologist.

Maybe you’ve never heard of him—Loren Eiseley, E-I-S-E-L-E-Y. He was head of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. He became my friend 40 years ago. I read an essay of his in Harper’s, “The Fire Apes,” which was so brilliant I wrote him a fan letter.

I said, “Dear Dr. Eiseley, ‘The Fire Apes’ is the finest essay written in the last 20 years in any American magazine. Why don’t you write a book?” He wrote back and said, “Hey, that’s an idea. I think I will write a book.” And he wrote 17 books. But I was his papa, even though I was 15 years younger.

So reread all the books of Loren Eiseley. They’re crammed with pomegranate ideas. That’s why I want you to read essays in every field—on politics, analyzing literature. Pick your own.

But that means every night before you go to bed, you’re stuffing your head with one short story, one poem, and one essay. At the end of a thousand nights, Jesus God, you’ll be full of stuff, won’t you? You’ll be full of ideas and metaphors, along with your perceptions of life and your own personal experiences, which you put away—and what you see in your friends and relatives.

You want all these things to go in. And the more metaphors you can cram yourself with, they’ll bounce around inside your head and make new metaphors. That’s why you’re doing this. But you’ve got to be able to recognize one when you see one.

So hygienically speaking, you’ve got two things to do. If you feel you have to do a novel in spite of what I said, go do it. But in the meantime, write a hell of a lot of short stories. And then every night, do these three things with the short story, the poem, and the essay. And you’re well on your way to being more creative.

Conclusion

In considering Ray Bradbury’s writing advice, we have to understand the practical nature of what he is telling us as writers. If you want to become a better writer, you have to read more; and, his advice is asking you to focus on the classics when it comes to form and structure. If you understand the basics then you can play with the template, you can evolve your own writing, and you can certainly experiment with writing concepts.

Works Cited

“Ray Bradbury on the Dangers of Starting with a Novel.” The Narrative Art. June 13, 2016. Web, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWBF4R6MW-k