5 Ways to Improve Your Writing

hello everyone Alexa done here and today I am talking about five ways to improve your writing talking about this topic is always kind of nebulous and abstract and a few of these are a little bit nebulous and abstract because it's such a big loaded question how do you improve your writing well we're all kind of at a different level and what does it mean to improve your writing in some cases if you're really kind of newer and 101 it's literally just learning grammar and usage but I'm gonna be focusing more broadly in terms that can help any writer at almost any writing level I've done several of these myself because I am definitely still in a state where I need to improve my writing I don't think I'm ever going to stop improving my writing so these are things that have concretely worked for me and of course many of these are things to pay attention to at the drafting level to essentially teach yourself to do with the drafting level but plenty of these are also things you can apply in edits and very often it's applying these things in edits first that essentially rewires our writing brain to do it right or better the next time we draft so the first thing is one of those mark esoteric ones and that is you need to learn your weaknesses you need to essentially know what you're not so good at so you know where to focus because I need to be better at writing is such a broad topic once you know your specific weaknesses you can hyper target this includes seeking out resources for those specific things and doing some of the other things I'm going to talk about to target those weak areas usually you figure out what you're not so good at by playing the comparison game it's reading other people's writing and going oh wow I realize seeing how good they are at doing this thing that I am not so good at doing this thing or you can determine your weaknesses very often most often through feedback this is gonna be reader feedback either beta's critique partners even your agent editor or through reviews if you are reading reviews well reviews are not there to teach a writer you can sometime pick up things from reviews it's kind of a double-edged sword so basically the first step is to admit you have a problem because you can't solve a problem until you admit you have a problem so I want to list off some common writing weaknesses that might help you kind of pinpoint maybe saying these things and you looking them up or in many cases I have videos on these on my channel will kind of set off a light bulb moment for you or connect you to something that you've gotten from reader feedback and some of those things are white room syndrome this is where anything could take place in a white room because you're essentially never describing what's going on in scenes passive voice is really really big one purple prose this is where yeah your words are pretty but do they mean anything melodrama really really a big one I find that's a big kind of novice writing mistake if you've watched my fanfic video you know how I feel about melodrama says someone who's prone to melodramatic writing inconsistent characters this is a really big one if you're getting feedback that people don't believe things that your characters are doing or even just that they're not emotionally attaching to them you have character problems in Stallone this is a very kind of specific it's almost like a trope thing and a lot of people hate it but this is a weakness and writing that you can definitely fix that ties it to character telling too much you here telling versus showing all the time and another one of my tips here is going to kind of feed into that but I think it's almost too basic to say show Dotel I think that's very kind of limiting writing advice despite it's not in this video specifically but you might have a problem with telling too much stilted prose this is just like you're essentially your sentences they're awkward they're boring or not being vivid enough and essentially stilted prose usually just leads to an unpleasant reading experience you'll have reader stopping and just not getting through your work an authentic dialogue some people are really great at dialog others aren't and there are definitely steps you can take to improve it and very good dialogue and dialogue scenes can make a huge difference in a novel pacing a big one even pros can have trouble with pacing and of course the answer here is to learn a lot about structure and not enough conflict or high stakes essentially you get into a problem where people just don't care what's going on in your story very often this is both a character and a conflict stakes issue and very often those conflict and stakes feed into pacing I have videos on a ton of these topics and I will link to all of the relevant ones down below and this is just a starter list for you there are all sorts of other things crafty things that you can struggle with in your writing and so the first tip is to identify what you are not great at accepted about yourself except that everyone has weaknesses in their writing and what's great is once you have a pretty good idea of your weaknesses you can pinpoint them one at a time to improve your craft so the second tip for improving your writing is to analyze and then emulate your favorite writers or even just not your favorite writers this is just writers who are doing better than you are at the things that you want to improve at I actually put this one into action I was reading a book by a friend and I was just really engaged with the the dialogue scenes particularly the scenes with like lots of different characters and I was just really impressed I was never confused about who was speaking and I could just visualize everything that was happening and that's something that is a weakness of mine this ties into weight-room syndrome and I just basically stopped myself as I was reading do you notice to think a compliment at this writer and then I I decided to analyze well what were they doing that was making this work so well for me so I looked at a line by line level of exactly what they were doing with their dialogue and kind of dialogue tags and action tags and that what I found was this writer barely used dialogue tags at all very few instances of they said she said he said etc or whispered or whatever it was almost exclusively action tags meaning having vivid and specific action between all of the things that people were saying and so I then actively in my next draft pulled way back on dialogue tags which I tended to use especially in scenes where a bunch of different people were talking and I emulated what this writer was doing using far more act chin tags to make it clear who was speaking but also to really freshen up my scenes and show what was happening in them and also specifically what this writer did that I was like oh I should emulate that is if you're smart about the actions that you use in a scene like that the very actions of the character reveal personality traits about that character you're also actively doing characterization so that is a great example I was reading something I was impressed by what someone was doing I decided I wanted to do a thing and I pinpointed how they were doing it and then implemented it in my own writing so that's what you should be doing if you have a critique partner who is just really really good at something ask them how they do it hopefully they can explain not all of us writers can like pinpoint exactly how to do something it's because writing is weird and creative and nebulous but maybe you can get some concrete advice or just read books by your favorite authors knowing what your weaknesses are narrowing on those strengths from those writers they're strong at things that you were weak at and try to zero in on how they're doing what they're doing I'll admit this is kind of a 201 or 301 writing skill if you're just starting out in writing kind of looking to how other people write isn't always going to be helpful because the dangerous line here is imitation while imitating another writer can definitely teach you a lot about writing and help you improve your writing you can also get into the dangerous territory of just becoming a really great imitation estándar people's writing isn't the best way to go it's more about absorbing little tidbits of other people's strengths and techniques and process to improve your own process so be very careful with this one the third tip for improving your writing is a new favorite of mine and that is dramatized where you are narrating this is another one where I have a whole video on it and I will link to that down below if you want to watch me talk for like 12 but it's about this but in brief so this is the cousin of toweling versus showing narrating is to say something briefly that has happened you're basically glossing an action that has happened and telling the reader that it happened this is a very effective technique I mean you can't do an entire story that is all dramatization dramatization being when you dramatize when you show through interactions of characters something happening actively happening on the page you do need a balance of both narration and dramatization not a patient of a decision but where this becomes a tip for improving your writing as I have found a lot of writers rely far too heavily on narration so they have a ratio that is off in their story and a book that relies too heavily on narration is going to provide a very passive reading experience there's gonna be distance in the story for the reader it's like they're being told a story versus experiencing it themselves and so focusing on switching instances of narration to dramatization wherever possible is going to improve your writing by making it more active and vivid and interesting the example Laini Taylor gave that I thought was really great when she tweeted about this always gotta give credit to Laney for kind of elucidating this concept for me is she had ridden in her first draft that two characters kissed and it wasn't until she was going back through and editing that she realized this is an important emotional moment and also just did an important beat that readers loved that it was kind of not being done justice with a one-liner of hey they kissed so she dramatized that moment instead to make it more emotionally satisfying for the reader so think about examples like that where you're just essentially glossing over the action of something but be careful not to go overboard because you can't dramatize everything but if you are finding that your ratio of narration to dramatization is off anything where a narration is more than 50% of your book you might want to make some crisp corrections and this is definitely one where I think it can instantly improve someone's writing and you know storytelling tip number four for improving your writing is to pare down superfluous prose or editing which is my way of paring down my superfluous prose this is a big one that I see especially with I hesitate to say novice writers though I do see it in novice writers but there novice writers who do this too I think we all actually fall into this trap very often with drafting especially if we're trying to get those word counts or just a so we're feeling kind of awkward with writing and we can't quite put our finger on the right way to say something we're the best and most concise way to say something and so our writing can end up very rambley I see a lot that writers are basically they're saying something in 8 12 15 20 words long ass dried out sentences when by making some smart choices when it comes to verbs action verbs eliminating filtering and those sorts of things you can basically pare down your sentences so that they're short and crisp and way more evocative and effective so the big thing here often is verbs I'll see people basically use a basic gas verb it's usually based the gas verb combined with a bunch of extra phrasing that kind of wraps around the verb to try to describe something when all you have to do is basically use a better verb you can cut all of that extra phrasing and create a vivid picture in the mind of the reader so the tip here is if you're not someone who knows a ton of great vivid verbs brush up on that you can google it there are all sorts of great resources because I'm telling you changing the verb in your sentence using very active specific verbs can transform your writing and then coupled with this very very often is filtering I know you've probably heard about filtering a lot I have hesitated to make a whole video on filtering because sometimes I like filtering and I have a problem with filtering but the point is filter words are words that you use that literally filter the experience through the eyes of your main character and it can create a lot of distance in the narrative and also lead to clunky or more awkward sentences so she felt she saw she thought like those sorts of things sometimes effective but also very often clunky writing so the combination of eliminating filter words where you can and thinking about more active interesting verbs you basically need to look at your sentences on a sentence by sentence level and think yourself could I say this better and more concisely and very often the answer is yes you could and in reproaching your sentences in the way that your phrasing things you can really firm up crisp up improve your writing so an example that I wrote as always my examples aren't the best they still hopeful illustrate a point because I I never want to use like real examples of other people's writing because it seems cruel so I always have to think of kind of bad examples on the fly but I did come up with one which is she thought she saw a bird fly in a circle across the horizon first of all it's kind of a very long way to say something incredibly basic I threw in some nice filtering there and I used a very basic a spur which is fly and then I had to use a little phrase to explain how the bird was flying and if you rewrite that sentence just slightly make a slight tweak remove the filtering change the verb you can rewrite that to be the bird arced across the horizon arc is a specific verb that basically means to not literally go in a circle but it achieves the same idea and it's a bird so you soon they're flying you don't actually have to say they're flying because it's a bird they fly that's just like a real basic example and think about it now this sentence is more crisp and concise and you can actually add it more interesting description to it to make it a more impactful sentence overall you could describe the horizon or more about the bird I don't know lots of options but or you can just have a nice clean crisp sentence in your story which is never a bad thing essentially you should have interesting and complex sentences all over the place I'm not arguing that all pros should be simple I'm not a Hemingway issed but by removing kind of extra phrasing repetition and weak verbs in your writing and having enough effective short concise sentences you earn the space for the more complex prose that you might want to use you don't want to bog your reader down with unnecessary long sentences and there's nothing that annoys me more as a reader when I'm reading something I see this a lot actually in like like blogging or journal them where you read a long-ass sentence and you're like why did I just why did you have three lines to describe something basic as like get to the goddamn point and it demonstrates that someone is weaker at writing because essentially writing is all about understanding what words mean when you put them in certain orders and using words effectively verbs and adjectives and adverbs so don't go overboard with adjectives and adverbs either that is another way to improve your writing but again I'm not on the anti ever train I never have been so recently that's not in this list either but hey you've abused adverbs this is a bonus tip for this video if you do abuse adverbs reducing your use of adverbs and using stronger verbs is another great way to improve your writing really the lesson of this one is stronger verbs better verbs more action verbs and really watch your filtering and the fifth way to improve your writing is I'm a broken record I've given this advice so many times in multiple videos that I'm just never gonna stop saying it it is really almost the number one piece of advice for gripping your writing but it is that like vague nebulous one where you might roll your eyes and go how is this a concrete tip but it is you need to read read read read read read this is how pro writers very often improve their writing because when you have a base level of skills it's not about taking a class or watching a craft video it is just about absorbing words absorbing words that are strung together in beautiful sentences that mean things and reading great books books in the category that you want to write in the genre that you love and you just you see what good writing is if you read enough good writing you start to figure out what your weaknesses are you see those author's to emulate you start to understand the structure and the beats and the tropes of your genre because improving your writing isn't just all the concrete prose vocabulary stuff it is also storytelling craft which is it's like deeper tie than this it's so many things and you get it all from reading often widely deeply and I personally find I know not every single Raider is like this but when I read enough in a specific genre or of a specific author I bits of their writing style and it's not that I'm spitting out exactly their writing style but it influences my writing style so when I want to write fancy I'll read more literary fiction and it does kind of spark for me an elevated prose in a lot of cases I pay attention to when an author uses a word really beautifully a vocabulary word that I hadn't thought of in a really long time that was just vivid and perfect I look at description short descriptions that I'm really impressed by and I'll jot them down be careful not to use them in whole cloth because you don't want to copy other authors plagiarism is bad but I do like to jot down really evocative freezing as inspiration of what are they doing here and analyzing it and then thinking how I can do something similar to just effectively string words together reading is the number one for improving your writing and it's not just strictly about reading good books though reading good books is going to make you better writer honestly reading books you don't love can make you a better writer as well because if you learn to read like a writer and analyze why something isn't working for you why you find something annoying clunky phrasing etc you can do your own soul-searching of your own writing like I don't like it this here am i doing something similar do I fall into the same patterns what can I learn from this thing I didn't like to improve my own writing so that's it five things you can do to improve your writing essentially rate a ton do some soul-searching analyze other people's writing dramatize more than you narrate and watch those verbs and filtering and just basically any sentence that is long and meandering for no goddamn good reasons so yeah let me know down below in the comments what are some of your favorite resources for improving your writing anything you've done that has really upped your game and give this video a thumbs up if you liked it if you're not already subscribe to the channel go ahead and do that I pose new videos two to three times a week thank you so much for watching and as always guys happy writing

Channel: Alexa Donne

Views: 61,398

Keywords: alexa donne, author tube, writing advice, how to write a book, publishing advice, ways to improve writing, how to improve writing, improving your writing, writing tips, how to get better at writing, narrate vs. dramatize, filter words, ways to improve your writing, getting better at writing, become a better writer, improve writing

Id: InU8hMCdekg

Length: 20min 4sec (1204 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 09 2019