HOW TO GET STARTED AS A WRITER

hey writers welcome back to my channel and if this is your first time here welcome to heart breathing's and today we are going to talk about how to get started as a writer so I am bringing this to you because I've had a lot of questions lately from people on how do I even get started people who are fans of reading that have been fans of mine and fans of lots of other great indie authors and they're wondering how can I get started in this career for myself I've always wanted to write a book and I'm really interested in learning how to do it but when I sit down to write I can't figure out how to put a story together well this is really common I mean when I decided back in 2007 that I wanted to be a writer I had only written a few stories and some things that I had submitted to some things in high school and had written all through college I had written a lot of poetry that's pretty bad and will never be seen but that's another story I had been an avid reader since I was probably 7 or 8 years old and I always wanted to write a story but I focused on singing for my college career and my graduate school career when an opportunity presented itself to me to quit my job teaching and learn to write full-time I had no clue where to start really I just knew hey I want to tell a story and like a lot of people who want to be writers I thought it was gonna be a lot easier I mean I knew I was gonna have to put a lot of time into it I know it's gonna have to learn as I go but at the same time I also naively thought that you just sit down and you start telling a story and it just comes to you and that's all it is but as I got further into the process of learning to be a writer I understood that there is a reason they call it a craft there's a lot more to it than just spitting a story out on the page now there are a lot of people at various levels who you know maybe intuitively are able to put together a story that makes sense and that follows rules and that you know has great pacing and characters just naturally and those people I kind of hate them because it's a lot easier for people that comes naturally to but for the rest of us I mean it does come naturally to some extent but there was also so much that I needed to in terms of how to really craft that story for it to be the very best that it could be how to you know turn the story exactly when it needed to be turned when that first kiss should come when that first battle should come and then how to wrap up the story at the end and how how to get from you know a lot of times I knew where I want it to be at the beginning and then I could see kind of where it was going at the end but then somewhere in the middle I was like I have no idea what to do with this middle part like what should happen the truth is that there's nobody that's going to tell you this is what should happen in your story and once you really get to the process of sitting down to write it out yourself you start to understand oh my gosh this is fully 100% my responsibility to figure out what happens in this story what what needs to happen to these characters to get them from one place to another and when you're talking about the success of your story long term whether it's still going to be selling you know 10 years from now or more it really comes down to how well-written that story is how much it resonates with other people how much they understand and get what your characters are going through they don't necessarily have to love your characters it depends on the genre but they do have to understand where your characters are going and they have to understand how your characters got from point A to point B and that is a really tough part of storytelling so if you are new to writing and you're not sure where to start I'm gonna give you some of my top tips for getting started as a writer one tip is to read books on writing if you sit down and you just expect that you're magically going to understand how to tell a story you are probably going to spend a lot of time sitting at your computer not knowing if the words are any good if the story is going anywhere important if it's all coming together or not and when you're talking about a higher novel you're talking about fifty to a hundred something thousand words on average think of it like this okay writing is not brain surgery I know that but it is still a craft a skill something that you have to learn and you have to hone and you have to really put your time into learning how to do it so you wouldn't for example just pick up let's talk about another craft so you wouldn't go and sit down at the piano and just expect to be able to open up a book of music and begin writing it yes I know that there are some people who can play by ear so if they hear it they can sit down and play it but those are like it's super tiny percentage of our population most people if they decided they wanted to learn to play the piano they would go through a process they would you know find some easy music and they would learn how to read music they would have to figure out where the dots on the page mean and how that corresponds to where you put your fingers on the piano they would probably get a teacher to teach them how to play and to hold them accountable for how well they're doing and for whether they're missing notes are not missing notes and then they would practice because you can't just sit down and start playing Rachmaninoff if you have never ever read music before in your life there's a process to getting there and if you want to be the next you know JK Rowling or Stephen King or Jonathan Franzen you are going to have to practice you're gonna have to learn how to do it and you're gonna have to get teachers along the way so that's why I say read books on writing I can link below some of my favorite books on writing and I will also do a video in the coming weeks that will talk about my favorite books on writing but basically if you just go to the library or your local bookstore or go on to your favorite eBook retailer and start searching for books on writing you're gonna find some great ones by people like Donald Moss James Scott Bell K M Weiland one of my favorite books is called screenwriting tricks for authors by Alexander Sokolov she used to be a screenwriter and now she is an author and so she has a lot of great understanding of how to tell a story and what that road map looks like and she applies it to something that's a lot easier to do in terms of you know if you could sit down to read a novel to analyze it it's not as as easy in terms of figuring out what plot points are being hit where because it takes you you know 10 hours to read a novel but if you sit down and you look at a movie it's only going to take you an hour and a half to two hours to look at that movie and she gives you some specific tips on here's what you're gonna see an Act one here's what you're gonna see in Act two at the midpoint you're gonna find this here's what you might find at the end like when they're storming the castle and what I did when I first found Alek Sokoloff and she came and spoke to my local rwx chapter was I found that I sat down and made a list of 10 movies that were similar types of movies to the type of heroine or the type of story I wanted to write and I sat down with those movies and a notebook and I would pause it you know right at 25 minutes and be like okay here's what happened at the end of Act one and this is the going through the doorway and I started to analyze them and by doing that I started to see okay it was like a light bulb went up over my head that said okay this is how you tell a story this is how you twist and turn and control the pacing then I started paying attention to characters who had flawed backgrounds or you know where heroic characters following hero's journey and I started paying attention to that character arc and I still do that today when I go and I watch a movie I will always kind of think in the back of my head okay this is the first doorway okay this is where she meets her mentor okay I get it this is the twist at the midpoint or this is the first kiss or whatever and I start to understand those posts that she talks about that you can see in that book so that's just an example there are also a lot I mean there's just probably hundreds if not thousands of books out there on writing that are really great and yes it takes time and I know that you're ready to like get in there and learn how to write and start practicing what you should be doing that too but it's so so important for you to start reading books on how to craft a story because your long-term success at this and whether or not you spend hours floundering at the keyboard thinking I have no idea what happens next or you get to finishing a novel and it doesn't really flow well and people don't aren't really following it and they drop off in the first couple chapters because it's not that interesting you're gonna wish that you had spent the time upfront to learn how to actually write just compare it to sitting down at a piano and immediately inviting people over to a concert and you you're not playing any music you're just staring at some sheet music and like banging on the piano that would not really be something a lot of people would want to sit and listen to you'd have people getting up and leaving or shifting uncomfortably in their seat and that's the way your readers are gonna feel even if it's just your husband that you - that's the way they're going to feel when you haven't put any time into actually learning how to craft a good story some of the elements that you may want to study are plot this is one of the big ones like figuring out how to plot a story now there are some people out there that we call Panthers who don't necessarily plot their story out ahead of time they follow the flow of the story and then maybe afterward they sort of rearrange it but they intuitively understand how the plot works so you may not necessarily need to sit there and actually form an outline if that's not your perfect process but you still need to have a basic understanding of how the plot of a story is put together grammar is a big one if your story is not readable yes there are editors that can fix that for you for a large amount of money and everyone should use an editor but you can't count on an editor to fix every single sentence of every single piece of writing that you put out there an editor would take a look at someone who doesn't understand basic grammar and they're just gonna send it back to you because it's not going to be worth their time you need to make sure that you understand the basics of sentence structure comma placement you know what's capitalized and what's not and as you go you're gonna learn more about that when you get feedback from your editor but it should be really the best that it can be before you send that out a great book for that is The Elements of Style by Strunk & white it's something that I have dog-eared always sitting next to me because it is super important to understand the basics of grammar and the basics of sentence structure pacing how you pace a novel in terms of the character arc and the events of the novel that's super-important another one of my favorite books his goal motivation conflict by Deborah Dixon where she talks about how you can weave into the story not just the external plot but also the internal plot that your characters are going through what's their goal was their external goal was their internal goal what's their external motivation for wanting that goal and then what is the conflict that's holding them back and you she takes you through how to figure those things out on a both an external and an internal level this is another book that extremely changed my writing and every single time I sit down to write a new story even if it's characters I've been writing for years I always sit down and figure out for this novel where are they in terms of goal motivation conflict both internal and external so that's a great book to pick up as well the second tip that I have for you is to practice just like you would sit down and practice that piano every single afternoon you want to actually practice your writing that may mean that you might not end up with your very first attempt writing a full-length novel right away I didn't I started with short stories because they seemed a little bit easier so I didn't have to worry as much about plotting out an entire thing I just practiced like tone of voice how does dialogue work how do people talk to each other how can I get characters out on the page and I spent probably a year of my first attempts at being author reading a ton of books and also learning how to write and how my own voice work what kind of stories did my voice lend itself well to you know just the practice of sitting down every day now there are challenges out there that will help you hit that practice goal for example this month in April there's something going on called camp NaNoWriMo and if you haven't heard of NaNoWriMo it's National Novel Writing Month and it happens every November that well over a couple hundred thousand people across the world will sit down with the challenge of trying to write 50,000 words in a month which is about 1667 words every single day of the month and in the month of April and in the month I believe of July they have these camps where you can set your own goals so if you missed this one which you might have hit back in I believe it's July it could be June but sometime this summer there's another camp NaNoWriMo and you can set your own goal so you don't have to go 50,000 words you can say this month I'm going to sit down I'm going to write a 10,000 word short story or I'm going to write the first three chapters of my novel but you have that accountability because you put that number up on the website you have a cabin that you join that's just a virtual cabin like a virtual chatroom and you can put in your words every single day and talk to other people but practicing your writing making time for it and sitting down to write every single day is crucial because same with piano if you sat down and you practice you know for two hours today and then you didn't sit back down at that piano for two more weeks you're not going to have made any progress you're just going to be as bad as you are today and actually maybe even worse but if you sat down for every single day for the next two weeks you would see significant progress and how well you're playing the piano and how fast and quickly you're reading that music and putting your hands on the page it's the same with writing if you don't sit down and practice you begin to get rusty you begin to forget kind of how you wanted to put those sentences together how what was going on in the story you need to stay connected to that story and to the process of writing every single day which brings me to my third tip which is set time aside in your schedule for your writing practice for me it's usually between 9:00 and noon every single morning I get my son off to school I sit down I do some administrative tasks and then by nine o'clock I am writing and I try to write for at least two to three hours every morning it's afternoon here now and I have not done my writing yet because I have not had a chance but I will sit down this evening probably between 9:00 p.m. and midnight since my son will already be in bed and I will enjoy the quiet time in the evening to finish the writing that I needed to get done today but I try to make sure that I write every single day now I run a challenge in a Facebook group that I have that I say to them don't break the chain which is something that came from Jerry Seinfeld the comedian who he said what he would do is he would tell a joke he would write a joke every single day and then at that point the only thing he had to do was not break the chain and so I've taken that you know certainly not my concept but I've taken that concept and applied it to writing that I try to write or touch my story in some way whether it's plotting or whether it's you know researching or whether it's you know working on something that my character is going through that I can't quite get right or editing or reading back through or actually sitting down to write the words I try to touch my stories every single day so that I don't get rusty it's just like you know an athlete you have to do that work you have to put in that work every single day in order to see the progress in order to keep your muscles so like your writing muscles limber I don't know if that's what you would say but it sounds good so make time for your writing daily so that you can get that practice and also you want to read authors that you admire and watch film so that you can begin to learn more about story and I mean how great is it that you can actually say hey I'm watching this movie for my writing research so don't give me a hard time like this is actual research and it can be super fun so for example if you are writing a zombie novel and that's what you always wanted to do was to write a novel about the zombie apocalypse you could write down your top ten movies about the zombie apocalypse or it can also be just about apocalypse in general something dystopian or where the world is falling apart and you can write down your top ten movies and then watch them this is a really great way to and again this comes from Alexandre Sokoloff screenwriting tricks for authors where she suggests making that top ten list and then going through it but this has helped me a lot because in the course of a week you could watch those ten movies and you could start to really understand okay what is common in the zombie apocalypse genre what are the things that people watching and reading and consuming this genre expect to see so I make sure that I have some of those elements in my own story or I can play on those expectations and twist it right when they don't expect it like play around with it like for example in a lot of zombie apocalypse movies there's like a group of survivors who are together and someone has secretly been bitten and the watcher knows that but the rest of the group doesn't so you're waiting for that moment when that person like turns into a zombie and like starts killing everybody so that adds tension to the story so you see that in almost every like zombie apocalypse survivor movie TV show that you've ever seen before somebody tries to hide the fact that they've been bitten I played on that sort of reader expectation of the zombie apocalypse trope of somebody getting bitten and hiding it from the group in my own story but I twisted it in a unique way so I'm playing with the readers expectations in a fun way that surprises them if you don't take the time to understand what happens in that genre normally then you wouldn't be able to play on those expectations and you wouldn't be able to twist new and fresh things into your own story because you honestly don't even know the other thing is a lot of readers could pick up your genre and be like this is you know it's great to be unique and tell a unique story but a lot of people might be like but this doesn't have a lot of the elements of zombie fiction that I really enjoy and then they're not gonna like your book as much so you don't want to copycat other people but I think that you really do need to have a deep understanding of what's expected in this type of genre what kind of things happen in these types of stories movies are a good way to do it but also reading as much fiction in your chosen genre as possible and if you don't know what genre you want to write because you like reading mysteries but you like reading y-a and then you like reading epic fantasy read a few of those and start paying attention to them from a writer's mind and thinking is this the kind of thing I want to write when I'm reading this do stories immediately come to my mind and make me excited to tell them ooh I would love to tell a story about a girl who was meant to be the princess but gets stolen away and kidnapped what kind of thing starts to spark your imagination and reading and watching films that are in those chosen genres is really going to help get you to that point of imagination where you start to see what lights you up and my final tip is to get feedback from other writers now it's all good my husband reads my fiction so he does for sure become what I would call my first reader my alpha reader he does not get to see my rough drafts because those are off-limits to anyone because they're terrible but once I've started editing the story and bringing it together my husband's the first one to read it and I incredibly trust his opinion on it however passing your book off - you know you're very uninterested mother or your cousin who doesn't read at all and just saying please will you read this or your best friend who is not a reader or doesn't enjoy this genre at all and saying will you give me feedback number one can be putting them in a bad position because if your writing is terrible you definitely don't want to put them in a position where they feel like they have to just tell you it's amazing because you want to get honest feedback having someone throw your book back at you and be like this is the best thing I've ever read doesn't really do you any favors it just makes you believe it's like those people on American Idol sorry to say who like go in there and they're like my voice teacher told me I was amazing and then they're like the worst singer in the world don't be that writer where you're passing your book off to everyone and then you get upset when they give you honest feedback where they're like I really couldn't get into this or I didn't understand it if you hear that kind of feedback it might hurt but you've got to get a tough skin in this business because this is your family telling you this just wait until you put it up on Kindle and a bunch of people who you don't know are going to give you a lot of honest feedback and it might not be so great because you are a new writer and you still need to be patient and put all that time in it's important to open yourself up to criticism that might not be hopefully it will be kind but it might not be what you wanted to hear because it can sound great in your own mind but when other people start to read it they might truly have some criticism so I encourage you that when you do get to the point where you feel like you're ready to receive feedback from people be it your cousin or your best friend or an online Facebook group or if you joined like a local writers group whoever you tend to get feedback from in the future open your heart up to not taking it personally but taking it as this is where I need to improve and this is the length let your ego step aside and say okay this is where I need to improve this is where I need to start really learning and if they say gosh your characters are just I'm just not getting into their story well okay so maybe you need to find some books now about how to bring people you know how to write better characters and how to bring people into a story faster there are lots of resources out there about that sort of thing and then again you can read some of your favorite books watch your favorite movies and say okay this is not necessarily a likeable character but why is it that I'm so invested in their story and a lot of times what you're gonna find is that you're invested in their story because there's some sort of stakes out there like you may not like her but she's got two children and you want to make sure that those kids are safe or this detective might not be necessarily a likable guy he might be a drunk he might be a loser but you find out something sympathetic about him immediately like he lost his wife and children when he was stationed in Afghanistan when he came home they had been murdered well that's why he's a drunk and a loser it's because he's been through this trauma and now we have this reason to be sympathetic to him and to like him and to cheer him on but if you just have the drunk and a loser and you have no reason why he has like a wound in his or something that's made him like this a lot of people are just not gonna like reading about this guy who's a loser so you got to learn how to create those characters and how to create sympathy for them how to give the readers a reason to want to follow these characters through the story and there are lots of ways to do that but it's going to take you time to learn so these are my biggest tips on how to get started if you're just learning to be a writer but also let me say be patient with yourself don't expect that you are going to just jump into this and you're going to have a novel ready in two weeks and it's going to be ready to publish because I can guarantee you that like 99.9% of people cannot sit down in two weeks and write a novel that's going to be a best-seller there may be exceptions to that rule but I don't really know of any most people it takes them years to learn the craft of writing it's just like I was talking about with the piano or like if you wanted to be a Olympic level ice skater like you cannot just put on some skates and expect to go out on the ice and immediately start doing like quadruple Axel's or whatever it is they do like that doesn't happen you may you know put on your skates they may feel awkward on your feet for a little bit but you're going to go out there and you're gonna take it slow and you're gonna learn how to do it and maybe you're gonna have a teacher which is like the books I'm talking about the critique partner so I'm talking about and it's going to take you years potentially to learn how to even get up speed on the ice fast enough that you could actually take off and do a you know single lutz or i don't know it could take you years to learn how to do those things but it's worth it in the end if you end up as an olympic athlete or if you love it every single day that you're working on it so what i highly encourage you to do is understand that if you truly want to be a writer it's going to take you time it's going to take dedication and it's going to take patience it's going to take opening yourself up to criticism it's going to take really pushing your emotional self to put everything on the page that you can like as a writer you know we most of us pour our emotions and our hearts and our feelings about life into the page so you're gonna have to open yourself up in ways that you never really have before for some of you but if you learn how to write you take the time to study craft get the books on writing read other authors that you admire watch movies that you admire so that you can watch reader expectations viewer expectations of genre and you set time aside in your schedule and you practice every single day or as often as you can then you are slowly going to become the writer that you always want it to be I encourage you to give yourself that shot to not put too much pressure on yourself to be this amazing writer if you think that every time you sit down at the keyboard you're just gonna start writing you know Hemingway or something you're going to be disappointed probably in yourself because it takes time it takes sometimes like sitting down and working for hours on one small scene or one small sentence to get the words right and that's just the process of being a writer so be patient with yourself give yourself the time and the opportunity to learn give yourself the tools and the resources to begin to learn how to be a better writer but go for it you know you don't have to worry about publishing right now there's no deadline that says you have to be published in the next six months or it's not worth your time for me I started in 2007 in June of 2007 and I didn't publish my first novel until October of 2010 and even now I go back and look at that first novel and I see how new at this I was and how far I've come in the past you know eight years of writing full-time and writing several books a year it takes time it takes effort and it's going to grow on its own as long as you put in the time and the effort to become a better writer but I wish you all the best and I hope that if you have gotten anything out of this video that you will subscribe to get more tips on how to organize your writing life and how to and how to self publish and start making money doing something that you love but for now I highly encourage you to just bask in the joy of trying something new to enjoy the process and to figure out what it is you truly love about writing and what types of genre you love to write because to me I think sometimes there is nothing closer to magic in this world than the way it feels to figure out that story and to tell those characters stories and create something like worlds and people that that others will begin to love and you know follow their stories out of nothing but your own imagination and hard work it truly is magical and it is so rewarding so I encourage you to put the time in put the effort in dedicate yourself to it and you can experience that magic too alright guys that is all for now and I will see you in my next video don't forget to look down in the description box below for some of those books on writing that you might want to check out first if you're a new writer and also don't forget to subscribe to my channel and over at heart breathing's calm on my website I do have some free printables on how to figure out what you want out of this career that might be helpful for those of you just getting started and trying to pick out your genre so head over there to get those everything will be linked below in the description box alright I will see you in my next video bye [Music]

Channel: Heart Breathings

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Keywords: creative writing for beginners, creative writing tips, writing (interest), how to become a writer with no experience, how to become a writer for beginners, how to become an author, how to write a book, how to write a bestseller book, how to write a novel, tips for beginning writers, writing tips for beginners, tips for beginner writers, how to write a book on amazon, steps to become a writer, heart breathings, sarra cannon writing tips

Id: mJoRgkTTCs4

Length: 27min 32sec (1652 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 25 2018