hey guys it's shaelin i'm here today with another
video. so in today's video i'm going to be talking about the writing advice that changed how i write,
my favorite pieces of writing advice, these are pieces of writing advice that either i found when
i implemented them kind of instantly improved my writing, or it's just advice that clicked with me
most of these i remember when i first heard them and i went 'oh that makes so much sense.' there's
obviously tons of great writing advice out there um not all of it resonates with everyone and
i'm not saying that these are rules, but this is writing advice that resonated with me it changed
how i write it in some way either clicked or clarified something about writing for me and so i
find these to be like my top 12 writing tips.the first one: if the reader can imagine something
happening without needing to be told then you don't need to show it. this is one of those
ones that i think i just saw on the internet i literally think it was in a tumblr post, i don't
know the the person who first provided me with this advice, and it really clicked something
for me because when i was a new writer i had this impulse i felt like i needed to show you
everything in order to make the story believable. i felt like because this was realistic to happen i
had to include it, you know. like let's say there was a scene where the characters went to the
hospital because someone was injured or ill, i felt like i had to show the drive to the hospital
and what they were feeling and how they were treated when they got to the hospital, i don't
know, and all these technicalities, when really you could just cut to the next important moment of
the plot. and this was such a good piece of advice for me and my writing habits to just be told 'if
we know what happens we don't need to be told or we don't need to be shown a whole scene.' right
like we could just be told then we drove to the hospital we don't need a scene of them in the car
driving to the hospital and this really helped me whittle down my stories and my plot to only
include what is necessary and not have all this redundant stuff that i was including
because i felt it was 'realistic.' it was realistic in the sense that yes in the narrative
of this character's life this does happen. as my personal writing style i like to just focus on the
important moments and kind of cut anything else. this was such a great eye-opener for that.
so my next favorite piece of advice is to use strong verbs i don't know where i first heard this
advice but i know that it was kind of just among friends. my university cohort at one point we all
just got really into verbs we all started talking about verbs all the time and we got super into
using funkier verbs and i do remember at one point the professor was talking to us in our workshop
and she was like 'all of you guys have really been working on your verbs lately like all of
your stories you've had such great verbs and i know that it's because you've been talking
amongst yourself because i know that i didn't tell you to do that.' we'd been talking about verbs!
you know you're cool when you and your friends just talk about verbs. yeah we literally thought
we were like the cool kids of our writing program. but this has become one of my favorite writing
tips because i think it instantly improved the quality of my writing to just focus on having
stronger verbs and verbs are like my favorite thing now. i have employed some odd verbiage in
my work in the past. once you start you kind of get addicted to it you can't stop. it instantly
improve the quality of my prose to start veering out of familiar verbs and using more unexpected
verbs that feel more visceral and exciting and surprising within the sentence and even sometimes
getting into like weird territory, making them up, very nouns. every single time i show an example
of writing where i've made up a verb some party pooper leaves a comment and it's like 'otherwise
good writing except that like this isn't a real verb.' it is now my guy let today be the first
day of the rest of your life. my next tip is a bit related and it's to avoid ing and to be verbs
so ing is the past participle form where it ends in ing and to-b verbs are any conjugation of the
verb to-be. learning to cut these things really really improved my control of language, so i had
a professor who had a bunch of things she wanted us to cut as much as possible from our writing
and it really taught me how to rethink language by forcing myself to cut as many to-be verbs as
possible, to cut as many ing verbs as possible. going through that process where even though it
was yeah pretty rigorous going through a story and literally pruning as many as possible, it really
did strengthen the prose helped me really see how to use language. a lot of people will
say that it's ridiculous to put those kind of constraints on language, but sometimes when
you put a constraint on language you learn how to push yourself so much further. so it was having
to write with these very strong constraints that gave me the control over language i have now and
taught me how to line edit taught me how to write cleaner. even though i'm not obsessive about it
in my work now i will let many an ing verb slide, knowing hey it's good practice to cut this when
you can also did really help just make my prose cleaner and smoother. the next really really
impactful piece of writing advice in my life was 'it's not show don't tell it's described don't
explain.' i remember this very distinctly it was a note that a writing professor had written in the
margins of one of my stories and i had a flashback and the flashback was a bit expository and she'd
written in the margins 'even in flashback describe don't explain' and that clicked something for me
i was like that's what show don't tell is, showing is just describing telling is just explaining.
i talked about this in my video on show don't tell but that changed how i saw show don't tell
because i think it's so much more approachable and i wish we could rebrand show don't tell
to describe don't explain because it makes more sense. you hear describe don't explain you
know exactly what to do. so it's something that really clicked things for me even though obviously
it was advice that i knew i knew what show don't tell was, that small change in phrasing had a big
impact on me. the next piece of advice is one that i bet a lot of people will disagree with so if
this doesn't seem right for your story that's totally okay, please keep in mind that not all
advice is for all writers, but it really resonated with me and it was if your story is boring slow it
down don't speed it up. i remember exactly where i read this it was in the glimmer training bulletin
archive, so i highly recommend the glimmer train bulletin archive as a resource, one of my favorite
places to go for interesting craft topics and discussions is the glimmer train bulletin archive.
so glimmer train was a literary magazine that is now sadly no more but you can still read the
bulletin archives online and they're just brief craft essays by a bunch of different writers but
they're on topics that i bet you've never heard of before, they're on very specific interesting
topics. and there was one and i don't remember which one it was because there are so many i'll
see if i can find it i probably won't be able to, the writer writing it had said if your story is
boring slow it down don't speed it up. it might not be boring because it's too slow, it's probably
boring because there's not enough to sink into, slowing it down increases the richness it gives
the reader more to invest in and that resonated with me a lot. it felt true to my own experience
as a reader that the stories i tend to feel most compelled by are not the ones that move quickly
they're the ones that are rich and detailed. my next tip is probably the one you guys were most
expecting: be specific. i talk about specificity non-stop in every single craft video i make, but
i genuinely think it's essentially the key to good writing vague writing i think is generally weak
and specific writing generally will be stronger. this was so useful for me in understanding how to
write description and i don't remember the first time i ever heard this but it was in university at
some point, where i realized that writing strong description was not about having the most complex
or weird phrasing, it was just about picking more interesting and specific details and if i could
just pick more specific details the interest of the description and the language would be there
inherently because it would be interesting words describing interesting things. whereas describing
vague things in overly embellished terms was just creating purple prose and overly tangled writing,
so that was so important for me learning to prioritize specificity probably had the strongest
impact on my writing going forward than anything else. the next step is one that i remember from a
very specific professor and it's a very specific tip but it's one that also really resonated with
me, and it was to find the hope and despair in every scene. i really liked the way that she
talked about. this hope and despair is the pull of tension. it was specifically the idea
to find the hope and the despair and find the despair in the hope. if a scene is only despair
then there's actually no tension because there's no possible way forward, but if there's no despair
in the hope then those joyous moments also don't have any tension. so understanding that balance
of balancing the hope and the despair finding the hope and the despair finding the despair
in the hope i thought was really interesting, it was advice i'd never heard before, and it was
something that really resonated with me. the next one is um a bit of a reframing of common advice
and it's actually from the same same fiction professor that talked about hope and the hope and
the despair, and it's that your character needs to yearn for something. we've all heard characters
need to have goals, but i had this one professor who wouldn't say what's the character's goal,
but would say what is the character's yearning, what do they yearn for, and that changed how i saw
goals it's not about 'what's this concrete thing i want to achieve even for an internal reason' it's
'what am i yearning for, what do i crave in my life.' that little difference in phrasing i think
especially as a writer of literary fiction and writing like more character-driven work um was
super important for me for understanding how goal worked in that style of writing. i do not
know the origin of the next piece of advice but it's that characters contradictions are what make
them most interesting. the reason this really resonated with me is because i think it is why
people are interesting. people are contradictory. people are so complicated. i think it's almost
hard to conceptualize how complicated people are. every single person is so complicated. inherently
people have contradictions, there are inherently contradictory aspects about people contradictory
within their beliefs, contradictory within your expectations of them, contradictory within
their personality. i think a big issue is thinking that a contradiction within a character is weak
writing or is inconsistent characterization when contradictions are what reveal the most
interesting aspects of a character, it's where the humanity and the realness of them is because
it's so real to life, we are very contradictory creatures. so i think finding contradictions
within a character to be one of the most compelling aspects of learning about a character,
exploring and writing a new character, and so that's advice that really really shaped how i view
characters. the next piece of advice is another line editing tip, it's a fairly obvious one but
it really did change how i write, and it's to just cut as many words as possible, like reframe your
sentences to be as concise as possible. learning to trim the excess off my sentences is what
helped me learn how to make description pop and i think the philosophy i have regarding line editing
is the fewer words you have the more the important words will shine the more the important words
will pop, they don't get muddled in a bunch of uninteresting words. this is learning to cut you
know those more like bulk words like unnecessary adjectives or adverbs but also cutting like weasel
words condensing constructions. learning how to like line edit rigorously and cut any excess
word was one of the most useful skills i ever learned as a writer and it really really helped
me tighten up my prose which helped me tighten up my storytelling. i'm really glad that i had people
in university who really pushed me to work on the prose aspect of my work in terms of concision and
economy. i'm glad that i was forced to do the work to learn how to do that. that skill of learning
to edit for economy and line edit really intensely probably changed my writing for the better more
immediately than anything else. so the next tip is one that i really really like and it's from
a specific professor that i had in university, great guy, and he would always talk about artistic
incongruity. this was one of those things that put into words exactly what i was looking for i think
this is just a term that he made up but he always talked about how that's where the interest of
writing comes from is in the artistic incongruity, so things that don't quite make sense or not
that they don't make sense but they're unexpected or a bit askew in an artful way. he had us do this
exercise where we wrote a bunch of nouns and then we wrote a bunch of adjectives that we would
expect to go with the noun and then we had to make it artfully incongruous and there's one that
i always remember the example was an innocent baby is not artfully incongruous because obviously
a baby is innocent, and so he turned that into a knowing baby, and i just really liked that. a
knowing baby. finding the artistic incongruity i always thought that was just a really cool
concept. i've been better for it. so my final tip um, i don't think that this was ever something
that i heard in a specific moment but it's just something that when i realized it, was the base
of how i approach writing, and it's the question you should ask yourself in every aspect of your
writing is: how can i make this more interesting. in terms of detail like when you're picking a
detail asking 'can i make this more interesting, when you're creating character can i make this
more interesting when you're writing a scene can i make this more interesting, there's no need to
ever let that up or sacrifice that i think, in my own work i really don't want to ever let slide a
scene that serves a utilitarian purpose but is not interesting, i don't want a single scene that's
not compelling at least from my perspective. i don't want a paragraph that just serves a
utilitarian purpose but is not interesting. if i have a moment like that in the story i ask myself
how do i make it interesting. ultimately the reason i find this so impactful as a philosophy
behind writing craft is because i think in terms of your story being enjoyable to read that's
the most important thing. i'll read pretty much anything as long as it's interesting. i think
that that's the most important quality that writing can have, is to be interesting, because
the opposite is for it to be not interesting and i don't see the appeal. i find that's a
guiding question that i always ask myself through the brainstorming phase, through the
writing phase, through the editing phase, how do i make this more interesting sometimes it's
as much as changing the setting like putting the characters in a more interesting setting giving
the scene a more compelling aspect i don't know in all aspects. i have a very old video on making
your writing more interesting so i'll leave that below it's really really old. so those are the 12
pieces of writing advice that changed how i write, all of these pieces of advice i can kind
of trace back to either a specific moment or to at least a significant period of time
where that started to become clear to me, these are things that either i just find really
interesting and compelling and they make sense to me, they articulate something that i want
to articulate, like artistic incongruity, that says what i want to say, it's the perfect term to
express what i want to express or they were things that i had kind of an aha moment and when i first
read the advice or was told the advice i went oh very interesting. i don't know for whatever reason
they left an impact on me, of course i'd love to hear what your favorite pieces of writing advice
are in the comments and i just also want to say that if there's a piece of writing advice that
i talked about in this video that you don't like that is totally okay, in every video about craft
someone doesn't like some aspect of what i say and there's rarely right or wrong if a piece of
advice doesn't fit your personal philosophy or fit your style or your goals, then you don't
have to implement it but it doesn't mean that it is necessarily bad. all of these things have
impacted me for the positive, but it's okay if they don't work for you you certainly don't
have to apply them and you also don't have to leave a long rant about why you hate it,
okay, writing advice is rarely universal um it's actually very personal and i think
writing advice is about curating your own set of rules and guidelines and tools that
make sense to you and that you like to turn to and these are all things i really like
to turn to because they make sense to me. alright guys so that's all for this
video, thank you so much for watching if you have any questions you can always send me
an ask on tumblr and i'll see you in another video
