Ten Weird Writing Tips That Actually Work

i'll be so honest i do not know what my hair is doing today hey i'm hannah i'm a writer you can grab my books in the description if you want to see some of my stuff i don't know why i feel like my intros have to be as long as other people's intros are in minutes but in seconds you know what i mean like they do like five to seven minutes i do like five to seven seconds and then we gotta keep going well now it's a little bit longer i guess today i've got a list of 10 less common writing tips that i've found a lot of success with you can let me know your favorite one in a comment or tell me your own weird writing tip because i think they're fun the first tip is for if you have a character that you like too much or you hate too much in general you want your characters to be complex a mix of good and bad traits because that makes them read believably so if you're having trouble imagining them complexly my hack is to temporarily change their name replace their name with the name of a real person that you like or dislike so if i dislike a character and i want to write them more fairly i'll give them my friend sam's name because it's androgynous so you could slap it on anybody and it makes me think of them more fondly so i imagine better traits for them i won't tell you the names that i use when i want to like a character less but i do have a few in rotation then at the end of that draft i just do a find replace to switch the names back tip two is to cut the last thing you wrote i find that most writers make their point before they're done talking and they just keep talking because writers don't know how to shut up so those extra words after the point often make it weaker and this tip isn't going to be true 100 of the time so use your own judgment but look at the last thing you wrote and ask yourself if it's stronger cutting that because it normally is when i'm critiquing other people's stories or editing my own i do normally end up cutting the last paragraph or few paragraphs and it always makes it better tip three is stop writing while you still have ideas this might seem counter-intuitive if you have like a good flow going but knowing where you're starting at the beginning of your next writing session makes that one much more productive for example if you have a certain word count goal that day and you hit it and you still have ideas it might be best to stop while you still have ideas i like to summarize what i think should happen like just a couple bullet points so that way in the next writing session i know exactly what i'm going to be working on if you burn yourself out of ideas your next writing session is going to be a lot of thinking and that's going to slow you down a lot versus if you could just jump in writing tip four is to print your manuscript for proofreading this is probably the most common bit of advice on this list but having like a physical copy in front of you for some reason makes it a lot easier to spot mistakes i like to go through and mark them up with a pen if you don't want to do that or you don't have access to a printer you can also export it as a pdf you can do an epub and put it on your e-reader like just changing the format of it makes it a lot easier to spot typos you can also change the font on your word document and that'll kind of give you new eyes looking at it i know a lot of writers who swap to comic sans for their second draft so if you can't actually print your manuscripts you have other options tip five is to keep sentence long summaries of your scenes as you write them this is a great alternative for people who are starkly against writing outlines because it kind of writes an outline as you go so you still have the benefit of like an overhead shot of your book this is really helpful for longer books because i forget everything that i write so having easy access to like a miniature version of the book that i can see on one screen is really helpful i also like being able to click and drag to reorganize those scenes because i write with novel pad by the way thank you navelpad for sponsoring this video i wrote six books in a little over a year on novel pad so if you would like a tool that can make writing way easier stick around to the end of this video to learn how you can try it for free tip six is to keep a list of topic ideas and brainstorm there regularly especially if you write short things like poems or blogs once you have an idea your subconscious works on it and your down time so if you can just make yourself have those ideas you kind of draft things on accident so by the time you finish your current project you could have 10 ideas that you've been passively outlining in your head so it's free content for like no work it's free real estate i do this for short stories i do it for blog posts i do it for video ideas it's like keeping a project in every stage of the idea funnel so that you have a constant flow of content tip seven is when you're writing longer projects try keeping a list of problems as you think of them instead of stopping to fix them while you draft i find this helpful for novel revisions particularly if you notice that one of your characters needs a stronger arc or you're trying to fix a plot hole just keep an ongoing list of those things that you can go back to once this draft is finished i started doing this just to track my macro edits so that i could worry about them later on instead of actually stopping myself in the writing process but then actually having them written down made my brain work on it while i wasn't actually thinking about it so i end up coming up with solutions for those problems before i even specifically dedicate time to figuring out those problems i will say sometimes problems are too big if i find i'm losing momentum on a project i was really rolling on i will go back and read it from the beginning and try to find where i went wrong because for me i know that that means that i misstepped somewhere but aside from cases like that i just keep a list of problems so that i have a head start on revisions tip 8 is to summarize paragraphs if you get stuck i find i lose a lot of momentum if i'm writing and then i get to a paragraph or description or like a character conversation that for whatever reason isn't coming to me easily so i kind of skip over them at first i will note as detailed as i can what i think should happen in that spot so either like a play-by-play of rusty crusty description just so that i have an action outline or i'll put something like character a has some kind of interaction that makes them empathize with character b like what i need this scene to accomplish even if i don't know what's actually going to happen in it what doesn't work for me is a summary like write description here what does work is the beat for beat description of what should happen without trying to sound pretty or be good writing at all so it's either the roughest draft in the world or it's summary when it should be written and seen or whatever kind of stand-in makes the most sense and then i try to come back and fill it out before i finish the chapter because i have done that and finished the draft of a novel without going back and filling in those little summarized spots and that was a pain in the ass tip nine is to swap scenes with a writing partner this one's fun if you have someone that you write with regularly so they're like pretty familiar with your current work in progress so if you get stuck on a certain scene or a certain concept or just for fun you can write a scene for your writing partner and they can write one for you one thing that's helpful for me is to pitch some kind of concept that i'm having trouble with with my book like one time i had a character who went through some traumatic event and then i didn't know what to have her like reflection on it be so i told my friend that they knew the story and then they wrote like what they think she would have been doing another example is my friend had a hetero pairing in one of her books and she didn't really know how to write that so i wrote a romance scene for her and that kind of gave her an idea of a dynamic that those characters could have so you might not keep the scene but it can give you a fresh perspective on a story for the same reason that like having beta reader feedback is helpful you're really really close to it so you might be cutting yourself off from a perspective that's possible just because you've been locked into it for so long tip 10 is if you're struggling to get in your character's head try writing them going through something that you're going through yourself for example i've been planning a tattoo sleeve right that's a big permanent expensive decision so it's been taken up a lot of my headspace for a while i was stuck on a scene in my current novel where i knew that i really needed the character and the reader to connect and for whatever reason i was struggling to get into her head for that scene so i wrote her thinking about getting a tattoo sleeve the best lies are grounded in truth and sever fictional characters so if you need to connect with your character get in their head try writing about something that you are actively thinking about in your day-to-day life and it might not be something that continues into your final draft like that might be something you delete when i do this a lot of the time i end up deleting what i wrote but it's like an entryway into your character's head and then you can write from there as them i'm sure this won't work for everyone but it works really well for me so you should give it a shot and let me know how it goes so back to our sponsor don't leave novel pad is a straightforward intuitive writing software that helps eliminate distractions organize your novel and it doesn't bog you down with a ton of features you can literally open it and start writing and you can kind of learn about those organizational features as you use the program or as it becomes irrelevant to your project you can try it free for two weeks through the link in the description no credit card required i really recommend trying it out because like i said i wrote six books on novel pad this year i'm so serious it's a great program i'm a particular fan of the chapters page because you get that overview of every scene the description of the scene the location it takes place in and whatever other labels you would like to ascribe to it like the character pov the mood whatever you need to keep track of then you can just click and drag to shuffle them around i also want to shout out the goals page where you can set your writing goals in great detail including which days of the week you want to weigh heavier or lighter sprints and vacations etc the novel pad does the math for you i know none of y'all can do math stop playing again you can grab the link in the description to try it for free no credit card required you can also join their discord to speak directly to the creators about any questions or requests you might have that will also be linked in the description that's all i got hope it was helpful thank you for watching leave me your favorite weird writing hack and a comment and i'll see you next time [Music] you

Channel: Hannah Lee Kidder - Writer

Views: 250,693

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Id: G_V_5a-J9Us

Length: 9min 20sec (560 seconds)

Published: Thu May 05 2022