I’m a big fan of nonfiction books. At any time of year, there’s a teetering tower of books on my nightstand. I love reading everything from health and healing to writing craft books. No matter what I read, I can parse something to my writing life and every word seems to wind itself into my prose.
I’m also taking 7 courses and homeschooling. In fact, I wrote about it in an article for ASJA this month.
With all the information I’m garnering, I thought I’d share a few pearls of wisdom from experts that offer a fresh perspective on improving your writing without having to spend the time and money on it.
If you follow me on Instagram, you know I’m loving Charles Johnson’s The Way of the Writer: Reflections on the Art and Craft of Storytelling which to me has hints of Stephen King’s infamous On Writing, another must-read for writers. Here are a few tips garnered from his book.
Fill a journal with ideas, pieces of writing, overheard dialogue that can help to revise your fiction.
Write three long sentences involving different emotions
Study a piece of prose you love and identify what strategies the author used to create it.
Each paragraph should have: a) one good idea b) advance the story c) help with world building through details.
How do you know when your work is finished?
Johnson says, “You know when a piece is finished, because you can’t pull out a single sentence or change a word or syllable. If you do extract that heavily polished piece, you create a hole in the space between the sentences before and after it, since you have altered not only the sense but the sound that links those sentences.”
In answering the common question of what to do when you’re stuck in your novel, he says, “In my experience, I find when a novel fails, or when students get stuck in their stories and can’t figure out what happens next, it’s almost always because they failed to fully define-and understand-the character and his conflict and the ‘ground situation’ in the beginning; or the story may fail at the end because the writer by now is just exhausted and impose on his characters events that have not grown logically and systematically and organically from all that came before.”
I’m also taking Natalie Goldberg’s The Way of Writing where she explains that polite writing is boring writing. Besides a daily 10 minute exercise on seemingly benign free writing topics like teeth or cake, she asks students to write all over the page, to forget about the margins and allow yourself to write freely without your inner editor.
What amazing writing tip have you learned that helped you so much you want to shout it from the rooftops?
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