Today’s tip is less of a tip. Well, it’s kind of a tip and kind of a public service announcement. Before I get into, however, I should give the boilerplate warning. Everyone’s creative process is different. How you best express yourself is going to be different than how everyone else does it. The creative process isn’t some rote engineering equation where we can plug ideas and characters into an algorithm and it’ll spit out emotional, thoughtful or exciting stories. Don’t believe the programmers. 

Now, with that out of the way, about 9/10ths of the writing process is editing. 

While you should always be writing, writing and more writing. You should also be editing, editing and doing more editing. 

Now, I may do more editing than some other writers. My creative process begins with an idea. It might be a name for a title. It might be a concept for a character. Sometimes I just think, “Huh, people seem to like trains.” And then I start writing. I have very few plans, goals, directions and never any outlines for how things will develop. My first draft is like a reader’s first read. It’s entirely exploratory and I’m just as shocked and amazed how things end up. 

As you’d expect, this results in a lot of jumbled messes and horrifically convoluted plots. I then take that first draft and I set it against the grindstone. Edit after edit, draft after draft, I refine the original story into something far more presentable, logical, and entertaining. A lot of the time, my first drafts look very little like my final. And there’s far more time spent editing the story than there is writing that initial one. 

I don’t doubt that if you plan everything out ahead of time you can probably save yourself on revisions. But I also don’t believe that no matter how diligent you are in outlining your story, you’re going to have to take it to the grindstone as well. Sometimes our ideas don’t work as well as they do. Sometimes we wander off on tangents. Sometimes we realize there’s a large hole in the narrative and have to go back and plug it up. Mistakes happen. We’re all human and as writers, we thankfully have the luxury to polish our work into something a little more pristine.

Now, I’m never satisfied with my stories. I think they can always be improved. There’s certainly a skill in recognizing where the line is when the amount of revising returns greatly diminished results and you might as well cart it off to the production line. I’m still learning where that is. Usually frustration and exhaustion determine it for me. 

But, keep in mind, while you are writing, writing and writing, you also need to be editing just as much if not more.

Just don’t do it. 

Do something else. Like, extoll your strengths and virtues. Focus on your positives. Sell your charm and wit. Take your shame, dig a deep hole and bury it so it never sees the light of day.

This may seem like a strange piece of advice. Alright, it should seem rather obvious on its face. But it is something I notice crop up in both amateur and professional work alike. For some reason or another, a writer will basically draw attention to an error, mistake or simply badly written section of their work. It will be in a moment where, say, the character is faced with an interesting idea and they choose to not take it. Which can work and be fine but the bigger problem arises when the character then muses how much more exciting, interesting, successful and marvelous that other option would have been. 

Or the character will do something and then reflect later, “Oh, I should have done this instead. I don’t know why I didn’t.”

I’m not sure what else to call this other than drawing attention to an error. Perhaps you, as the author, didn’t think of this alternative when you were first writing. You’re then neck deep in a sequentially locked story with little room for large choice changes without having to scrap everything and rewrite the whole story. But while you’re going through and editing you think “Man, this idea would have been so much better. I know. I’ll let everybody else know that this other idea would have been a huge improvement!”

Maybe it comes from a fear that because you noticed it, other people will notice it too. However, if you head them off at the pass, it’ll all be fine. 

But it isn’t. And it won’t. 

All it really does is shine a huge spotlight on this error and then rings it with flashing, neon signs reading “This was all a huge mistake!” Especially if there isn’t any reason given for why this better alternative never happened. 

See, I’m from the school of writing that everything which makes it into the final version should be there for a reason. If it’s not serving the primary goal of your story, then cut and prune all the extras. Witty paragraph of description? For a character or place that doesn’t really have any relevance? Cut. Deeply philosophical question that has great real world ramifications but not really important for your character development? Cut. 

And that’s, at best, what these little cutesy moments of recognition are. They’re extraneous fluff. “Look at this thing that didn’t happen” is most likely not advancing your themes, character or plot. But because you’re including it, you’re making an implicit statement that this is important to survive the editing process when so much else didn’t.

Hell, maybe this is the remains of a section that he had, loved and cut because it wasn’t relevant. And it’s serving for you as a touching obituary for a scene that you loved. 

Well, cut it as well. Because all it accomplishes is making your reader wonder why they’re telling you of a better idea than you did. It almost suggests that you’re wasting their time. And we never want people to feel like our art is a waste of time. 

So, when you’re writing and editing and you have your characters muse about an alternative that is far more interesting than what they do, ask yourself:

Is there any purpose of highlighting that a more interesting story untold here could or can exist? Usually no? I should cut this.

Shakespeare once famously asked if a rose by another other name would smell as sweet. My answer is no. If you just kept referring to the rose as a flower, people probably wouldn’t think quite as highly as it. 

This is a more tricky tip than some of the others. It has to do with naming. Not specifically your main character since that’s a whole other struggle and a half. No, this has to do with names for supporting characters. Your secondaries and tertiaries. The less important folks who get very little time on the page. Naturally, these people don’t have to be well rounded wholly defined entities. Not many people are going to think too much of the life and times of the apothecary who sells Romeo his poison. And not only is it not recommended but it certainly isn’t needed to make every individual that crosses the page a remarkable individual.

One of the sad truths of life is that there isn’t truly that much that makes any of us special. In the plays of other lives, most of us would counter ourselves lucky to be included in the nameless chorus. 

However, you probably should consider naming more characters than you currently are now. 

There’s no easy rule to follow here, naturally. Too many names in rapid succession can be confusing to the reader. A name, oftentimes, signals a person of enough import to be remembered. Otherwise they would be the unenviable apothecary. 

However, people are remarkably good at forgetting things that aren’t actually important. How many people can recall Benvolio’s name, afterall. And, at the end of the day, how many even care? For ease and clarity, you should heavily consider naming a character if they start having dialogue lines. The more lines they have, the more likely they should probably be named. I’ve gone through the horror of trying to read passages between a protagonist, Guard #1, Guard #2 and Captain of the Guard and it is not pleasant. Especially since a writer is apt to give them “temporary” names like “the tall one” and “the gruff one.”

Needing to read more than one line of dialogue from “the tall one” is probably a sure sign that you need to give a character a name. Course, this leads to another stumbling block where sometimes a writer may worry that using a name for a character which the source of the book’s point of view may not know would be jarring. And, certainly, it can. It’s a reasonable concern.

However, writers are basically gods and it’s pretty easy to contrive moments to blurt out a person’s name. Is it natural for the captain to name his two flunkies the moment he runs into the protagonist and their band of escapees? No but who cares? There’s probably flying dragons and sorcery in the world and your reader would rather a minor contrivance of a theatrical, “Stop them Bryce and Gertrude!” rather than meander through an awkward chapter of these names legged sentries arguing for several pages with your hero. 

Another point of consideration is whether the character is important to your protagonist. Maybe the tertiary individual is only in the story for a page or two but they happen to be the hero’s best friend. They could probably use a name. They are “important” in a character sense even if narratively they do little more than give the hero an encouraging pep talk once. 

Remember, no one’s ever complained about a character in a piece of work having a name. At least, I’ve never come across it. It would certainly be a new and strange complaint if they did. 

Finally, one last cheat is to simply use a character’s profession as a pseudo-name if they are basically there to fulfill the duties of their job and literally never show up again. I mean, I’m not about to fly over to the United Kingdom to lecture Shakespeare’s bones on whether the apothecary should really have been called Frank or not. 

Not that he’d care anyway.

So, when you’re writing supporting characters, especially small ones, asking yourself:

Does this character have more than a single line of dialogue? I should probably heavily consider giving them a name.

Does this character appear in multiple chapters/sections? I should probably heavily consider giving them a name.

Is this character very important to the protagonist? I should probably heavily consider giving them a name.

Look, writing is hard. I get it. There’s a lot to juggle. You want consistent characterization simultaneously with personal growth. You want adventure and adrenaline inducing action while keeping some resemblance to reality. You want… some other contradiction that I can’t think of at the moment because a lot of writing is making sure you’re grammatically correct while still coming up with creative ideas.

It’s a lot. 

For anyone. 

Sometimes mistakes happen. They’re pretty inevitable, really. Like death and taxes but without the pithy idiom. Not to mention English is a tricky language to write. I assume you all are writing in English. I mean, I don’t know how you’d be reading this blog otherwise. And while I’m certain there are cultural considerations to take into account when writing in other languages, I don’t know them so I’m not going to discuss them. 

Today is a grammar tip though. Please, for the love that is all good and enjoyable, please watch your tenses. I know, sometimes we think we want to write in present and then halfway through we switch to past and oops I didn’t notice but it’s already so far along who is really going to care?

I will.

I also wouldn’t recommend swapping tenses for artistic effect unless it is abundantly clear why you’re doing it. Doubly so if it’s meant to be interspersed within the same chapter/sections/paragraphs/sentences. It really just reads as a mistake and little else. Can you do it? Well, if you follow a prior tip of “break every rule but intentionally” then sure. But it’s going to be difficult. You could, say, have different tenses between prose and dialogue. Quotation marks are an easy delineation between two different states that are easy for the reader to follow. You could have it in prose between thoughts and descriptions. Toss them in italics and I’m sure no one would blink an eye. 

But do be aware that it is jarring. Which might be what you’re going for but it’s important to weigh how jarring it is to flop between tenses. 

It’s especially hard to do nonchalantly too since more often than not if you come across a tense change in the wild it’s just a straight up mistake. So most readers are already primed to see that shift in an unfavourable light. 

So, please practice responsible grammar mistakes.

When writing and considering incorporating different tenses into the same passage, ask yourself:

Is the reason for the tense change clear? Can the reader immediately see a separation between when it’s used and when it’s not and why it is happening?

Did I actually mean to shift my tenses in the first place?

Today’s writing tip is less a tip and more my general philosophy when it comes to writing. See, this is an art just as much as it is a craft. And the fun thing with art is that anything can be art. Yes, stick figures can be art. Finger painting. A toilet bowl. We didn’t come out the other end of postmodernism to sit and quibble about what does and doesn’t qualify for the umpteenth time. Besides, we live in a late capitalistic market so hoity toity concepts of what is and isn’t art is less important than what sells anyway.

And what does sell? No one knows. Don’t trust anyone that says they do. The best written works are almost never the most popular. And what’s popular is hardly ever new. So don’t sweat it. 

We’re going to focus on the distinction of art and craft today anyway. 

First off, let’s address what I’m not saying. I’m not saying you can just ignore all those suggestions on what makes good writing. I mean, if that were my goal, I wouldn’t have done several months worth of posts on the subject. But I do want to stress that these are suggestions. All “rules” of writing are really just shorthands for what people have noticed generally work best. Will they work in every situation? Of course not. Any rule you are taught that is important to good writing, you can usually find a successful or accomplished piece that undermines it. I mean, James Joyce is considered a master of the field, after all. 

However, I’d argue all those that are successful at breaking the rules do so intentionally. That’s what makes it art. When you accidentally “break” a rule of good writing – you’ve made a mistake. But when you know the rule and have analysed its use in your work and then choose to forgo the rule, that’s when you’re being artistic. But how do you get to that point? 

Well, you play, really. Try new things. Try different things. We learn best by our mistakes, afterall. And this loops back to my primary tip which is to always be writing. But the more you write the more you learn what works and what doesn’t. And then you start noticing the edge cases where you can skirt the “proper way” to produce something surprising and effective. 

However, before we can start undermining expectations we must first learn what those expectations are. So I do encourage you to go out and learn all these rules and tips. Try to understand what they are and what they are accomplishing. Pay attention when you read other works, especially those that are deemed masterpieces, and take particular note when and where the creator chose to follow the rules and chose to break them. Ask yourself why they did it in the different situations and tease out deeper meaning which you can use with your own writing. 

And once you’ve got a good grasp on the fundamentals to the point that they’re second nature, that’s when you start to twist them. Bend them. Stretch them to the point of breaking. Find where you can skirt the rules as much as you possibly can. And play with it. 

Because at the end of the day, we enjoy art because it’s fun. If you’re not having fun with your work, how can you expect someone else to?

So, for this tip, it’s more to keep in mind when you’re receiving feedback. If someone points out something in your writing and says its a mistake, ask yourself:

Did I intentionally write this point of contention to go against protocol and establishment? If not, it’s probably a mistake.

If this was an intentional “error” is the reader getting the desired effect from breaking this rule? If not, maybe try breaking it in another manner or provide better context for the reader to understand what the “error” is attempting to achieve.

Here’s a little tidbit for you – writing isn’t real. It’s true. Writers create fantastical places, people and events to titulate and entertain. And we most certainly never base things on real people or events unless it’s a biography. 

Scouts honour. 

But how do we convince people to get invested in clear make belief? I know when my nephew whines that his imaginary friend is hungry, I’m not jumping into the kitchen to whip up some homemade tacos. Harold could stand to lose a few pounds there. He’s clearly been engorging himself on one too many many breakfast waffles. 

However, for our stories, we seek to create a sense of verisimilitude. This is a very complex topic and one of the primary pillars of storytelling. So there’s no way I can properly discuss it in one blog post. Or three for that matter. It’s a real art of giving your creative work a sense of reality or truthfulness and there are a lot of tools in which you can produce it.

Today, I’m going to tell you how to avoid one. 

The goal of writing isn’t to reproduce an exact copy of real life. Readers really don’t want to get bogged down in the minutia of someone’s day-to-day activities. It’s why so few stories have people go to the bathroom. Or fixing dinner. 

There is one pitfall, however, that beginner writers might tumble down. And that’s in trying to capture the peculiar speech patterns of real life dialogue.

My advice is simple: don’t.

If you actually sit and record someone speaking, it’s a little painful to listen to on playback. There’s a lot of pauses, stammerings, filler words and sounds as well as random tangents that don’t go anywhere. Real life conversations are messes. Please don’t try to replicate them. No one wants to read through a transcript of verbal tics and noise. 

So don’t stuff your writing with “um,” “like,” “ah,” and “you know.”

You can use a small sprinkling, think of it like salt, to add just a dash of flavour to one character or so. But excess use of verbal noise and repetition makes dialogue really hard to read and, ironically, less organic. No one talks in real life like people do in novels. Just like no one talks like the characters on Gilmore Girls. But it’s this novel creativity that gets people interested and attentive. 

If life weren’t so boring, we wouldn’t want to read and listen to the tales of storytellers to escape it.

So, when writing your dialogue ask yourself:

Is there too much unnecessary filler in my character’s dialogue? 

If my character has a verbal tic, am I overusing it to the point of annoyance?

Can I cut any words from the dialogue to keep it short and snappy while still maintaining the necessary information?

You know, I wasn’t always a world class, globally famous and widely celebrated writer. Hard to imagine, I know. But it’s true. There was a time before that. Not when I was humble. Heavens, that would be silly. There was a time before I wrote creatively. 

Alright, that’s a big old lie however I did attend an institute of higher learning which taught me a different kind of writing. I do feel that the job of a writer is partially to be a learner. Go out and learn things. Many different things. The more disparate the better. That way you have a wider breadth of knowledge from which to infuse your work. It’s like making an herbal tea or something. The more foreign the ingredients, the more you can charge. 

Today’s little tip, however, actually comes from my scientific days. There’s a whole new kind of formatting you have to learn in order to write “academically approved literature.” Several formats, actually. Each with their own niggling, fussy details that will drop your grade each time you get them wrong. And the professors really don’t care if you forgot if it was their class or Microbiology that wanted Chicago style over APA for giggles. 

At any rate, one thing you must do regardless of your professor’s love for outdated publishing standards is define your terms and acronyms. Specifically, before you start using them. And it really doesn’t matter how common you think they are. Sure, if I was writing an international thriller and my main character had a prominent job in New York, it might seem pretty obvious to say that she simply works for the “U.N.” 

Course, when she starts talking about the STDs from her job, you might get a few raised eyebrows. Depending on the age of the reader, I suppose. I’ll never stop smiling whenever a mathematician mentions them. 

However, regardless of how widespread or obvious you may think an acronym is, it is still good practice to write it out. Because with the wide variety of specialty fields out there, and we’re not even going to get into different languages, there’s probably a whole lot of alternative definitions which could spring to a reader’s mind before the definition you’re intending to use. And maybe what you think is common knowledge isn’t that common at all. Clarity is of the utmost importance and, honestly, there is nothing lost by a character stating at the beginning of the book, “Hi, I’m Claire. I work for the local health unit studying Ulnar Neuropathy. Specifically damage caused by Sexually Transmitted Diseases. What, why did you think I worked for the United Nations?”

So when writing your story, ask yourself:

Have I properly written out any acronyms before using them (no exceptions)?

Let’s discuss pet peeves. Everyone has them. Especially when it comes to grammar points. Don’t believe me? Ask loved ones in your life what errors drive them up the wall. Some people hate split infinitives. Others can’t stand the confusion between their/there/they’re. For a rare curmudgeonly few, it’s ending a sentence with a preposition. 

For me, it’s “alot.”

I don’t understand. Alot isn’t a thing. Maybe it’s a name. I don’t know. I’m not worldly. All I know is that this particular spelling error drives me bonkers. I don’t know why. No one said pet peeves have to be rational. I sort of glaze over other spelling errors or smile bemused at a mixup between fairy and ferry (no Kait, I’ll never forget). Most don’t produce much emotion other than, perhaps, a slight tinge of resignation as I correct them. 

But if you want me frothing at the mouth with rage, you can simply smush these two little words together. 

I’m not even sure how this error propagated so much. You never come across abit. Do people often see alittle? Maybe English speaker’s minds can handle that small amounts should be in separate piles. But once you get into big mounds then it all sort of collapses together into a whole. Or awhole, in this case.  Or apile. Or even amass. 

At any rate, this is less a writing tip post and more a recommendation. It’s “a lot.”Just put a space in there. I swear, it’s not a problem. Your auto-correct should catch it anyway. And if it’s not, then you’ve been typing on your phone with predictive text turned on too much. While this won’t have a huge impact on the quality of your writing, it will still be a nice change if even one person breaks from this habit.

Because you never know if I’m going to be the curmudgeon who ends up editing your work.

We all know what it’s like – a friend recommends this subversive new movie that’s absolutely going to shake up the film industry with the director’s creative genius and artistic flair! You find it online after searching through four different streaming platforms for the one niche provider still willing to throw a few bucks towards an arthouse production. You grab a snack, turn off the lights, pop some popcorn and get ready to have your entire cultural paradigm shifted.

Except you only get about twenty minutes in and you have to turn it off. The main character is such a jerk and completely detestable. Every scene is like listening to nails scratching chalkboard and they treat everyone around them like utter garbage without any pushback or confrontation. People bend over backwards to appease them which only makes them even more insufferable to watch. 

And that’s why I won’t sit through The Order of the Phoenix. 

I’m sure we’ve all read stories where the main character is not heroic. I mean, I would hope we all have. Variety is the spice of life and we don’t want every single tale to be some noble King Arthur riding around with his unwavering knights to banish evil at every turn. I actually like a good anti-hero. I particularly enjoy reading stories from morally questionable characters. I mean my favourite fantasy series is Thieves’ World. And it’s right there in the name – they’re all thieves! Well, mostly. It doesn’t really matter. 

My point is that you should write a likable character.

Sure, that may seem like it’s flying in the face of my previous paragraph. Why can others write complete heels and jerks but I have to be stuck with the goody-goody law abiders? Well, first, I didn’t say that. I said your character should be likable. Second, I didn’t even say it should be your protagonist. 

But it probably wouldn’t hurt if it was. 

You see, most people are going to want to cheer for their principal character. Generally we only get behind people that we like. This isn’t always the case and there are certainly stories that follow the redemption of terrible people or even them simply getting their comeuppance. These are a little harder to manage so if it’s early days in your writing journey, do be conscious that you’re choosing a more difficult task while still trying to hammer down the basics. But even if you do choose to have a real jerk of a protagonist, I implore you that you need a prominent secondary character that isn’t. And the sooner you introduce that character, the better. 

In this day and age, you really have to compete for readers and eyeballs. And you’re not just competing against a massive library of past and present literary works. You’ve got film, television, telephones and video games all vying for the recreational time of the broader populace. If you don’t provide something to really grab your reader, they’re apt to simply put your book down and go off to something that’s more enjoyable. They won’t stick around for your hard wrought narrative of whatever fate befalls your detestable protagonist and they won’t enjoy the payoff for having to sit through their unpleasantness. 

So you need to give them a reason to keep with your story. A promise, if you will, that you’re aware things may not be immediately gratifying but they don’t need to worry – you know what you’re doing and you will deliver them that massive payoff in the end if they stick with it. 

And there is no better demonstration than giving them the juxtaposition of an utterly contemptible person with a charming, good natured and witty foil. Be sure to let them know that early and clearly.

So, when considering your cast of characters, ask yourself:

Is my protagonist sufficiently likable/relatable that my reader is going to want to continue reading to find out what happens to them?

If not, do I have some supporting character that my reader can be a cheerleader for?

Am I introducing this likable character early enough that I’ll secure my reader’s trust before the commercial break ends and they go off to watch whatever new Marvel tv show is making the rounds in social media?