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People like writing about war, but they rarely like writing about the aftermath. And I think that’s a shame, because sometimes writing about the aftermath can be at least as interesting. There’s a lot you can do with what happens after the fighting is done, when people need to rebuild, when they need to find who they are and where they fit in a world that is different than it was when they began.
Write about interpersonal relationships, and how they changed.
Write about how people view themselves and the actions they needed to take.
Write about rebuilding—physically, socially, mentally, emotionally.
Write about the choices people made because they thought they were never going to need to face the consequences.
Write about the emotional toll that war takes, that constant violence takes, that never being able to relax takes.
Write about the physical toll that war takes, about the people who come back missing limbs or neurons.
Write about the people who lost everyone they knew and still have to live with themselves.
Write about the people who lost everything, their homes, their land, the cities, about them finding new places to call home, or not.
Write about the people who are tasked with creating a new world, and the decisions they have to make.
Write about the people who only knew war, who were born after the war started and grew up with only that, who now need to figure out who they are in a world that has no place for them anymore.
Write about the people who were heroes, who know how to be heroes but don’t know how to be people.
Write about the people who weren’t heroes, who were hated, who were disgraced.
Write about the people who didn’t fight in the war because they couldn’t, because they weren’t physically capable or because society said they weren’t suitable.
Write about the people who fought on the losing side, who sacrificed everything and still lost and now need to rebuild with nothing, who are painted as monsters when they need no worse than the side that won.
Write about the trials, for people who committed war crimes, for people who took advantage of what was going on to do what they wanted.
Write about the weapons that are finding their way into the hands of children, cheap and easy to use, because they were left behind when the soldiers packed up and left.
Write about the landmines, the unexploded ordinances, the things that governments forgot were there or just didn’t care.
Write about ten years later, or twenty, or thirty, or one, or six months, or the next day, about what people do when the adrenaline of victory or defeat subsides and they’re left with a world that they no longer understand, that they no longer know, because they spent so long trying to destroy the old world that they forgot that they would have to live in the new one.
Write about the next generation, who grew up with parents who flinched at loud noises and cousins who could remember air raid sirens, who grew up doing drills they didn’t understand because the people who made the drills couldn’t forget that one day they might have been necessary.
Write about the women who stayed behind because they had no choice, about the women who stayed behind because they wanted to, about the women who couldn’t stay behind because there was no behind, because everywhere was a warzone and they were soldiers because everyone was a soldier.
Write about the children who trained for a war that ended before they were old enough to take up arms, where all they know is violence, not peace, how to destroy a city but not how to build one or how to run one.
Write about career soldiers who no longer have a career because the war is over, there’s peace, and so they find work for the highest bidder, for the person most willing to give them a knife or a gun and throw them wherever a little muscle and a lot of violence is needed.
Write about the people who did research on things nobody should ever research, who discovered things they could never speak about, who rationalized what they did as science while knowing it wasn’t.
Write about everyday people coping with everything that happened, with things they saw and things they did and things they knew that they wouldn’t wish on their worst enemy.
We have had several amazing people ask for our advice regarding writing together, writing in general, getting motivation and ideas and what exercises to do for practice. So we decided to make a post about it!
Listed will be some of our personal ideas for how to work on writing alone and with a partner, we will toss in examples where applicable and if you have any other questions or want anything else added to the post, we will do that for you!
You’ve been there.
After a long day, you’re ready to sink so deep into a novel that the day’s stresses seem to belong to someone else, to some other life. For a moment, the words on the page disappear and play instead like a movie in your mind.
But something happens. You’re torn from the story. And the novel? Just words on a page.
Maybe the author used a phrase that didn’t fit. Maybe he rambles. Maybe he’s just in love with the sound of his voice. Whatever it is, you toss the book aside because you just can’t get into it.
It sucks to be that reader. But it’s worse to be that writer, isn’t it?
Wordy prose. Elaborate description. Redundancies and filter words. These little indulgences—exciting for the writer, dull as dirt for the reader—weigh your story down.
Worried you’re that writer? Do you wonder if your readers can get into your work? What’s standing in their way?
The resources below can help with that. Here, you’ll get five techniques to obliterate the barrier between you and your reader. So you can cut the fluff and get out of your story’s way.
#1: Nuts and Bolts: “Thought” Verbs
You know that “show, don’t tell” rule everyone’s always talking about but no one is really explaining? (Check out my post: Show don’t tell: Or Should You?)
This article from Fight Club author, Chuck Palahniuk does the opposite. He never mentions “show, don’t tell.” He just tells you how to do it.
You’ll learn to identify and obliterate passages of boring explanation. It’s a shot of adrenaline for flabby fiction.
#2: The Adverb is Not Your Friend: Stephen King on the Simplicity of Style
Not sure what an adverb is? Then it might be killing your fiction.
In this article, Stephen King walks you through adverbs: how to recognize them, how they weaken fiction, and how adverb-laden passages compare to those without.
After you absorb this simple tip, you’ll be leagues ahead of most writers.
#3: The 200 Most Common Redundancies
Phrases like “added bonus,” “advance warning,” and “past experience” bloat your writing.
Why?
Because bonuses are always additional. Warnings always come in advance. And experiences? Well, they always happen in the past, don’t they? So “added,” “advance,” and “past” add no meaning. Which means they don’t pull their weight.
Get rid of them. Then check out this resource for 197 more common redundancies to strike from your fiction.
#4: 25 Editing Tips to Tighten Your Copy
This article may target copywriters, but every writer benefits from these skills.
Copywriters, those people who write Coca-Cola taglines and perfume ads, are great at one thing: persuasion.
Don’t turn up your nose. Persuasive writing creates images so powerful, they slip into your subconscious before you realize you’ve read a word.
Copywriters are also the masters of brevity. They have to be if they’re going to persuade busy people. So their imagery conveys concepts in very few words. That’s like telegraphing emotion right into the subconscious, and it’s effective writing no matter your genre.
Use them to ignite your fiction.
#5: Short Story Shortcuts: 4 Techniques for Making a Big Impact in Few Words
Brevity is an art. And a vivid image conveys more than a long-winded explanation. That’s why this article focuses on character gestures, clothing, and dialogue.
Here, you’ll learn how to pack meaning into fewer words. It’s great for short story writers and novelists too.
I hope this helped! If you have any questions, or you just want to talk (I don’t bite!) feel free to drop by my ask box!
by: Ryan Holiday
There are two types of writers, Schopenhauer once observed, those who write because they have something they have to say and those who write for the sake of writing.
If you’re young and you think you want to be a writer, chances are you are already in the second camp. And all the advice you’ll get from other people about writing only compounds this terrible impulse.
Write all the time, they’ll tell you. Write for your college newspaper. Get an MFA. Go to writer’s groups. Send query letters to agents.
What do they never say? Go do interesting things.
I was lucky enough to actually get this advice. Combine this with the fact that I was too self-conscious to tell people that I wanted to be a writer, I became one in secret.
I’m not saying I’m great at it or anything, but I am a bestselling author at 26. I have a column with a major newspaper. I get paid to write professionally. A fair amount of aspiring writers email me about becoming a writer and I always say: Well, that’s your first mistake.
The problem is identifying as a writer. As though assembling words together is somehow its own activity. It isn’t. It’s a means to an end. And that end is always to say something, to speak some truth or reach someone outside yourself.
Deep down, you already know this. Take any good piece of writing, something that matters to you. Why is it good? Because of what it says. Because what the writer manages to communicate to you, their reader. It’s because of what’s within it, not how they wrote it.
No one ever reads something and says, “Well, I got absolutely nothing out of this and have no idea what any of this means but it sure is technically beautiful!” But they say the opposite all the time, they say “Goddamn, that’s good” to things with typos, poor grammar and simple diction.
Good writing saves nothing. On the other hand, a deep, compelling or stunning message can float writers who struggle to even complete a sentence.
So if you want to be a writer, put “writing” on hold for a while. When you find something that is new and different and you can’t wait to share with the world, you’ll beat your fat hands against the keyboard until you get it out in one form or another.
Everything that is good in my writing came from risks I took outside of school, outside of the “craft.” It was sleeping on Tucker Max’s floor for a year. It was working as Robert Greene’s assistant. It was working at American Apparel, watching the office politics and learning how to get stuff done. It was dropping out of college at 19. It was saying yes to every meeting and introduction I got, and hustling to get as many as I could on my own. It was reading dozens of books a month.
It was going to therapy. It was getting into pointless arguments. It was having friends who are smarter than me. It was traveling. It was living (briefly) in the ghetto. I was able to write about the dark side of the media because I put myself in a position to see it firsthand.
All these things gave me something to say. They gave me a perspective. They gave me a fucked up writing style that makes my voice unique. They gave me opinions that tend to piss people off.
It also gave me money and the marketing experience to make my projects a success.
I don’t know the first thing about how to write (as you probably noticed in this post). I nod along and pretend that I know what things like “subject” and “predicate” and “passive tense” actually mean. I mean, I think I have an idea, but it hasn’t held me back so far. To quote Schopenhauer again, “to have something to say” is “by itself virtually a sufficient condition for good style.” I’ll take grade school dropout writing passionately in his prison cell over some empty, superior Yale MFA any day.
Part of what I’ve said here is my opinion. There are many ways to become a writer and though my way worked for me, you may prefer a different route. So you can take that part or leave it. But another part of it is an undeniable change in the economics of the business of writing.
See, it used to be that getting “published” was the hard part. You had to impress some gatekeeper and that gatekeeper was an agent or an editor at magazine, at a newspaper or at a book publisher (all of whom were typically trained writers). Well, today there are essentially an infinite amount of outlets to feature your writing. And no matter where you ultimately do get your writing out, you’ll have to bring your own audience with you anyway.
Getting published is easy. Getting anyone to care? Well, that’s the hard part.
What matters more now than any other single thing is that what you’re saying is different–that it’s interesting, that it provokes some response from people. You’ll only accomplish this if you’ve got something you have to say. Better yet, you need to have something that you can’t NOT say. If what you’re writing is a compulsion rather than a vehicle for your display how smart and well practiced you are.
So think about it one more time. Is it that you want to be a writer? Or it’s that you have these things inside you that you want very badly to communicate to people and writing is the best way to do it?
Getting the answer to that question right is the day you really become a writer.
As a writer, creating characters is probably the most important thing you do. Get it wrong, and the story will be wrong no matter how well plotted.
Here are 25 things to know.
Characters that have everything they need and want in life are pretty damn boring.
In the real world, strong female characters go by another name: women. Try writing about them.
Not every character needs to have some past trauma simmering beneath the surface to be interesting. Well adjusted people can be just as deep and complex if you give them the right goals.
There’s a difference between being quintessential and being a cartoon, but not a big one.
Watching a character fail but keep trying is usually more interesting than watching them succeed.
Don’t judge your characters—even the villains. If you do, they’ll lack truth. Instead, find out why they are the way they are, and accept them for it.
Often what we remember most about memorable characters is how they interact externally—think, Mulder and Scully, Romeo and Juliet, Lucy and Ethel. The interaction, the relationship, these are traits in and of themselves.
Real people sometimes like lascivious and licentious things: porn or weed or orgies, or porn, weed and orgies—you get the idea. So, why can’t your character like some of these things, too?
Sometimes they should die.
A name is a terrible thing to waste, and it can shape your character more than you might think. Choose wisely.
There are no recipes for great characters, but if there were — the chef would probably create something simple with a few, fresh and fantastic ingredients instead of a plethora of overly processed junk.
Archetypes are for people who are too afraid to be creative.
Even an evil character who’s evil for evil’s sake has redeeming qualities that allow us to empathize. Find them and play them up.
It’s okay if the character’s gender is the last thing about them you decide.
At a base level, every character wants the same things: food, shelter, sex — how the these primary instincts, the id if you will, interact with the ego (personal identity) can be an endless source of exploration.
Just because a character lives in the past doesn’t mean she has to conform to outdated stereotypes.
They all have flaws, and it’s the flaws that make them who they are.
In real life, we strive to avoid conflict. But in fiction, characters who always agree have no life—at least, not one worth reading about.
A character’s back story is the least important thing in the story.
Don’t be surprised when a character you’ve created does something you don’t expect. That’s called magic and you should just get out of its way.
The thing your character wants most might never surface in the story, but it still drives every. single. thing. they. do.
Real people are seldom interesting enough to make great characters. Create, don’t imitate.
They don’t always tell the truth.
Likewise, they don’t always say what’s on their minds.
When drawn correctly, when given goals and even just a few layers, most of the other details fall into place.