this is an archive filled with writing tips, prompts, inspiration and resources.
"If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it" - Toni Morrison
Back in college, Sanket and I would hang out in bars and try to talk to women but I was horrible at it.
Nobody would talk to me for more than thirty seconds and every woman would laugh at all his jokes for what seemed like hours.
Even decades later I think they are still laughing at his jokes. One time he turned to me,
“the girls are getting bored when you talk. Your stories go on too long. From now on, you need to leave out every other sentence when you tell a story.”
We were both undergrads in Computer Science. I haven’t seen him since but that’s the most important writing (and communicating) advice I ever got.
New creatures in stories tend to share a common characteristic:
Some aspect of them resembles an animal, or multiple animals, from real life. They are often a combination of existing elements drawn from nature.
Designing them this way can give creatures both a familiar and foreign feel. It also makes the reader able to visualize them because they have a point of reference for their design.
As an example, look at the Kaiju from Pacific Rim and see what characteristics they share with real-world creatures:
Knifehead - He has skin that resembles that of a rhinoceros, limbs that are styled after those of an insect, and a head that is reminiscent of a shark.
Leatherback - His body is clearly modeled after a gorilla, but his features are reptilian.
Otachi - She’s a dragon-like Kaiju with wings and basic body anatomy resembling a bat. She even has a bat nose!
Now, obviously writing requires a bit more work than film when introducing new creatures, but it’s still doable.
If the creature belongs in the world, have your characters treat it as such. If I were to reference a giraffe, I would expect everyone to know what that is. If your character were to see or reference a creature that he/she knows, but the reader doesn’t know, make it seems familiar to the character and then provide the reader with a visual description of the creature to make it not only stick in their minds, but also seem normal. Feel free to relate your description back to real life animals with comparisons (simile or metaphor).
If the creature isn’t a normal part of your character’s world, you can describe them in the same manner, but make sure your character doesn’t react to them as we would a pigeon on the sidewalk. They should be surprised, bothered, worried, or fearful of this new creature in their path.
I personally tend to draw out my creature ideas before I try to describe them. If you have that skill, I recommend doing so. if you can’t draw and you know someone who wouldn’t mind drawing for you, then use that to your advantage. There are also a ton of wonderful artists who would love creature commissions if you have the cash.
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!
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.
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.
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.
#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.
Hi, I'd just like to ask you for some advice on how you develop your OC's. I've been trying to start up a story for a while now but it's difficult for me to develop really believable characters and I just wondered if you'd have some advice on that. Thanks). xx
Hey, anon! I got this message while I was at work so I’m sorry if it’s a bit late! I can’t tell you exactly how I do it because some things just click into place and sometimes it feels like magic mixed with sheer dumb luck. But here is some of my advice to you!
Read:
Exploring someone else’s world, their paracosm may help to inspire your own.
The first major book series I read was Harry Potter (surprise, surprise), and when I was younger (though I am embarrassed to say, lord help me), I was in fact in love with Harry Potter, he made me happy (I also had a serious crush on Sirius Black @ baby me, wtf) so I used to imagine myself as a character in HP that came along and fixed all of Harry’s woes, I was his light, his princess in shiny kickass armor, and soon this fictionalized version of me took on a character of her own.
Fanfic & Retellings:
If anyone ever says fanfic isn’t ‘real writing’, they can bite me. Fanfiction is valid, you’re pouring your heart and soul into the work, and not just the work but the characters. As with retellings (of myths, fairy tales, etc.) the world and the characters were already built, but the moment you write for them, for that brief inexplicable moment, those characters are yours.
Let them be yours. And then let those characters spawn, let that world expand, and then cultivate those characters you find in that other world that are truly your own and bring them into your own world.
All in a name:
Sometimes seeing a specific name or even a word that reminds me of a name, conjures a picture or a voice, fills my head with this creature’s story. Knowing the meaning or the origin of that name can add to the back story and depth of a character (i.e. why did their mother or father or parent name them this?).
Sometimes, I have to find a picture first, seeing a model or an actress can sometimes give depth to a character because when you know what they look like on the outside, you can start building the inside or vice-versa when you have a character in your head all built up and then you find that one picture of that one model that completes them.
Research:
Characters are a by-product of the environment they live in much like actual people. If your character lives in a world where robots have become sentient and want basic ‘human’ rights, study robotics, philosophy, dystopias, when you’ve created a world, you can decide how your character is going to react to that world. Are they rebellious? Are they afraid of robots and must learn to get over that prejudice? Will they fight for robotic rights? Will they be the villains of the tale? What are they going to learn from this world?
History has always been an inspiring point for me, other and ancient worlds have always spoken to me so I research them, I get to know the people and the world, and then set my characters loose on it, how would they have reacted if they lived in a village that was hit by the Black Plague or taken over by Vikings?
Headcanons:
Create headcanons for your characters. If you see a text post on tumblr that says ‘imagine your otp’ than imagine your own characters. Play those headcanon games used for someone else’s fictional characters and play with your own.
Come up with a list of random facts about that character (i.e. Emily is the kind of character who will listen to Vivaldi when on a heist but prefers electronica on her days off. Her favorite color is periwinkle. She has a cat named Buffy [after the show], and her favorite ice cream is mint chocolate chip.) Knowing all those tiny, seemingly insignificant things will bring depth to your character, those little things make us who we are.
Believability is subjective. There are going to be characters who are too good to be true, either they seem too perfect or they seem to imperfect. Use your own emotions and experiences to give credibility to a character, if there’s something in my life that I cannot control, that has significantly left a mark on me, it’s something I can deal with via my characters, I can work it out through them even though it might not work in real life. I can take my anguish and my sorrow and my humor and wrap flesh around it and send it off into another universe with another name.
I read recently (I think it was on maggie-stiefvater‘s blog) that writing characters is like writing a thesis paper and you’re trying to convince everyone reading them that they exist. I know I probably mangled that quote but I like it, and I think it speaks to what we do as writers. We make these worlds and these characters and we ask others to accept them, to believe in them, and love them.
I really hope at least some of this helped? It’s about 2am for me (I didn’t get home from work until after midnight) and I’m a little worried it’s all over the place, but I hope it makes sense!
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.
