Have you ever sat and asked yourself, “How can I become a better writer?”
Unfortunately, one of the first things many Creative Writing Professors love to tell their bright-eyed and bushy-tailed students that are waiting to learn how to become the world's best novelist…
“You can’t teach Creative Writing.”
Then why in the H-E- double hockey sticks did I pay a ridiculous amount of money to sign up for a class for my Creative Writing DEGREE, just for the PROFESSOR of the subject to tell me that he can’t teach it.
“If you don’t know how to write a story walking into my classroom, you won’t be able to write a story walking out.” -Prof J. a man soured by his many rejection letters who in turn tried to crush the hopes and dreams of my junior year writing class.
Here’s a hint… if your teacher has this attitude, try and see if the class is offered by another professor because that one isn’t going to be teaching you anything useful.
I know from experience.
Two different colleges and seven creative writing classes later, and of the ones who said it couldn’t be taught… just weren’t helpful teachers.
I had one professor give us a story template that included the characters' names, descriptions, setting, dialogue, and what actions he wanted them to do and told us to make an original story out of that. (Then complained if we added too much)
I’m sure this guy just had writer’s block in his own story and was using us as a bunch of robots to fix the scene for him.
I won’t even get started on the fact I received poor grades for my horror fiction work just because he thought it was “a trashy genre only those with no imagination write in.” Several of us had similar issues with this and after the Dean of Students got involved our grades were handled by his Teachers Assistant instead.
Writing, like any skill, can always be improved. That’s all there is to it.
It’s a form of art that needs practice.
Bob Ross didn’t just pick up a paintbrush loaded with oil paint and make a masterpiece.
Beethoven didn't stumble across a piano and make music worth listening to.
Shakespeare's first written stories… were probably trash.
Nobody starts out as a perfect storyteller, but like any skill, it can be improved.
Looking for ways you can improve your own writing skills? Try some of these tricks.
Have a routine
Having a routine as a writer is one way to make your creative talents come out in the right setting.
If you make time to sit at your computer for an hour or so each day your mind will learn to switch into creative mode and get it working on your story.
Leave behind the emails, laundry, dishes, and any other nonsense that rattling around on your endless to-do list and make this time just writing time.
Routines build habits and habit’s become second nature after a while of repetition.
This won’t go to say that there won’t be days where you have to drag yourself to that computer chair by your shoelaces… but show up, sit in the chair, and write.
Write about your day in the third person.
Write about some scene you want to include in your story, even if you don’t quite know where you want it to go yet.
Set a word count goal and try to reach it every day. Reward yourself when you do,
Read… a lot
Within a moment’s notice, you can have the best teacher anyone who wants to write stories could ever need.
BOOKS!
It doesn’t matter what you read, but I recommend reading in the same genre you wish to write in and then branching out as well.
You’ll be studying without having to take notes or remember anything for a quiz because your mind is doing it for you.
As you read, your brain is taking in the information of sentence structure, pacing, dialogue spacing, and much more so that when you sit down and write your own story you’re brain will start to fill it in, in the same way, the stories you read did.
Any published novel you have lying nearby is proof that a person just like you, put pen to paper, or hands to keyboard and made a story.
Join a Writing Group
One benefit to the fancy Creative Writing degree is the process of peer editing.
A painful process in which you print out too many copies of a few pages of your story and have people say unhelpful things about it.
“I don’t understand what the story is about.” (Duh, you have five pages of a two hundred-page novel.)
“I don’t relate to this character.” (You haven’t even met her yet.”
“I think it was good.” (Really? That’s all you have to say?”
In most of my classes, we weren’t taught how to give productive criticism because we ourselves were still learning how to write stories. If we knew what we did wrong we wouldn’t have subjected it to this torture.
This is where writing groups come into play. It’s all the help of these classroom workshops without the strain of a participation grade.
Writing groups can be filled with all like-minded individuals writing in the same genre as you, who have a love and passion for the written word, and aren’t just there because their friend told them it was an easy class to pass.
These groups will help you refine your writing through helpful feedback, give you a support system, and can be a sounding board to bounce ideas off of when you get stuck in your story.
These groups are everywhere and can be easy to find, check local groups on Facebook for ones near you or search for online ones accepting new members. In most cases, these groups are free to join and as long as you are respectful and follow the rules of the group then you could be making connections that last a lifetime.
Write What You Know
If you don’t know something, it’s going to be pretty hard to write about it.
I read Horror Fiction, and so I write Horror Fiction.
I don’t believe I have ever read a Science Fiction book and I don’t even know the first place to start if I were to attempt to write it.
Although, “write what you know,” is advice that’s always thrown at new writers it is simply because it’s true.
When we write what we know we can connect emotionally with our story because our characters are going through something similar to what we have experienced in life.
‘What if my characters are vampires going to work on an international space station? I’m not a vampire and I’ve never been to space.’
Have you ever traveled to a place you were unfamiliar with or started a new job? Were you nervous, excited, or a little bit of both?
It’s not the exact situation that you have to have experienced, but the emotions you need your characters to convey back to your reader.
Try Daily Writing Prompts
No matter what stage you are in your writing career, writing prompts are an amazing, free, and easy-to-access writing tool that will do wonders for your creative muscle.
These can be found all over the internet and can kickstart you into your new story or just turn on the creative flow to help you start getting into the practice of writing.
My absolute favorite is
https://callofwriting.com/
It’s 100% free to use online, or they have an app that’s free to download as well. Why do I like it so much?
Motivation.
You set either a time limit or a word could limit and if you stop writing for more than five seconds EVERYTHING you just wrote is DELETED.
It’s that great motivation to keep getting out the words without looking back and second-guessing yourself.
Online Classes or Free Youtube videos
Learning to write doesn’t have to cost you a dime, as long as you have some sort of access to the internet.
If you’re reading this article then I very much believe that you do in some regard.
I have a college degree in Creative Writing, but that doesn’t mean that’s where my education ended. The internet is full of free resources that help me learn how to better myself as a writer every day.
From learning how to outline to knowing where to break up your paragraphs, everything you need to know about writing a book can be found online.
Simply search for any area you may need help on from topics as broad as, ‘How to Write a Novel?,’ to ‘How many different dialogue tags should I use?’
Hint here: He said/She said/ They said is mostly all you need. Dialogue tags should be invisible. Don’t say, ‘he said disgruntled.’ show his attitude in the way he’s acting.
My favorite Authortuber is https://www.youtube.com/c/JennaMoreci
I love her nonsense, no B.S tips for writing on all types of topics.
Outline
Tell me, if you were going to build a bookshelf from a certain yellow and blue furniture store known for giving you more parts than you know what to do with to hold all the wonderful novels you were going to write… would you wing it? Or would you follow a set path of instruction that takes you from point A to point B?
This path is your outline. It’s much easier to write once you have some idea of what you’re going to write.
Going back to those vampires in space, what are they doing there? What character are we focusing on? What tension and drama is going to keep my reader turning the page in anticipation to know what happens next?
An outline doesn’t have to be a complicated series of notes and thumbtacks on the wall as if you’re a detective on a late-night TV drama trying to solve the town's latest murder.
Anything from a few notes scribbled on a nearby piece of paper to a full blow chapter by chapter outline, can be a great tool to keep your mind focuses on the writing without having to stop and ask your brain for directions every few sentences or so.
Don’t Stress.. first drafts are never perfect
Walk over to the nearest book you own, pick it up, and start flipping through the pages.
Does it seem like a well-thought-out, free of errors story?
It sure didn’t start like that.
First drafts are ugly little demons that most authors look back on and cringe at if they even dared to keep that original document around.
If your story isn’t coming out like that professional story you have in your hand just remember that the book in your hand was rewritten at least three times before going through several rounds of editing by the author, read by beta readers before being edited again, worked on by a professional editor and then read by maybe a half dozen more before it became the story that’s now on your shelf.
Even a master writer such as Stephen King admits that he doesn’t write a perfect first draft, although he tries to make it as clean as possible. If I had one-hundred and three books under my belt I would probably write the same way, but as it is I only have three.
When you start rereading through the work that you’ve completed, you can cringe and hide it away in a dark drawer for a while. No matter what, don’t you dare delete it or throw it away. It’s still your child, it needs some love and care to get it through its ugly teenage stage, but it’ll get better or you will through practice.
Take up Daily Journaling
Dear Diary…
This is a yes and no of what I mean by daily journaling.
Keeping a daily journal sets you into the routine of daily writing as well as gives you a space where you can let out all of your ideas, connect with your emotions, and learn to write by way of a stream of consciousness.
When you learn to master this easy flow of writing it will help you when you need to turn your character from just an idea to a literary breathing living character on a page. A reader will not care about your character if their personality is as flat as the paper they are printed on.
How can you manage to convey the thoughts and feelings of your character if you let your own stay trapped inside of you? Let them out in a place that’s only for you whether in the form of a special bedside notebook or a secure online program/ notes app.
Don’t Stop Writing
You’re reading this article and have stuck around so long because you want to be a writer, correct? You know what this means you have to do right?
Exactly… write!
When you begin to write a story it’s all fresh and new and you swear you’re going to finish it this time… but then life gets in the way.
You’re tired.
You’re busy.
You don’t know where to go from there.
So you move it to the back burner and say you’ll get back to it in a few days and then before you know it weeks have passed by and maybe this turns into months. By the time you come back to your beloved story, you’ll be staring at the page wondering what in the heck you were writing because you don’t remember a single thing about this story that you’ve written. Or has that only happened to me?
The point is, is that if you want to be a writer you have to find the time to write, practice writing, or think about writing.
Did you think you were going to get better without practice?
Very funny.
Wherever you are now, whatever activity it is that you paused so you could spare your lovely time to read this article of mine.
Close this app/browser.
Set a timer for ten minutes.
Open up your notes app.
Now write. Nonstop. Until that alarm goes off. Do this every day a few times a day and guess what? If you write a little bit of a story every single day, you’ll eventually end up with a whole novel sitting in front of you.
I hope some of these tips will be useful to you or that they at least inspired you to spend a few more minutes a day writing than you were before.
The most important takeaway from this is that writing is a skill that CAN be learned and NEEDS to be practiced daily if not at least six days a week. If it’s only a hobby to you then once or twice a week will be fine, but if you have the neverending need and passion to tell this story that you’ve been dying to get out of you, then let it out.
There’s no such thing as the perfect writer, but practicing can get you pretty close.
Keep writing!
I believe in you.
With love,
B.K.