Writing Tips!

NaNoWriMo Tip

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If you're like me, you're struggling to get though nearly 2,000 words a day. You might even bounce back and forth between multiple projects in a desperate attempt to keep the creative juices flowing. You most likely suffer from the bad habit of editing while you write.

This year, I had the good fortune of attending a presentation by Julie Berry, and what she said had a profound impact on me. She said we need to give ourselves permission to write badly. Unless you're editing your work, when you sit down to write a scene for the first time-you need to just write crap. You've never written it before, why should it be perfect? Don't kid yourself-it's never going to be perfect on the first try. World-renowned published authors can't do it. No one can. The real writing comes in the EDITING process, when you mold that misshapen lump into something unique.

Her words were inspiring, but the full meaning of her advice didn't resound with me until a few days ago, because I hadn't realized what "write badly" meant. It's painfully obvious in hindsight, but hopefully this will help someone.

Originally, I thought "write badly" just meant writing a skeletal screenplay version-he said, she said, he did this, then she did that, etc. Light on the details and simple, basic dialogue. It helped me put more words on paper, but not enough. Then one day, I found myself wanting to describe how quietly someone moved. I wanted to make the metaphor relate to the worldbuilding/personality of the character, but the only thing my brain could come up with was "quiet as a mouse." SUPER cliche, right?

Except that's exactly what writing badly means! Phrases like "the sunlight streaming through the tree branches peppered her olive skin" don't come to you on the spot. You have to sit there and mull over a variety of words in your head, turning them inside out and sideways to get them just right. aka-the editing process.

So what do you do instead?

- Forget about the majority of writing skills you've been taught, just stick with writing coherent sentences and separate your dialogue. Those other skills are for editing!
- USE AS MANY ADVERBS AS YOU WANT! I don't care how many "quietly's" or "slowly's" you use, you can always embellish it later. You just need the basics.
- Cliches are your friend. Seriously. Again, you can embellish it later, just get that scene from your head onto the paper! Cliches are quick and fast and that's what you need.
- Long, run-on sentences are fair game. You can fix that later. (see the pattern here?) If you end up with a six-line paragraph sentence? Great job, that's six lines of your story that wouldn't be there otherwise.
- Be redundant. If you describe a character tightening their grip on their sword five times on one page-that's fine! You can figure out later which one you want to keep. Your story will go through multiple drafts and you can discover which placement carries the most impact.
- Use all the dialogue tags you want. They're cheap and easy and let you know how your character is feeling or acting. You can-(say it with me)-fix it later and add subtle hints and gestures to better convey their emotions.
- Tell don't show. This is a rough draft, you're just vomiting words onto the paper.
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tl;dr-In your first draft, do everything you've been told NOT to do.

Embrace your inner ten-year-old again! Write for the joy of writing! You never stopped and wondered if you were writing well, you just wrote! DO THAT AGAIN!

It's just like making a sculpture. Your rough draft is merely slapping pieces of clay on top of each other to create a lumpy mess you can refine later. A person who has a horrendous, cliche-ridden, third-grade level, completed novel is far more successful than the person who has ten perfect revisions of only one chapter.

Give yourself permission to write badly. You can always fix it later.