Do you apply these 5 writing tips?
How to improve your writing and progress from novel to novel? There are 3 rules. Three things to do to perform at your best every time.
- Read a lot in the genre in which you write.
- Write in quantity and with regularity.
- Analyze and reflect on feedback from your proofreaders and readers.
Once you have a well-oiled routine on these bases, experiment with the 5 writing tips that Lucie Castel offers you here. These are the techniques and strategies that have made a difference for her in her goal to go from amateur writer to published author. These writing tips are also very helpful for Wikipedia writing services.
Tip #1: Write to be read
What if a compromise wasn’t a dirty word?
First of the 5 writing tips: write to be read. If I tell you that you have to write to be read, you may feel a sense of rejection thinking that I am telling you to compromise yourself. To seek out what the public wants to read and hear and to give it to them. Submit to fashions.
Go back to the clichés.
That’s not what I’m talking about, although I invite you to take a step back from your rejection of compromise if you write genre literature. At a minimum, you will need to know and follow the codes of your literary genre.
What I’m talking about is writing a dynamic story that is entirely intended to be read by a third party. Not a succession of texts where you have fun, nor a role-playing sequence of which only your friends would see all the springs.
Have fun vs. offer a journey to its readers
Let us oppose “writing to have fun” to “writing to be read”. There again, there is no question of obliterating your pleasure and your passion in finding the right words and feeding your text. But writing a novel that you are going to publish cannot be reduced to that.
Remember that the purpose of your novel is to tell a story. It is this story that keeps the reader turning the pages.
Each paragraph, each scene, and each chapter must be at the service of your narration.
Writing to be read means correcting your text at the end of the first draft by putting yourself from the reader’s point of view. The reader reads your story with two conscious or unconscious objectives: to feel emotions and to know the outcome of the plot.
This writing advice will give you the line to follow to make the necessary cuts in your text and correct them with a professional eye.
Tip #2: Write with an outline
Join the Plotters team
I previously explained to you the two main schools of thought when it comes to writing: the plotters against the panthers.
LINARES recommends plotters by offering a writing method based on the plan. Rather than jumping into writing on inspiration, my writing tip that has recalled everything for me is to do some groundwork.
Before writing, you are going to think about how your story will unfold. Where does it start? How does it end? What are the main twists that upset the protagonist? What does your protagonist learn at the end of the story?
To write with a plan is to write with a course, with a guiding thread for our imagination.
The more or less detailed plan
The 2nd of Lucie’s writing tips: test the plan. Many authors refuse this formalism because it stifles their creativity and takes away their interest in the writing process.
Very often, this is because they immediately think of the most rigid and detailed form of the plan. They imagine that every detail is thought out in advance and that in the end the novel is written twice. Once in the plan, then a second time with more complex sentences.
However, the author is free to decide on the level of precision and detail with which he works best! The LICARES writing method that we teach in our training is deliberately flexible and light so as not to fall into the pitfall of “fixing everything in advance” and wasting too much time before writing.
Take the test. Start with a simple roadmap that gives you the big moments you need to hit at the third, half, and 3/4 of your story. You will see that writing may become much easier!
Tip #3: Write from the villain’s point of view
The detective novel is written with a plan.
Turn to lead authors for their writing tips. This 3rd advice comes directly from the great Agatha Christie and concerns the writing of thrillers. In particular thrillers with enigmas (known as the whodunit).
More than ever, crime fiction is a genre where it is essential to write with a plan. Indeed, for a thriller to be successful, the author must subtly distil a set of clues (some to mislead the reader, others to put him on the right track).
If you don’t think from the start about the subtle layout of your clues and your action, the work of reworking your text after the first draft risks being titanic.
Write a foreground from the assassin’s point of view.
Agatha Christie’s advice is this. The author must first think about the unfolding of the story from the point of view of the assassin. Then with a second shot, a second timeline, he traces the path of the investigator.
This work of visualization and reflection from the antagonist’s point of view is essential for a believable, subtle, and thrilling story.
By extrapolating, if, in a story of another literary genre where the figure of the antagonist is as embodied as in the thriller, the author could very well follow this advice and think about the story from the point of view of his nasty…
Tip #4: Don’t Explain, Show It
Show in dialogues and action
Do you remember the “show, don’t tell “mantra so dear to writers like Stephen King?
Here’s the 4th writing tip: As often as possible, don’t take the easy way out by telling the reader about your character’s feelings. Show them through his reactions and words in action scenes or in dialogue.
The reader must see these emotions taking shape before their eyes rather than reading a summary of them.
This is advice that is both very simple and very complicated to implement. The author is often afraid that what he wants to convey will not be clear or will not be understood if he does not say it directly to the reader. And yet there is a great narrative force to be shown rather than explained.
Make the player active
Let the reader infer your character’s traits from their reactions rather than telling them everything. In this way, you make the player active.
You offer him an immersive experience. He wants to watch what’s going to happen and be surprised and touched by the action and the characters.
The more the reader has this impression of taking part in the story, the more he will want to turn the pages and stay in your universe.
Tip #5: Take care of your secondary characters
The last of the 5 writing tips is about characters. I have often spoken to you about your main character and his crucial importance for your novel to be successful.
However, do not neglect the secondary characters.
After all, following our “show, don’t tell” mantra, it is through repeated interaction with secondary characters that the hero reveals himself and the story develops.
Secondary characters are useful on their own. The reader is all the more conquered by a novel when he is presented with a gallery of characters who make him react.
But the secondary characters are also and above all useful to reinforce the importance and the interest of your hero.
No need to make 25-page character sheets for each character in your story. Especially not for those who appear very punctually.
However, it is always welcome to make a summary sheet for the most important ones. It will allow you to move these characters with credibility and for maximum impact on the reader.
