Practical writing tips

thatwritergirlsblog:

Writing is often promoted as a very artsy, abstract process. Therefore, it can be difficult to get concrete, practical advice on how to manage your writing career/hobby daily. Here are some tips:

1. Back up your work

• This may seem like a very simple statement, but it can save your life. Imagine working on a novel for years only to have it disappear into thin air when your PC crashes/someone steals it. If you’re writing your novel by hand, you could lose your notebook, drop it in water or have it become ash in a fire. And it will be devastating.
• So, if you are typing your work, an external hard drive is your friend. However, this can also end up destroyed/stolen. Therefore, I suggest also backing up your work by e-mailing it to your own account or saving it on OneDrive/Cloud. That way, even if something happens to your device, you can access your work. Here’s a simple tutorial on using OneDrive on Windows 10
• If you are writing on paper, a good idea might be to scan your work and save it as a pdf on your computer. You can even take pictures and save those. Then, you can use the same steps as above to back it up.

2. Type rather than write by hand

• This is just my personal opinion on how to streamline the process. That doesn’t mean that it’ll work for you.
• I used to write all my novels by hand and then only type them over once the first draft was done. Writing on paper is great and it can be easier to get the ideas flowing. However, if you plan on having anyone outside your immediate circle reading your work someday, it’ll have to be typed. Writing everything and then typing it is extremely time-consuming.
• Furthermore, when you’re typing on your PC, you have access to immediate spellcheck, a thesaurus and online resources for research. The world’s information is at your fingertips and that can really help inspire you and speed up the process. (Of course, it can also lead to hours of procrastination. So, discipline is key.)
• Therefore, I would suggest getting a small, mobile laptop that is just as easy to carry around as a physical notebook. It doesn’t have to cost you an arm and a leg either. MacBook 10″ is always an option. There are great mini laptops by ASUS. But these can be expensive. The one I have recently purchased is the Lenovo MIIX 320 10.1″ Tablet/Notebook. It’s very light and has gotten great reviews. AND it only cost me around $400 (I think in the US you can get it for $200). Here’s a good YouTube review

3. Format your work for easy reading

• These tips aren’t about creating a book that’s ready for distribution or anything like that. This is about making your document easy to work on, edit and get read by betas.
• Use a standard font like Times New Roman/Arial. No one likes creative fonts more than I do, but they can make your work difficult to read and appear unprofessional.
• Use 1.5 line spacing or double spacing. Single spacing will make your text look squished together and slow down the reader. It can also be more difficult to spot errors or find a specific sentence while writing if your lines aren’t nicely spaced out.
• A 0.5 cm first line indent will distinguish your paragraphs from one another and make for an easier read. (Indents are also great for flashbacks/letters)
• JUSTIFY your text. Please. This goes such a long way in terms of making your manuscript look professional.

4. Use placeholders

• As people, we tend to prefer doing something in a linear, chronological way. But this can actually slow down your writing process quite a lot. It might be difficult at first, but your writing process really becomes streamlined once you realise that you don’t have to write this way. You can skip something and move on. 
• Don’t know how to describe something? Put in a placeholder and move on to the rest of the scene. Still need to do more research about an aspect? Move on to what you have figured out. Can’t seem to make a certain scene work today? Write the one you’re really excited for.
• You can really use anything you want as a placeholder – brackets, asterix, pictures – you name it. You can even use a specific word in another language so that it’s easy to search later on. I would also suggest highlighting these gaps in the manuscript so that they are easy to spot when you do get around to writing them.
• Don’t believe me? Here’s a vlog from YA author Kim Chance

5. Colour-code issues to go through later

• This may sound somewhat similar to the previous point, but this refers to things you’ve already written and need to tweak later.
• Writers around the world have warned against editing while you write (though I don’t think that this is a hard rule). With colour-coded highlighting, you can get the best of both.
• Do you know that this sentence bothers you? It could read better, but you don’t want to slow down your writing process by staring at it for hours… Highlight it in green. Is it pretty clear that this scene needs more information, but you don’t know how to convey that (or what that information is)? Make it yellow. Could something become a plot hole later? Mark it with red.
• Find a system that works for you. When you notice something you might have to change, highlight it and move on. Then, when you get to the editing phase, you can correct all of those errors. It can also help to tackle them by colour i.e. starting with the plot holes and moving your way up to sentence-structure and style.

Alright, that’s it for today. I hope that these practical tips could be of help to you. Remember, these aren’t rules; they’re just tricks that have worked for me and that you can try to make your life a little easier.

If you have any questions on these points or on creative writing in general, please feel free to ask 🙂

Reblog if you found any of this useful. Comment with your own practical tips. Follow me for similar content.