Writing Techniques

As much fun as it is to sit down and write your story, to just let the words flow and watch your story come to life before your eyes, you need to remember that isn’t all it takes to get a story published. You need to remember to craft your writing and think about using the best wording every time you write. At the beginning it’s okay to write and then focus on technique and craft in the revisions. Soon you’ll be so used to thinking about craft and technique that you’ll be wording things naturally while you write your first draft. That will make it much simpler when it comes time for the revisions.

Although there are a lot of techniques involved in writing well, here are a few we covered.

Point of View
Writer's Voice
Use Your Vocabulary
Cut Your Project into Manageable Parts
Avoid Rambling
Know the Details
How to Create a Setting
How to Create a Character
A Tip for Making Realistic Characters
A Final Thought on Characters
Plan Your Writing
Stop Thinking and Write Your Story!

Time to Revise Your story

Foreshadowing
Are You Writing a Report or a Story?
Avoid Cliches
Think About How You Tell Your Story
Pacing
Watch the Grammar
Imagine the Movie
Be Careful with Technical Terms
Watch the Details

Time To Watch The Details

You’ve gone through your story and edited it some and taken out the scenes you decided were no longer needed. Now you need to sit down and go through your story with a highlighter. Read the story slowly, preferably out loud if you aren’t disturbing anyone, and don’t just read what you think you wrote. Read only what you actually wrote and make sure all your character and story points are still valid. Often my view of my character, especially details and background, changes throughout the book. Maybe I thought she had a cousin early in the book only to decide later in the writing process that her parent was an only child. Readers will notice those things and editors are paid to notice those differing details. If you wrote a story over a few months or years, you may have very different backgrounds to your characters that will confuse editors and lose you a deal on what could otherwise be a very well written story with excellent characters, at least at the end of the book. Details can make or break a story and reading through your story in a short period of time such as a week or weekend will allow you to keep all those details in your head and allow you to notice differences.
As you’re reading your story look for clichés or dialogues that go on too long. Early in the writing process it is easy to write a cliché or explain everything at once so things are on paper quickly. During the following revisions is when you need to notice those things and rewrite or remove such things.

Time To Revise Your Story

Now that you’ve written your first draft and edited it some, let’s talk about revising your story for the second or third draft.
This is where you go through your story and make sure everything is needed and in the right place. Now that you know where your characters will end up at the end of your story, you can go back and debate with yourself if that scene in the kitchen really needs to be set in the kitchen, or would it be better after the next two scenes and set on the porch. Now you can go back and remove scenes that don’t support the story or plot and figure out where you need to add more scenes to foreshadow or hint at how the story will end. Did you put scenes in the beginning of the book that no longer make sense with the ending you wound up writing instead of the one you thought you’d write? Now is the time to take those scenes out. Start first with the scenes needed, then we can edit the information in the scenes you decide to keep.

Watch The Technical Speaking In Dialogue

How often have you watched those technical shows so popular on television these days? I’m talking about medical shows like House M.D and Gray’s Anatomy or crime shows like the CSIs and Law and Order series. As you watch those types of shows, you’ll hear them say a lot of technical things, such as scientific things, but eventually they will convert the conversation to simple terms for the laymen who didn’t get degrees in what the characters did. As you write your stories, you need to be careful about how much technical garble you put in them. You should have done a lot of research to write your story accurately and you may have learned a lot of the technical phases the professionals use. Although you may understand what your characters are saying to each other, your reader may not and they may get lost in the garble. If they get too distracted from the flow of the story and upset about not understanding the conversation, they will but the story down and find another story they can understand without a textbook next to them.
A good rule of thumb in creating dialogue for your characters is to keep it simple while still being true to the character. The balance needed for that is a delicate one and it may help to have a beta reader who has no problem telling you when you confuse them with too much phraseology and need to rewrite a scene to clarify things.

Cinematic Views In Writing

Something I read recently was advice to “write from different cinematic views”. I was looking for some similar articles online but all I found was references to a looked-down-upon way of writing fiction that focused on external and internal dialogue rather than description.



Not quite what I was looking for, so I went back to the website I found the tidbit on and the description was “Turn your notebook into a camera.” I like that idea because how often when you write do you see a scene in your head as you go? I often think like that as I write a conversation between characters or have a character walking down a path somewhere. I never thought about moving the camera in my head around the room though.



Let’s say you’re writing a scene about a husband and wife making dinner together and talking about the upcoming visitors for supper or the weekend. You wrote the scene looking at them in your head from the front. How different would the scene look on to your writer if you moved the camera to the left side of the room? Would the reflection of the couple in the window above the sink change the image much, or at least the effect given the reader? Would the effect change if the reader were looking in the window or through the door to the dinning room? Would the story be better by having the conversation take place or summarized by the couple’s kids waiting in the living room? These are all good things to think about when you edit your current work of fiction and viewing possible changes in your head as if it were a movie is a good way to decide if the changes really do improve your story.

A Writer's Enemy

As a writer, I believe the hardest thing about writing well is doing so inside the rules of grammar. Here are some online resources to help you learn the rules of grammar and punctuation.

Grammarbook.com

A Guide to Grammar and Writing

A page full of grammar downloads and PDFs

A great grammar book now online: The Elements of Style

Once you know the rules, it is much easier to write well and know how to ignore the rules to get the effect you want on your readers.

Pacing Reviews

Something I’ve recently learned about when looking into the craft and techniques good writers use is that you can control the pace and mood of the reader as they go through your story by alternating lengths of sentences and paragraphs. As I just discovered the new technique, I don’t think it smart for me to try and explain it to you in a helpful way. However, I believe this to be an important technique to learn so I am going to give you links to other people who do understand this technique and can explain it to you better than I can.

K. M. Weiland’s video blog on pacing based off of chapters definitely gives me something to think about when revising my stories. For those of you who prefer reading to listening, the UTube video is also transcribed below the video box.

She wrote an excellent blog post about 5 ways to pace a story that I recommend every writer trying to capture the attention of others read. Those are some great ways to vary pacing and thoughts to remember as you edit.

Aimed more at those who want to create suspense, Heidi M. Thomas does a great job of explaining how to speed up a book. However, she gets into the basics of pacing and those of you that want to slow your story down can merely reverse her ideas

Watch How You Tell Things

One of the hardest things to do as a writer is to balance the action with description. When I write a story, I tend to write down all the description at once. I remember reading the Babysitter’s Club books years ago and getting annoyed after the first few books because the writer always did the same thing. Whenever the Club had their first meeting in the book, the writer always spent a whole chapter describing every person at the meeting. The idea was that if the reader hadn’t read ever book in the series until that book, it wasn’t hard to meet the characters. To those that had read most or every book in the series, it was plain annoying. I quickly got in the habit of reading the first page or so of conversation and flipping through the chapter to the rest of the conversation, effectively skipping all the family and personal data of the characters I already knew. Now that I’m reading books for older people, I’m noticing a much more effective way of describing people and their backgrounds, which is in little pieces. It’s expected that when a character is introduced the writer will give a description and maybe an biographical paragraph if the point of view character knows the information. Saying the guy is tall, brown haired, and has a gorgeous smile but the character knows he’s hiding a black heart behind that smile as she used to date him often works better than having all their past history fly through her mind at the sight of him on the way to her important meeting. Although seeing him again may serve to distract her at the meeting, a long description of the past may slow down the pace for the reader.

Depending on the effect you want to create, a better way to introduce character may be more subtle like giving a brief physical description and the point of view character doesn’t realize for a few pages that his sister’s friend has lovely green eyes up close rather than the plain brown eyes he assumed because of her hair color or the friend’s dimples don’t make it into the book until he actually smiles.

As you write your story, I want you to keep in mind the different effects you can use in description and introduction of characters and settings. Think about how you want your readers to view this new place or person and what mood you have going in your story or scene. Once you know those things, you can decide how you want to craft the description to create the desired affect.

What's So Troublesome About Cliches?

As you go through and revise your rough draft or your tenth draft or any other draft you do, remember to watch out for clichés. Wikipedia describes clichés as: “an expression, idea, or element of an artistic work which has been overused to the point of losing its original meaning or effect, rendering it a stereotype, especially when at some earlier time it was considered meaningful or novel… A cliché is often a vivid depiction of an abstraction that relies upon analogy or exaggeration for effect, often drawn from everyday experience. Used sparingly, they may succeed. However, cliché in writing or speech is generally considered a mark of inexperience or unoriginality.” Although readers may skim over clichés in their reading, an editor or other writers will notice. Being labeled unoriginal in the writing community is laughable and until you can learn to minimize the use of clichés, or better yet: avoid them, you won’t be taken seriously as a writer and aren’t likely to get anything published.
Here is a very thorough article on clichés to involve clichés in expressions, plots, characters, and a self test on clichés. Another place to look for information on clichés is a list of clichés in alphabetical order on the ClicheSite.com.

Is It A Story Or A Report?

When you pick up a newspaper or read a news article online, you may get a lot of details and facts, but you don’t feel as if you were standing right there. News reports are designed to give a lot of information in a small amount of space; they don’t have a number of pages to write about how the scene affects all five senses or to describe the setting in thrilling detail. They can’t make the scene come alive as story writers need to be able to. People read newspapers in order to get facts about current events. People read stories hoping to be somewhere else, someone else for a little while. They don’t merely want the facts of what happened and how, readers want to feel it and sense the action or tension in the room.

The difference is in the details: how they’re incorporated in the scene and how they’re worded. Wording and timing are a writer’s best tools. Use them correctly and you may have an award-winning story. Don’t use them enough or correctly and you may not even have a good report to let others read. Which would you prefer to have at the end of your project?