As my first post, I figure it should have something to do with what I'm dealing in-- writing. So I've come to give some maybe/maybe not helpful tips for people writing fiction. I know, I know, "You're so young. What information could you possibly have that's helpful at all?" The thing is, as a reader, I've read enough books and spoke to enough other readers to be able to pinpoint the issues people have in writing their stories. It's not rocket science. Enough people have found my tips helpful that I feel like it won't hurt to try, so here they are.
Firstly,you can’t be a successful writer without being able to take criticism. People all the time ask for feedback, but once they receive real feedback, they get defensive. Everyone is going to criticize your writing. Publishing companies, readers, reviewers, agents-- they’ll all criticize your writing. Learn to deal with it and be humbled. Don't get me wrong, there is a difference between someone telling you to change something and someone suggesting you change something to better the story. Learn to tell the difference. In the end, it's your story. You decide what stays and what goes.
The voice in your story is extremely important. If your writing doesn’t have the proper tone or no tone at all, it’s going to seem like the story is just droning on and on. Readers won’t want to read it if you don’t have a good voice.
Diction. Diction is a pretty big deal in writing. If you keep using the same words over and over again, it’ll be a workout for the reader to even get through a small portion of the writing. For example, using the word cold and not using a substitute for it. If nothing else, just get a thesaurus out and do it that way. It’s important enough to waste the time on looking words up.
People seem to have forgotten how paragraphs work or that they exist at all. Paragraphs exist for a reason. They keep the thoughts organized and keep it looking clean.
This is more of a suggestion more than anything. Make your story different from the rest. Books these days seem to be the same thing over and over again, especially in YA books. More often than not, the stories unfold like so: Girl meets strange boy. Girl falls in love with strange boy in the time span of a week or so. Things happen. They break up for some miserable reason. More things happen. They wind up getting back together. End of story. Make your story interesting. Change it up. There’s a reason the books that are popular are where they’re at. They changed it up.
This is a big problem with aspiring teenage (girl) writers from what I’ve noticed. They will write a story that is pretty much the same as another popular YA book, only changing the characters and setting. It’s unoriginal. Too many times I’ve seen young (I mean young) girls post a chapter or so of their writing, saying it’s their “original” story. Then, I read it and it’s exactly like The Hunger Games or Divergent. This is not very imaginative. Don’t do it.
Also, don’t do spinoff stories of a book that isn’t your own. Only the author of the original books should do that. Also not sure if that’s even legal but I’ve seen people do it often enough.
This is it for now. I'll almost definitely be posting more tips like these in the future. If it was helpful, great. If it wasn't, then that's fine too. Ya win some, ya lose some.
No comments:
Post a Comment