Tips for Writers

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Are you a beginning, discouraged, or struggling writer?  Here are some tips to help you with your writing -- and your writing life.  

 

 UNIVERSAL WRITERS' TIP: 

GET A CAT. 

(The one pictured is Jack: handsome, affectionate, comical, and a great listener.  Also a passable dancer.)

 

Hot tip!  Volume Two of my Pocket Muse series is now available at a bookstore near you.

 

Tips for Fall/Winter 2007:

Make yourself a "writing kit" for the long, cold winter to come. Here are the ingredients (doing this in a group is more effective and loads of fun):

1. A huge list of words you love, either for their sound, meter, meaning...

2. A list of 10 questions, headed "How." Example: How do they train monkeys to assist the handicapped? How does one interview for a toll-collector job?

3. A list of 10 questions, headed "Why." Example: Why did my aunt paint her house that color? Why did a woman like Sarah marry a man like Mike? Why do Sundays always feel so sad?

4. A list of 10 "pairings." With a friend, put together three columns: People; Places; Situations. In each column, write 10 items. (People: a priest, a hockey player, a hotel clerk, a little boy, a Russian doctor. Places: a park bench, the United Nations building, a backseat, the produce aisle. Situations: a burning house, a stolen suitcase, a bounced check, a betrayed secret. Taking items randomly from these columns, put together a list of 10 pairings. Examples: A priest meets a hockey game; a Russian doctor's house is burning down; a hotel clerk finds a stolen suitcase...

5. A list of 10 titles of stories you'd like to read or write.

This little packet of stuff should help you jumpstart a laggardly writing session. Grab a word to fix a sentence, a pairing to begin a story, a "why" to deepen character, a "how" to embark on a research project, a title to get started.

Happy writing! 

Tips for Summer 2007:

Try to forgive yourself for summer distractions, but make them work for you. For example:

Pack a notebook into your beach bag. 

Add some books on writing and/or writers to your summer list. I'm reading the letters of Steinbeck along with everything else.

Take advantage of the long days by writing at night. Even an hour a day will get you somewhere.

Write about heat: both literal and metaphorical.

Summer television stinks. Turn it off.

Set an end-of-summer deadline to finish one thing: a chapter, an essay, a whole book, a first draft. My birthday falls in mid-August, so my first draft of a new novel is "due" then. Looks like I'm gonna make it, too.

The scrolling marquee on my laptop helps. Every 60 seconds it reads, in humungous letters: DEADLINE DEADLINE DEADLINE!!! WRITE FASTER!!! This kind of thing lights a fire under your pants, believe me.

 

Tips for October 2006: 

Here are a couple of tips from The Pocket Muse Endless Inspiration: New Ideas for Writing , now available.

 

Write a scene that depends on the failure of a reasonable expectation, such as:

            an anchorman who refuses to speak 

            a car door that lacks a handle 

            a radio that receives a single station 

            a museum guard who touches the paintings 

            a faucet that delivers something other than water

 

One-word story shakeup:

Change a "no" to a "yes" and watch what happens.

 

Second Follow-up Notice from the Department of Procrastination Prevention: 

Three words: bowl of chips.  One sentence, one chip.

 

Tips for May 2006: 

Since I'm heading out on the road, this month's tip is a metaphysical one: When you're NOT writing, forgive yourself.  Life is long.  Really.  You can fit a lot in, especially if you quit watching TV.  

Tips for April 2006: 

For the "cruelest month,"  write about an act of cruelty that yields the opposite of the intended outcome.

Tips for January 2006: 

Make a list.  Of anything.  Places you visited; boyfriends you dumped; jobs you quit; letters you never wrote; colors you hate; women you admire; things you should have named; regrets that laid you flat.  See where this list leads you.

Or, make a New Year's resolution list for one of your characters. 

 

Tips for December 2005:

A couple of prompts, previews from The Pocket Muse II, which will be out (exact title not yet determined) in October 2006:

Write about the one who got away -- and regretted it.

What's the most you ever paid for something you didn't want?  Why did you fork over the dough?

Write about the worst holiday gift you ever gave.

Tips for April 2005: 

Ah, spring.  The birds are coming back, just as we knew they would.  Write about a day when something that always happens...doesn't happen.

 

 Tips for September 2004: 

Because school starts in September, I think of this month as the beginning of the year.  Why not write a few beginnings -- first lines, to be precise.  Pile up as many first lines as you can manage, and change the tense (present, past) and person (first, second, third) for each one.  Like a squirrel hiding acorns, you can dig up these lines on some cold, uninspiring day in winter.  

To get you started:

1. Papa told us that as soon as he returned he would spill the whole story.

2. The first thing you notice -- barging into their apartment, checking your watch -- is an odd smell.

3. I tell this with all due deference to the harridan who calls herself my mother.

4. In a wide green clearing the boys found a rifle and a dog.

 Tips for June 2004: 

When was the last time you wrote longhand?  I recently found myself feverish with inspiration and about two hundred miles from my computer.  Hmmmm, what to do, what to do.  After dithering for about half an hour, ruing my bad luck--yes, friends, I could not think of a way to make thoughts without technological intervention--I resorted to putting literal pen to literal paper.  An interesting experiment that I highly recommend to other captives of the keyboard.

Writing tip for warm summer days: One cold, icy glass of beer/iced tea/white wine/Moxie/cranberry juice for every two pages you write.  Delayed gratification is a powerful writing tool.

 Tips for May 2004: 

Sorry for the long pause between tips.  My excuse is that nobody sends ME tips, so I've been suffering from the writer's block I always get after finishing one big project and gearing up for another.  All is well now, and off we go.

It's spring: birds and bees, cycle of life, sunshine and tulips, blah blah blah.  Beware, writer friends!  'Tis the season when our worst sentimental impulses take over, and the Muse stands in the corner rolling her eyes.   As the trees become atwitter with returning birds, write some cold, dark, wintry prose.  Possible kick-starts: a man waiting under a darkened Wal-Mart sign; four girls in a courtroom; a grim discovery (not a body) in a winter field. 

Tips for February 2004: 

A revision technique that requires guts and fortitude is to ask yourself what would happen to the story if the last line became the first line.  Scary.  And very effective.  Often we have to write what seems like an entire story in order to get to the authentic first line.  Don't despair if you must discard all that came before.  That's just part of the process.  The good news is that you're starting with something you know about, rather than starting in the dark as you did with the draft you just tossed.

Tips for January 2004: 

Okay, folks, another year of your writing life is underway.  Time to clear out the workspace.  This annual ritual (which I will have accomplished before week's end) never fails to inspire me.  You have to make the time for it, though, and bring reinforcements on the order of a great cup of coffee and a box of cherry chocolates.  Schedule nothing else for the whole day.  Exterminate the piles of paper!  Re-shelve the unread books!  Toss the leaky pens!  File the heap of correspondence!  Vacuum the rug, for God's sake!  Empty the trash, already!  What, were you raised in a barn?  This is metaphor in action, my friends!  Make ROOM!

Usage note for the new year:  Resolve to use the past tense of "lay" correctly.  I have addressed "lie" and "lay" elsewhere in these tips, more than once, but nobody's listening.  In the two wonderful books I read over Christmas, this mistake came up.  I am seeing this over and over these days in so-called literary novels.  How have writers gotten it into their heads that "lay" as the past tense of "to lay" is literary?  "Laid" is the past tense of the verb "to lay."  Today you lay your coat on the back of the chair, exactly where you laid your coat yesterday.  "Lay" is the past tense of the verb "to lie."  Today he lies on the same couch where yesterday he lay all day."    

 

Tips for November 2003: 

I'm struggling with two short stories at the moment: one has too little going on, the other too much.  Here's a tip: borrow from yourself.  Take something from one story-in-progress and put it into another story-in-progress.  I'm thinking about taking a musician from Story A and introducing him to the widow in Story B.  Thus, the overcrowded story gets some extra room, and the undercrowded story gets a visitor to stir things up..  

Tips for September 2003: 

Welcome to autumn!  It's time to get the imagination humming after the indolence of summer. Here's some help:: 

Are all your characters reasonably attractive? Ugly someone up and see what happens. While you're at it, place the character in a highly descriptive setting without using color.

 Tips for July 2003: 

Here's a twist: I need a tip.  I've just finished a late, probably final draft of a new novel, and I find myself plagued by a gut-twisting certainty that the manuscript I produced is a mere shadow of the shining thing I set out to make, three years ago.  This feeling is inevitable, I know; but can anybody think of a way to at least shorten its duration? Please?

 Tips for June 2003: 

 When was the last time you wrote something without the slightest thought about where it might eventually end up?  Do that today.

Usage note: I've already gone over "to lie" and "to lay."  And yet, shockingly, I continue to hear these verbs misused by newscasters who obviously are not reading this column.  Please, please, if nothing else: Do not say, "It's summer!  Time for laying around in the hammock!"  It's LYING around in a hammock, or LYING down for a nap, or deciding to LIE down for a nap, or heading outdoors to LIE in the hammock.  Remember it this way: When a good writer LIES down, he's not really napping, he's making up LIES for his next story.

 Tips for May 2003: 

 If you're feeling anything like me today, the words are coming very hard.  Try a word-association game with yourself to get the creative flow back.  Start with an ordinary word: "tree."  Then start associating like crazy until you come up with something that interests you.  Tree, bird, sky, plane, hijacking.  Try it again, with "road."  Road, asphalt, steam, engine, battery, assault.  I've just talked myself back into writing.

Usage tip: To be perfectly precise, use "persuade" when you mean getting someone to DO something, and "convince" when you mean getting someone to change his opinion.  "I convinced Peter that our new landlord was evil, then persuaded him to murder the chump in his sleep."

 Tips for March 2003: 

 If you live anywhere north of, say, southern Georgia, you've had a hard winter.  Subzero temperatures, ice and snow, burst pipes, the works. Celebrate the coming of spring (yes, friends, spring is coming) by buying something inspiring: a new pen, a handmade notebook, polka-dotted paper clips, 24-weight paper, a book of quotations...a gift that a writer would appreciate.  Then give it to yourself.

Usage note: Why is everybody suddenly mangling the past tense of the verbs "sink" and "shrink"?   "The ship sank" is correct.  "His hopes sank" is correct. "Sunk" is used for the past perfect, as in: "The ship had sunk" or "his hopes had sunk."  Ditto the verb "shrink."  "The dress shrank in the wash."  Movie titles notwithstanding, the proper form is "Honey, I shrank the kids."  

Tips for February 2003: 

 If you followed last month's tips, you must have something new underway.  Are you stuck already?  Read over what you've got so far.  If there is any dialogue at all, at some point one character probably answers "yes" to a question.  Change the answer to "no" and see what happens.

 Tips for January 2003: 

 No one who knows me well will find this hard to believe, but I spent most of the fall anticipating the advent of the year 2004.  Imagine my surprise on New Year's Eve to discover I'd gained a whole year!  Hence, the first writing tip of 2003: Write about a problem that involves somebody's misunderstanding of time.  

Tip number two: Clean your writing space.  Whoever said cleanliness was next to godliness must have been referring to the internal ahhhhh that happens when you enter a writing space that's ready for you.  No piles of files, no pencils stubs and old calendars, just a fresh, clean, organized space ready for another year's pileup of good work.  Don't let your junk cramp your spirit!  Get rid of it.

Looking for more? The last three years are archived at these links:

Archive of Tips for 2002

Archive of Tips for 2001

Archive of Tips for 2000