my 10 holy grail pieces of writing advice for beginners
from an indie author who's published 4 books and written 20+, as well as 400k in fanfiction (who is also a professional beta reader who encounters the same issues in my clients' books over and over)
- show don't tell is every bit as important as they say it is, no matter how sick you are of hearing about it. "the floor shifted beneath her feet" hits harder than "she felt sick with shock."
- no head hopping. if you want to change pov mid scene, put a scene break. you can change it multiple times in the same scene! just put a break so your readers know you've changed pov.
- if you have to infodump, do it through dialogue instead of exposition. your reader will feel like they're learning alongside the character, and it will flow naturally into your story.
- never open your book with an exposition dump. instead, your opening scene should drop into the heart of the action with little to no context. raise questions to the reader and sprinkle in the answers bit by bit. let your reader discover the context slowly instead of holding their hand from the start. trust your reader; donn't overexplain the details. this is how you create a perfect hook.
- every chapter should end on a cliffhanger. doesn't have to be major, can be as simple as ending a chapter mid conversation and picking it up immediately on the next one. tease your reader and make them need to turn the page.
- every scene should subvert the character's expectations, as big as a plot twist or as small as a conversation having a surprising outcome. scenes that meet the character's expectations, such as a boring supply run, should be summarized.
- arrive late and leave early to every scene. if you're character's at a party, open with them mid conversation instead of describing how they got dressed, left their house, arrived at the party, (because those things don't subvert their expectations). and when you're done with the reason for the scene is there, i.e. an important conversation, end it. once you've shown what you needed to show, get out, instead of describing your character commuting home (because it doesn't subvert expectations!)
- epithets are the devil. "the blond man smiled--" you've lost me. use their name. use it often. don't be afraid of it. the reader won't get tired of it. it will serve you far better than epithets, especially if you have two people of the same pronouns interacting.
- your character should always be working towards a goal, internal or external (i.e learning to love themself/killing the villain.) try to establish that goal as soon as possible in the reader's mind. the goal can change, the goal can evolve. as long as the reader knows the character isn't floating aimlessly through the world around them with no agency and no desire. that gets boring fast.
- plan scenes that you know you'll have fun writing, instead of scenes that might seem cool in your head but you know you'll loathe every second of. besides the fact that your top priority in writing should be writing for only yourself and having fun, if you're just dragging through a scene you really hate, the scene will suffer for it, and readers can tell. the scenes i get the most praise on are always the scenes i had the most fun writing. an ideal outline shouldn't have parts that make you groan to look at. you'll thank yourself later.
happy writing :)
Wait shoot I did a reply but a reblog makes more sense and I have more I wanted to say anyway.
First: I 100% agree with most of these. 4, 7, and 9 in particular are crucial.
But I have to quibble about 3 and 5, because while I think they're both conditionally true, there's a different issue at the heart of each which deserves to be highlighted.
3. Infodumping through dialog instead of exposition: I agree that infodumping is a huge problem and I've been guilty of it in the past. But an infodumpy paragraph can be just as awful in dialog, because it easily becomes "As you know, ABC," "Myes, and as YOU know, XYZ," also known as maid-and-butler dialog.
The problem with infodumps isn't just that they tend to flow unnaturally, although that can also be true. The worst and deepest issue with 9 out of 10 bad infodumps is that the reader doesn't know why they should care.
If someone is reading my story, they're probably in it for the characters. They're invested in what the characters want, what they plan to do, how they're going to reach their goals. So if I interrupt the action by talking about how the protagonist lives in a world with 14 months, and those months are arranged to line up with a regular celestial event, and the months are named for historical artists and free-thinkers rather than politicians and warlords... well, who cares? (I bet people skipped over that paragraph even!)
If you want to give readers info, the key is to make them ask for it.
My protagonist gets a letter warning that disaster will strike on the 9th day of Lovelace unless they can solve a particular high-profile kidnapping. "Oh no!" cries yon reader. "How much time does that leave us?"
The protagonist, as if in response, checks their calendar. It's the 21st of Mozart. That leaves them with only 13 days to stop it, and worse, only one real chance to interrogate the prime suspect... and that assumes that they even go to the stellar alignment ball on the 25th, rather than skipping again this month!
(You may notice I left parts of the infodump out, and to that I say, if your reader doesn't need to know it for the story, they might not need to know it at all.)
5. Ending each chapter with a cliffhanger: This may just be me interpreting cliffhanger a certain way, but I've seen far too many stories that end chapters with fakeouts. When Chapter 8 ends with the protagonist's long-dead mother appearing out of a limo, I need to turn the page to find out more... but when Chapter 9 opens with "oh lmao it wasn't her, it was a cardboard cutout, they're setting up for a memorial," I just feel cheated.
What chapters should end on, then, isn't necessarily a cliffhanger. They should end on a promise, and that promise should eventually be paid off.
If I'm writing that chapter 8/9 transition above, I don't need an oh-god-what-happens-next moment to get readers to turn the page. What I need instead is tension. The protag's famous mom has a memorial service planned? What I need is for readers to be desperate to see how it goes.
The protag looks on at the prep work and feels a deep sense of foreboding, because she knows her mother would never have wanted her own memorial to be boring. Somehow, some way, that daft corpse was going to make a spectacle out of it. And as usual, protag knew to her bones that she would be the one left to clean up the mess.
Turn page. Chapter 9: A Memorial to End All Memorials. Are you sure you want to put that bookmark in, dear reader? Don't you wanna stick around and see what happens next?
