Hints and Tips From a Chronic Writer

My writer's group frequently calls me 'relentless' when it comes to always writing. I think they need a little more than "I can't not write," which is something of a condition of mine. There's a kind of joke between myself and my family, and generally involves the laptop I take with me as a kind of security blanket - "It's been ten minutes, of course I'm writing something."

I'm a little bit annoying that way. I can, have, and will hold things up because I have to finish up a thought.

It's mildly entertaining to me that there's others who want that life. It can be a curse, I gotta be honest. But... if you really want that curse - here's what you can do.

Find a Source of Prompts

There's writer's prompts in a lot of social media. Most of them are a sentence or two long. Me? I ask my followers and readers to give me prompts via a forum I run. For my writer's group, there's hosts of people who submit prompts that are five words or less long. And we do that once a week, so you can take your pick from them.

Also browsing social media full of other creative people can help the gears keep turning. There's loads of people with interesting takes on fantasy and science fiction. That can inspire interesting new angles into your writing.

Write Every Day

It's getting a good habit established, and it doesn't have to be writing in your primary work. Writing a short story every day helps loosen the mental cobwebs and helps me relax about writing.

My daily flash fictions are not just a mental exercise. They got me used to the idea that I can't win them all. I can't please everyone, and I can improve for the next story. And the next one, and the next one...

It's kind of a "fail faster" vibe, if I must be honest.

Share the Results

As shown in the link above, I don't keep these things to myself. I put them out into a public arena to be judged by an unknown amount of readers [honestly, about two to five people actively get back to me on the regular] and then I do it every day.

It eliminates my fear of being judged negatively, mostly because hardly anyone has anything to say about it at all [can I have some cheese to go with this whine?]. It also destroyed my panic about being published. I publish these things every day. It's routine.

And you might get more prompts or ideas out of it.

Collate the Good Ideas

When something actually turns out to be popular thanks to whatever feedback obtained, keep notes on that stuff. If it compels the audience that finds you, then it might just compel a publisher to take you on. You never know.

And if you get enough material about it to gather a plot, then you're most of the way there. And it might be easier to wring a novel or even a series out of the thing.

For the record, I don't just stitch together my flash fictions into a lower-effort novel. I use those as a kind of springboard or inspiration towards a whole book. Or, in the case of A Devil's Tale, a series of books.

Concentrate on Writing

Or, as I used to put it, "Write now, edit later." It's easy for the inner editor to take over your mind and make you delete everything until you have a blinking cursor and unending frustration.

Write that thing, then fix whatever might be wrong with it. Never delete unless it's absolutely unnecessary excess verbiage. Or places where you put the same word twice in the same paragraph. That's where you need to edit. Obviously.

One rule I have about editing is - it's better to put more in than cut it down. Clarity is better than obscurity. Don't like a word? Put in a better one. Grow that thing rather than chopping it down to a stump or... knowing some editing types [Hi, Mum!] leaving the writing equivalent of a hole in the ground.

Focus on the story you want to tell first. Only worry about telling it properly after you've got it down.

Have Fun With it

If you're not having fun, why are you writing in the first place? Yes, sometimes the process is arduous, or troublesome. Sometimes, you wind up wiki-walking into fascinating labyrinths and forget what you were writing about in the first place. Sometimes... you're just not feeling it.

But if you write just to have fun... it's not that troublesome in the end.

If it makes you cackle like a witch, or laugh like an evil scientist, then you're on the right track. Even if you spend two pages to tell a phenomenally stupid joke... you're doing a great job.

Love the process of creation, and have fun relentlessly writing.