“If Someone Tells You, “You Can’t” They Really Mean, “I Can’t.””

Writing Tip #218

Tightening your sentences and getting rid of unnecessary adverbs and adjectives does not mean writing short sentences. You can have a long sentence without any adverbs or adjectives and you can have a short sentence with too many. Tightening your sentences just means that every word has to matter.

“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”

— Albert Einstein 

Hey I absolutely love your blog! It's awesome & very helpful! Can you give some tips for enemies to lovers plot, it's research & story development? If you could I would really really love & appreciate that. Thank you so much for providing such amazing contents! ❣️💕💗💖🔥✨

Thank you so much! Your love is appreciated. 

Enemies-to-lovers resources...

I have a few articles you may find useful, organized by area of struggle:

Enemies to Lovers

Guide To Writing Enemies To Lovers

Enemies-To-Lovers Prompts

How to develop an Enemies-To-Lovers story

Enemies to Lovers Tips

20 Mistakes to Avoid in Enemies to Lovers

Romance Genre

20 Mistakes To Avoid in YA/Romance

Resources For Writing YA Fiction/Romance

Resources For Romance Writers

Tips On Writing Skinny Love

Skinny Love Writing Prompts

On Romantic Subplots

How To Write The Perfect Kiss

Romantic Prompts

Research

Useful Writing Resources | Part II

Guide to Story Researching

How To Make A Scene More Heartfelt

How To Perfect The Tone

A Guide To Tension & Suspense

Tips on Balancing Development

Development

Resources For Plot Development

Guide To Plot Development

How To Write A Good Plot Twist

How To Foreshadow

How To Engage The Reader

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Masterlist | WIP Blog

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Writing Tip #222

Use action verbs. Avoid passive voice whenever possible. I say whenever possible and not never because sometimes passive voice can be a good literary technique. If you purposely want to make it ambiguous how something happened or if you want it to be unclear whether a character did something on accident or on purpose, passive voice can be a great tool. However, 99% of the time you want to use action verbs. If you have a lot of passive voice in your story you will slow down the momentum of your story and lose readers. See if you can reword sentences with action verbs instead.

Writing advice from my uni teachers:

If your dialog feels flat, rewrite the scene pretending the characters cannot at any cost say exactly what they mean. No one says “I’m mad” but they can say it in 100 other ways.

Wrote a chapter but you dislike it? Rewrite it again from memory. That way you’re only remembering the main parts and can fill in extra details. My teacher who was a playwright literally writes every single script twice because of this.

Don’t overuse metaphors, or they lose their potency. Limit yourself.

Before you write your novel, write a page of anything from your characters POV so you can get their voice right. Do this for every main character introduced.

“I do not think I’m easy to define. I have a wandering mind. And I’m not anything that you think I am.”

— Syd Barrett (via quotemadness)

“Forgive yourself for accepting less than you deserved - but don’t do it again.”

— Unknown