Latest Posts by justanothergirlsblog - Page 4

“Speak your mind, even if your voice shakes.”

— Maggie Kuhn 

“Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.”

— William Wordsworth

Bali's Unique Mourning Ritual

Bali is the only place that has been observed to consistently have funerals with no tears. In Bali, funerals are held two years after the person has died.

“If someone tells you, “You can’t” they really mean, “I can’t.””

— Sean Stephenson

The course of true love never did run smooth.

William Shakespeare

“There is beauty, heartbreaking beauty, everywhere.”

— Edward Abbey (via quotemadness)

“You can’t base your life on other people’s expectations.”

— Stevie Wonder (via quotemadness)

“To burn with desire and keep quiet about it is the greatest punishment we can bring on ourselves.”

— Federico García Lorca, (via quotemadness)

“Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable…It means that someone can get inside you and mess you up.”

— Neil Gaiman (via quotemadness)

“I have given away my whole soul to someone who treats it as if it were a flower to put in his coat.”

— Oscar Wilde (via quotemadness)

“Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you will ever regret.”

— Ambrose Bierce (via quotemadness)

“Fantasy is about making a metaphor concrete.”

— Neil Gaiman, MasterClass

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 is a lot like cooking. its a lot of ‘what the fuck is this missing’ and it being something really basic like salt. 

We wait all of our life for temporary things, like it is a normal thing. We wait for the weekend, for holidays, vacations, but this is not what life is about. We should not wait (never) because our life is too short and people don't observe this.

“All your life you wait, and then it finally comes, and are you ready?”

— Anthony Doerr (via quotemadness)

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.

Writing Tip #217

Don’t introduce your main antagonist too early in your story. Start with a herald of danger before the main danger. Introduce a minion before you introduce the actual antagonist.

How do you introduce an antagonist into a story? I'm stuck. They are important to the plot.

Introducing the antagonist…

The antagonist should be introduced in a memorable way that is useful to the story. However, first appearances and introductions can be different thing, and introducing them as a character versus introducing them as the antagonist can be two separate events entirely.

When you’re introducing the antagonist, you should keep in mind what the reader knows, and what they have yet to learn. Sure, maybe they know this person is the main character’s roommate, and they’re finding out that this roommate has helped their significant other cheat on them, but they don’t know that the roommate has held a grudge since high school which informed the decision to help them cheat. The antagonist’s introduction should be a strategic disclosure of key information. 

The introduction should also be memorable enough to evoke its own details in future scenes regarding the character. Perhaps what they say or do in their introduction should come up later. Their introduction should act as a bookend to their arc throughout the novel, so keep the ending in mind as you write their beginning. You must also be mindful that this is probably the first (or a new first) impression of that character on the reader, so you want to set the tone for their presence in the story and offer some preliminary character development for the reader to build on as the plot progresses. 

Here are some other resources you may find helpful:

Resources For Describing Characters

How To Fit Character Development Into Your Story

Making Characters Unpredictable

Writing Good Villains

Giving Characters Distinct Voices in Dialogue

Gradually Revealing Character’s Past

Tips on Introducing Characters

Creating Villains

How To Write A Good Plot Twist

How To Foreshadow

Tackling Subplots

Tips On Dialogue

Writing Intense Scenes

Tips on Writing Flashbacks

Describing emotion through action

A Guide To Tension & Suspense

Foreshadowing The Villain

–

Masterlist | WIP Blog

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“The idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart.”

— Maya Angelou

Tips for writing quickly

I am currently writing my debut novel (while working a full-time job) so I thought I’d share my tips on writing quickly. 

Writing the first draft is actually the easy and fast part! When you start editing, that takes the most time.

I work with brief outlines. Some work with strict outlines, but others use basic outlines for writing. I find that with basic outlines and a few points on what is supposed to happen helps me write faster because making the outlines basic gives me more room to keep it exciting.

If you work shifts like I do, identify what time in the day you are most productive and try to write then. For me, I won’t consider working in the afternoon because that’s when I’m in a slump. I prefer working in the morning or even late at night (even when I’ve just gotten home from work). 

Block distractions – I use Forest and the screen restrictions on my phone. 

I use OmmWriter (I got it when it used to be free) to block distractions and keep the music off, but turn the keyboard clicking feature on – since I love the sound so much it encourages me to write on! 

NEVER go back and edit or re-write. Going back to fix anything is the worst thing you can do. Instead, write a note for yourself, a random liner in the document or outside of it, and get it on the second draft.

Research later. If I forget a word or term, I put ELEPHANT or TK and search for it later to replace. If there is something I want to research, I quickly add a comment or note so I can research later. 

There are plenty of writing processors that have Talk-to-text. Use it! 

Do writing sprints with friends, or by yourself. If you have friends who write or study, get on FaceTime or Zoom together and set a specific time where you all get something done. When I’m by myself, I put up “write with me” or “study with me” videos on in the background sometimes to get in the mood of wanting to do something productive. If you’re an ARMY, try this. 

Keep writing notes on hand. Notes are important for names, birthdays, character descriptions, and more. You can have this digitally of course, some have use a binder, others a small booklet or note book. This saves time in finding information. 

Schedules are very important. If you want to write for a living, treat it like a job! Even as my passion, I treat it like a job and strive to be consistent with it. I find it helps to keep up a schedule instead of setting a deadline! The schedule has to be made a priority. You can set a schedule with your family or your partner, where you write after or before work every day, and let them know it is important for you to do. Treat your writing like a priority and everyone around you will, too. 

#3: 5 things to add more interest to Writing

Alright, real talk. Naturally a lot of writers overlook this part of writing but to me, I find it essential when it comes to writing fiction even though many times writers are already aware of these things. Your book may be doing fine with its technicalities but may lack interest. Below I’m going to list five ways to make your writing more interesting and hopefully, it does help out. 

1) Tension

One of the big reasons a story isn’t interesting enough is because of Lack of Tension. See, without this, none of the characters really want anything from each other so therefore no one is really prevented from achieving their goal. Might as well just resolve the conflict right there because nothing is holding them back, which if you can realize is not an interesting narrative. 

Your characters interests and goals should conflict with each other even if certain characters are on the same side because then readers are truly more interested to see the play of events. 

2) Purpose

When a scene has no purpose, it essentially just slows down pace and kills the momentum. Readers are interested in the story, not the other details of the story that really don’t add much importance. Usually also known as filler which is something that bores readers if they really don’t own any sort of purpose. 

3) Voice 

This is really important but extremely overlooked. Without any voice, it seems like the story is just laid out for the reader without any touch to it. Remember, the character is there because they can see the world different than anyone else. Really, without voice the story is just like a textbook. There’s no presence, no life, no humanity. Adding voice really sparks interest. 

4) Specificity

Specificity is like saying there’s a stack of books or saying there’s a stack of comic books and graphic novels messed up on the shelves. Or that there’s a painting on a wall vs a oil painting on the wall. These are really simple example but adding specificity helps really add to the character or the atmosphere. Specificity adds interest to the story, for example: A stack of books on the shelves really doesn’t say much but specifying that there are comic books and star war novels messily shoved into a book shelve defines the atmosphere and the character itself. 

5) Originality

So, when you write a story, write something that has a taste of originality rather than something familiar. See, what I mean by this is it is okay to write something relatable. Though not to the point its familiar with real life. Okay example, 

Think about reading a text where I, theoretically was the writer, that had a graduation scene describing waiting in line in a gown, shaking hands with the dean and taking my diploma. This is familiar so the reader’s first thought is “why am i being told this?” Everyone has a general idea on what a graduation is even if they never been to one so there’s really no point for me to writing that. To combat this, you can just delete it from the narrative itself, write it in a way where the reader wouldn’t be able to predict that sort of event.

Hopefully this does help and wasn’t super confusing. Peace.

This week’s writing tip comes from the legendary Alice Walker. 

Remember, self-care is as important to the writing process as it is to life.