How Do I Strengthen My Writing? I Tend To Fall Back On Bad Habits Because I Can't Find Good Habits To

How do I strengthen my writing? I tend to fall back on bad habits because I can't find good habits to replace them.

Building sustainable writing habits that really help you improve can be really difficult. Especially if you don't know where to look. So, here are 10 tips for building good writing habits that can help strengthen your writing!

1. Clear out your creative faucets

Step away from your project and do something else! Write something different. Let yourself write badly. Or just plain old take a break. Your writing will suffer if you're constantly forcing yourself to work on something that isn't bringing you joy.

2. Read voraciously

In the immortal words of Stephen King: “If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have time to write.” 

Read widely in your own genre and outside of it. Take inspiration from other authors, and read critically to see what they do well and what they could do better.

3. Read some bad writing, too

Breaking down exactly why a piece of writing doesn't work for you can be super helpful for understanding what to avoid in your own work. 

4. Try on different writing styles

Try out different approaches to storytelling to find the voice that feels most like yours. You might find yourself attracted to descriptive, sensory prose, or more to austere and pointed prose. Your writing will be strongest when you're the most authentic self you can be.

5. Explore characterisation 

People are messy. Accurately and compellingly conveying this innate messiness is essential to creating a powerful story. Explore your characters and who they are, and if it's a character-driven story, don't be afraid to let them drive.

6. Make friends with your thesaurus 

A great way to make a piece of prose shine even brighter is to expand your vocabulary. There are a lot of words in the English language that mean similar things but have slightly different moods and tones. Finding the exact right word to convey what you’re trying to say will help your writing land more emphatically with your reader. 

7. Banish filtering words

Filtering is one of the most common mistakes new writers make. It involves describing a character’s sensations or feelings with filtering words like felt, saw, heard, knew, watched, or realised. This holds the reader at a distance and makes them feel like they’re hearing a story, rather than living it.

An example of filtering would be, “She watched the sun rise majestically over the mountains”. It would feel more immediate to simply say, “The sun rose majestically over the mountains”. The reader already knows your point-of-view character is watching; now, the reader can watch it with them. 

8. Glare disapprovingly at the passive voice

Passive voice isn’t necessarily wrong all the time, but nine times out of ten, it will slow down the pace of your story and encourage the reader to lose interest in your characters. Passive voice means having something done to a character — “John was punched in the face by Nick” — instead of a character actively doing something: “Nick punched John in the face”.

9. Familiarise yourself with story structure

The best stories follow an established plot structure, and follow it so smoothly that the reader doesn’t even realise there’s an ancient storytelling template behind it. These structures are designed to introduce just the right amount of tension and suspense and to give the reader the ideal payoff by the end. Rather than being formulaic, they help with pacing and plot development.

10. Get peer feedback

Finally, the best way to make your work as strong as it can be is to get some feedback from other writers. This can be from a professional editor, a beta reader, or a collaborative writing group. Getting a second pair of eyes can help you catch plot holes or inconsistencies before you send your story out into the world.

Want to know more? Read the full post at the link below!

novlr.org

How do I strengthen my writing? - Novlr

If you're struggling to strengthen your writing, here are some tips and tricks to help you build good habits and improve!

This is a gift / it comes with a price / who is the lamb and who is the knife?

cleaned up a rhaenyra I did while chatting w @wodania 👍👍👍

girlhood this girlhood that. woman you are 26

Daenys and her baby Balerion

You can't convince me he wasn't spoiled.

“But this is not that king, nor is this his song.”

Aegon, inspired by this portrait of Stephen of Blois. Drawing by my friend. They also wrote some meta about it, under the cut. The quote is from The Green Knight (2021).

“His name should be “the Unfortunate.” Or, perhaps, “the Unready.”

In his behaviours, crimes and heroics, he feels like a quintessential local king. I have too little care for the ethics of feudalism to pretend that one bleached flea is more moral than another, I am not going to justify this fictional fool or any of his fellow ticks on the bodies of kingdoms.

I like his story though. The way he viciously rejects his heritage and embraces it at the same time, more Andal than Valyrian who still holds the strongest bond with the physical manifestation of Valyrian ideas, something that both upholds and discredits their predatory traditions. A king doomed by others to become a king, the one who doesn’t want to rule but grows into it to the point of giving his all. He’s ready to fight and burn among his people when they show him loyalty but turns cruel and unstable when they defy him. His future is bleak, his past is disgusting. Remember those lines in The Green Knight film? “Is this all there is?” - “What else ought there to be?” He’s not Gawain, of course. Please give me Plato’s number, I’m going to telephone him to hear his hot take on this shit.

But I find a pleasant fatalism in that he’s not only chosen by his family to play a role of a contender, those who then wash their hands of it, but also in how his story comes from a faux chronicle of events long gone, done and decided, a story that might be tweaked here and there, but will not be rewritten. It’s almost like he is aware in a fun way that he is long doomed—and tries to flee unsuccessfully, cowardly, violently even, only to be brought back into the cycle that must continue like the chains on his neck. They imply Rhaenyra is one of the prophecies, but him fleeing his destiny and fitting it so well resembles one of the many doomed kings from the old tales, the crowned blaze in the shape of a man doomed to face his grim fate no matter how far he has gone to escape it. But he is not that king. His song seems of a different breed. The unwilling and unworthy man cursed with the scourge of greatness. I think he should die in a public mass cannibalism incident.”