5 Fun Tips to be a More Writerly Writer

Real writers use a quill and wear glasses. Then they take pictures of them.

So, you think you’re a writer do you? I suppose you sit quietly at your desk, diligently knocking out 2,000 words a day, scouring the internet for tips to improve your prose? Pah! That’s not the way of the true writer. There are writers, and then there are writerly writers. Allow me to enlighten you…

1) Carry a notebook.

It should be leather-bound – the more expensive, the better. For maximum effect, wait until a friend is mid-way through a sentence, then whip it out and start making notes, laughing quietly to yourself. Then refuse to let them see, claiming that they wouldn’t understand.

2) Own at least 4 different colours of pen.

These are for editing. Red can be used to draw attention to plot inconsistencies. Green is for additions and amendments to the prose itself. Blue should draw attention to the sections where you deliberately missed out whole paragraphs to come back to later, then forgot about. Black has no special significance – it’s just black.

3) Work in the local cafe.

There is absolutely no point in being a writer unless everyone knows about it, so find a prominent public place and write there. Remember to invest in an oversized laptop with a particularly noisy keyboard, thump the table in consternation at the end of each sentence, and stare absent-mindedly at other patrons to freak them out. This is how most writers attract the attention of agents.

4) Wear a bow tie.

Another top tip to let everyone know you’re a writer is to wear a bow tie. Only writers wear bow ties – anyone wearing a bow tie who is not a writer is an impostor, and must have their bow tie confiscated on the spot. It is legal to do this. If you are uncomfortable wearing a bow tie in public, start slowly with a cravat and work your way up.

5) Get yourself all worked up.

The natural-born writer can only be truly creative when pacing up and down and ranting loudly to themselves, ideally under the heavy influence of coffee or alcohol – or both. Try to remember to write down some of the things you rant about for later use. Combine this with strategy 3 for maximum writer points. Top score!

Are you a writerly writer, or merely a writer? How many bow ties do you own? Click ‘comments’ below, or e-mail pithytitle@live.co.uk

Image © Simon Howden

3 Ways to Survive the Twitter Tidal Wave

Twitter repeats itself – like a parrot. This is a parrot. See what I did there?

Image © Elwood W. McKay III

As I’ve mentioned numerous times, Twitter is an amazing resource for writers. In fact, it’s an amazing resource for any creative, any professional, or indeed any creative professional. Never before has so much up-to-the-minute, field-specific information and advice been so readily available.

That said, Twitter does have at least one major flaw – sometimes it’s just overwhelmingly big. Where once we had to seek out the elusive stream of writerly knowledge, we’re now bombarded by a continuous tidal wave of information. It’s easy to be swept away.

If you’re not completely turned off by the information overload, you may be giving yourself an aneurism trying to keep up with it all. I’ve suffered from both in the past, so here are three strategies I’ve come up with to make sense of it all.

1) Don’t click on every link you see.

I’m an unpublished writer. If, like me, you follow hoards of other writers, journalists, agents, publishers, and so forth, then you’ll be receiving a steady stream of fascinating blog links every second of the day.

The question is, how much of that information is useful to you right now? While it may be tempting for me to read up on techniques for writing agent queries, the fact is I’ve still got the better part of a novel left to write! Writing tips are the only thing that have practical value to me at present.

My advice is to only check out links that might be of practical use to you right now, or in the very near future. People will still be tweeting the other stuff when you’re ready for it. It’s not going anywhere.

2) Don’t repeat yourself.

The nature of Twitter and the blog-o-globe means that there are at least 50 people posting essentially identical advice, at least 50 times a day. But there’s no need for you to read it more than once. The cunning blogger will find creative new ways of presenting old information, but don’t be fooled!

If you see a link that appears to cover a topic you already know about, don’t be tempted to click on it just for the sake of self-assurance. There’s some security and satisfaction in being told what you already know, but don’t give in to the instinct – it’s a time waster.

3) Know when to stop.

I used to have Tweetdeck loaded in the background all day every day. Every few seconds a notification would appear with a potentially interesting link, and I’d instinctively check it out, just in case I risked missing out on the most important piece of writerly advice ever. I didn’t get much work done.

The whole point of Twitter is that it’s a never-ending stream of information. It’s not going to turn itself off. You have to do it.

Sometimes it can be tempting to give in to paranoia, and think that you’re going to miss that crucial piece of advice or information, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned over the last few months, it’s that Twitter repeats itself.

Yes, you may miss that information, but the good stuff never goes away. People retweet. Others incorporate the information into their blog post, and tweet the link. Weeks later, completely different people stumble across the blog posts, and tweet the links again.

Limit your Twitter use, and have faith that the truly useful links will find you.

Do you have difficulty surviving the Twitter tidal wave? Were these suggestions useful to you? Do you have any other advice for dealing with the information overload? Click ‘comments’ below, or e-mail pithytitle@live.co.uk

3 Ways to Increase Your Writing Productivity

Coffee can increase productivity over short periods. It can also increase trips to the toilet.

Image © Idea go

So you want to increase your writing productivity, eh? Don’t we all! I’m not claiming to be an expert, but here are three tips and techniques that have helped me massively. Maybe they could help you too.

1) Get up at the crack of midnight.

Ok, maybe not midnight, but try to get up as early as you can manage without adversely affecting your sleep. Recently, I started going to bed around 9 or 10pm, and getting up at 5am. This gives me a few hours in the morning to do nothing but write, without worldly distractions.

For maximum effect, I recommend showering immediately to wake yourself up, and drinking copious amounts of coffee – but not a drop of caffeine from six-hours-to-bedtime onwards. You’ll need deep, perfect sleep to keep up the routine. And for those who have difficulty getting out of bed at the best of times, try putting your alarm on the other side of the room, so you have no choice but to leave the bed!

This is a harsh but rewarding regime.

2) Turn off Twitter!

So, you’ve cut out the distractions that you can’t normally control by writing in the middle of the night – what next? Well, that just leaves the distractions that you can control, mainly because they’re self-inflicted!

Twitter is the worst culprit here, but reading the news, checking up on your regular sites, anxiously clicking ‘refresh’ to view your latest blog traffic – these are all completely unnecessary activities that are not only eating into your writing time, but also putting you in entirely the wrong frame of mind.

And if you’re anything like me, then as soon as you start playing around in that browser window, you’re lost. Regardless of how much you struggle to focus on the writing, you will find some excuse to keep shifting back to the browser every few minutes. It’s a total productivity killer.

There’s only one solution – for those few hours that you’ve set aside to write, turn the clock back to 1989. No internet. Not one page. Not one tweet. You’ll thank yourself for it.

3) Do something you hate.

Well, maybe not something you hate – I wouldn’t necessarily try to force you into something horrendous! – but I genuinely believe it’s beneficial for any creative person to have something in their lives that they wish wasn’t. For you, it may be your menial job, the housework, or the weekly shop. For me, it’s my menial job, the housework, and the weekly shop.

I’m never more motivated to write than when there’s something unpleasant preventing me from doing it. That passion for not doing the hated activity can be translated into a passion for the writing.

For example, I’m paid not much more than minimum-wage – this means that my employer values a whole hour of my time at approximately the same level as the supermarket values a dead chicken.

My time is worth more than that. Your time is worth more than that. I’ll be writing as soon as I get home, in the impassioned knowledge that at least I am valuing my time appropriately.

Did you find these suggestions helpful? Have any of them worked for you? Got any better ideas?! Click ‘comments’ below, or e-mail pithytitle@live.co.uk

5 Writing Links of Awesome #1

Five links. Five die. Coincidence…?

Image © healingdream

Yip-yo! Welcome to the first entry of my regular Friday series, in which I offer up all the very best writerly linky-links I’ve accumulated from Twitter during the previous week. It really is an amazing source of information and advice. Behold:

The Ten Traits of a True Writer by Liz Kessler

If you think you’re too messy and disorganised to be a writer, think again. Liz tells it like it really is, and makes us all feel better – hurrah!

3 Tips – When Characters lose Character by Pam Parker

In redrafting my novel I found that the voice of Gwillum, my protagonist, was becoming somewhat generic. It can happen all too easily. Pam’s prompts could help you bring your characters back to life.

50 Problem Words and Phrases by Mark Nichol

A comprehensive list of all those common word misuses and misunderstandings. I’ve always considered myself to be flawless in this area, but even I learned a thing or two. An invaluable resource in your quest to avoid looking foolish.

40 Twitter Hashtags for Writers by Simon Kewin

If you want to discover more blog posts like these, then you really need to be investigating these hastags. If you want other people to discover you, then you need to be using them yourself. And if you’re not on Twitter, and don’t know what a hashtag is, then for god’s sake sort yourself out! How do you live?!

How to Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon

Whether you’re a writer, or involved in any other kind of creative activity, this is without doubt the best article you’ll read this week. Encouraging, informative and entertaining. Trust me, you have to read it.

That’s all for this week. If you’re visiting my blog for the first time, why not check out the rest of this week’s posts, for more advice, suggestions and resources. The popular ones are listed off to the right.

Have a good weekend!

Don’t Write What You Know

 

This cat is boring. Don’t write about it. No-one will care.

Image © Carlos Porto

To me, ‘write what you know’ must be the worst advice ever. Who comes up with this nonsense? Yet it sticks, presumably just because it can be expressed in a short, memorable sentence.

If I were to write purely about what I know, I’d either have to write a book about the tedious grind of being an entry-level chef, or a compendium of inane factoids about Doctor Who. Cynically, I’m going to suggest that most other writers probably have equally ‘understated’ lives. Did I euphemistically use the word ‘understated’ – I meant to say ‘shit-boring’.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that writers as a group tend to lead boring lives – I’m saying that humans as a group tend to lead boring lives. I happen to know some of them personally, and they just won’t shut up about it – sometimes I wish I had the balls to just yawn in their faces and walk away.

Anyway, most of us wouldn’t want to read a book based on our own tedious lives and useless knowledge, so why should anyone else? Sadly, I get the impression that an army of failed-authors-in-waiting are even now slaving over their fifth, unpublished, semiautobiographical work, about an ordinary person who solves predictable crimes at the weekend with the help of their cat.

I think the problem arises because people take ‘write what you know’ literally – a much better piece of advice might be to write what you understand. There must be an almost infinite number of topics I can get to grips with, without having first-hand experience or a university degree in the subject area concerned.

So I suppose this is my advice to other writers, and to myself – for god’s sake, DON’T write about what you know. It bores the shit out of the rest of us. Research something fascinating, bizarre or implausible, understand it, and write about that instead.

Are you writing a novel about an ordinary person who solves predictable crimes at the weekend with the help of their cat? Please don’t e-mail me at pithytitle@live.co.uk or leave a comment below. Just stop writing.