231: Writing Advice That's Actually Helpful

 

There's a lot of writing advice out there. Some of it is good, and some of it is... not so good! In this episode, we cover the main pieces of writing advice that I think are actually helpful.

 ------

- Click here for ways to work with me + a free character profile template: www.thekatiewolf.com/info

- The last Tuesday of the month is a Q&A episode! Submit your questions for me HERE.


- TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@katiewolfwrites

- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/katiewolfwrites

 

 

Writing Advice That's Actually Helpful

Hi friends, welcome to You Big Creative Life Podcast. And welcome to an episode that I think is going to be kind of quick because I don't have a ton of battery left on my phone. I'm working away from home today. And I wanted to get this episode out because I'm a little behind on my podcast episodes. And I'm hoping that I can get the full thing recorded before my phone dies. So we'll see. But I wanted to dive into some popular writing advice that's actually helpful because I feel like, especially now on social media, oh my god, there's just like so much writing advice. And some of it comes from people who are well-meaning, but... really get dogmatic about things. Or I also hate seeing writing advice from people where it's like, they don't work with writers.

All they're doing is basing their piece of writing advice off of their personal experience, which is fine to do. But then they're framing it as like, well, I do it this way. So therefore, this is the only way that you should do it. And you're wrong for doing it any other way. And of course, that's like almost never true. There are very few absolutes when it comes to writing. I mean, basically things that are obvious, like don't steal someone else's work. Don't I don't know. Well, in my case, use generative AI to give you ideas or write the book for you. But I don't know. There are very few absolutes. And so to say that it's so black and white of like, if you're doing it this way, you're doing it wrong. Every writer has a different approach. So there's a lot of bad writing advice out there, again, from people who I think are well-intentioned, but there's also good writing advice that is like, it's just the basics.

These, the things that we're going to talk about in this episode are the fundamentals of writing and their advice, all these things we're going to talk about today, I found them helpful in my own writing and also with clients, like over the years that I've been doing this, with coaching clients, with editing clients, these are things that are just true. So here's some stuff that actually is good advice for you to take. Number one is to just have a messy first draft. This and Lamott, I believe, Is it Anne Lamott who coined the phrase, embrace the ****** first draft? I think that's her catchphrase. I want to make sure to give her credit if that's true. Bird by Bird is one of those just sort of gospel craft books or books about writing, I should say. Embrace the ****** first draft. Yeah, it's Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott. But basically this just means not being a perfectionist and not being too precious about the first draft because no one's going to see the first draft. It doesn't matter if it's a hot mess. It doesn't matter if you have placeholders where you're like writing notes to yourself, like come back in, add more description here.

I even recently, I sent the 1st 20 pages of my new book to my agent because I wanted to get her thoughts and just kind of some kind of some general feedback about that. And I also center a synopsis of my new book because we've never, we haven't really talked about this and I wanted to get our thoughts on the premise and everything. And even when I was writing that, I did like the road ahead looked like XYZ because I just like don't, I'm just struggling to think of how to phrase it. And I don't want to spend 25 minutes coming up with like the perfect words for a sentence. It doesn't matter. I'll just come back in and do that later. For me, it's important to focus on getting the first draft out and letting it be messy. I would much rather focus my time and energy on that. So This is just one of those things you have to remember. Like, it's okay to let it be messy. Turn off that part of your brain that wants to compare and criticize what you're putting on the page because it literally doesn't matter. No one will see it.

Number 2 is, oh, well, I have another piece of advice that's kind of, it kind of ties into this. So maybe this is point like 1.5, but it's to get the first draft out quickly along with letting it be messy, messy. Because think about it, these things go hand in hand. If you are letting your rough draft be messy, if you're just getting the story out, you're not being too precious, you're not spending a ton of time and energy like getting the perfect, you know, all the grammar correct and all the details and everything like that, just, it means that you can move quicker when you do that. Now, of course, it's not wrong to, take your time with your first draft. I'm not saying there's something wrong with you if you're taking a while to get your first draft out. I just think that there's a reason why this writing advice exists, because it is true that if you just let it be messy, stop being such a perfectionist, you are much more likely to actually finish a first draft. And that is something that a lot of writers struggle with is either they have a half-finished book that's been sitting on their computer for years or they've started multiple books, but they don't ever finish anything. And I think this is a big part of why. I mean, there are a lot of reasons for that, some mindset related too. But yeah, so messy first draft, great advice.

Number 2, Kill your darlings. This is the editing advice of being ruthless with your pen or I suppose your fingers on a keyboard and a mouse. You know, most of us run in computers. And being willing to cut things that don't serve the story. Being willing to remove characters, even kill off characters, literally or metaphorically, I guess. Like kill them off, meaning remove them maybe. But don't be too attached to certain elements of your story that aren't effective or aren't serving it. This is really something that you want to pay attention to in editing because what can happen is we love our worlds. We love our characters. We love our settings. We love our magic systems. If you're writing fantasy, all of these things we are so attached to because we spend so much time brainstorming them, so much time writing them, et cetera. And then when you get to editing, it can be difficult to make those hard choices sometimes about like, okay, yeah, I love this one scene because it was really fun to write, but it's not really serving the story.

There's no real point to this scene. Or this scene could probably be about two pages and instead I have it taking up 15 pages of the book. So it's time for me to like kill some of this. It's time for me to axe a lot of this and remove it. You have to be ruthless. You have to be willing to do that because it's going to make the story better. It's going to ultimately serve the story. And it just, it really is saying like, this saying of killing your darlings is saying don't get too attached to anything in your book and place all of your like worth and value on that either. Yeah, it's just, we can be super attached to things, but if it's not serving the story, it's sometimes it has to go or at least be condensed. Maybe it can stay, but it has to just be shortened. Next piece of advice is to, okay, so that was a piece of advice about editing. My next piece of advice that's helpful is about starting and it's this, just start. There is no perfect way to begin a book. You don't have to have your opening scene completely figured out. Oftentimes, I have found in my own writing and also with clients that what we think is page one doesn't actually become page one, turn out to be page one at the end. We will often start the story somewhere on page one and then realize later it no longer makes sense to do that. It's the wrong place to start the story. It's boring.

There's a more interesting place to open the book, all kinds of stuff. So there's a good chance it's going to be changed anyway. So it doesn't matter. This is part of the reason a lot of people can procrastinate on starting the book, particularly if you have done a lot of work on outlining and brainstorming and world building and coming up with all of this stuff, then we can consciously or subconsciously put a lot of pressure on the opening paragraphs of our book because, oh my god, we're actually starting right now. Holy **** this is real. But it doesn't really matter. Just start somewhere. Whatever feels easiest for you, whatever feels like a good entry point into the book. Maybe it's not even page one. Maybe it's a scene that you know isn't exactly going to be page one. There's going to be some stuff that comes before it. But it's just like the first scene that you're excited about and that's where you want to begin actually writing. Great, awesome. You can always go back later to fill in the gaps of what came before that scene. That's fine. So just start.

This is, I had a question about this on a Q&A episode. The episode that came out last week, someone was asking about, you know, I'm procrastinating, I'm doing all this world building and research. And I just am building it up to my head and I maybe I'm experiencing some imposter syndrome. I don't know, I'm just procrastinating on actually starting to write. And yeah, this can happen. And I think it's one of those things where you just have to pick a date on the calendar and be like, this is the day that I'm going to start just start. And going back to 0.1, the writing advice about like letting it be messy, this is where that comes into play. Don't get too precious or perfectionistic about whatever you're going to start the story on, because again, there's a good chance that it's going to be changed later. So just start.

And then the last piece of advice that we're going to touch on is to, is that sometimes simple is better. And I'm mentioning this because I feel like I've had a number of conversations lately with editing clients and coaching clients about letting things be simple. I remember I read this collection of speeches that Philip Pullman wrote, this author that I love. His Dark Materials, the fantasy series, is like my favorite series on earth. I read it, well, now once every couple of years, probably. I reread it. But anyways, he was talking about how writers have this tendency to want to overcomplicate things. Sometimes it comes from a place of wanting to show that we're smart and that we've figured things out and we're like, look how clever we are. And he talked about a particular thing that he was going to have one of the characters in the His Dark Materials series do. And then like, and then he got to this place of realization of, well, it doesn't have to be that complicated. It can just be, This is just who the character is. And that's it. Like, I don't have to prove anything about how clever I am or how smart I am. I can just let it be simple.

Now, simple doesn't mean boring. Simple doesn't mean, you know, I don't want you to hear me say simple and think that that's a negative thing. It just means we don't have to overcomplicate things unnecessarily. I will point out two times where I see this. Number one is in mysteries or thrillers. Sometimes I get the sense that the author just wants to be super twisty for the sake of being super twisty and to show that they've really thought through like shocking twists and turns and like, yeah, all that's important. I mean, if you're writing thrillers, yes, you need to have twists. That's like a hallmark of the genre. But that shouldn't be the primary focus of your book. You also need to have an actual story. You also need to have compelling characters. The pacing needs to be right. There needs to be conflict. Like all these things need to be present. It's not just showing off the sake, like your cool twist that you have and having a twist every three pages because the reader's gonna get frustrated with that. That's like insane.

The rug constantly being pulled out from a reader with all these different twists and reveals and everything. So that's where I sometimes see it is this super complicated spider web of things where if the reader would just, or if the author would just like distill it down and focus on a few more impactful twists, a few on focus on fewer impactful twists, that would serve the story better. And I also see this sometimes in fantasy with magic systems, where it's just unnecessarily complicated and it does sometimes read as though the author just wants to prove that they've come up with a really clever way of magic, a really complicated magic system. But with fantasy specifically, you have to remember that complicated world building doesn't mean a good story. Those things are not like, you can have incredibly complex, dense world building in a magic system and a story that's like flat and boring and reductive. Or you can have a fantasy novel that the characters are so incredible, the world is fleshed out, it's lush writing and everything. But the magic system is pretty basic. Like those things aren't always, they don't always go hand in hand.

So remember that the world building that you're doing, the magic system, all those things are there to support the story. So sometimes making things simple It really is better. And with mysteries and thrillers and fantasy, it can really impact the pacing. Because if you're just going from twist, from twist, twist, reveal, oh, it's this thing, it's this thing. And the reader is going to feel like what I mentioned a second ago, that the rug is just being constantly pulled out from under them. They're not going to be able to get their bearings. They're probably going to feel a sense of frustration and like not be able to get plugged into these characters in this world and this story. It's very difficult to like get your bearings when things are constantly being shaken up. So just remember, sometimes simpler is better. Okay, so those are the pieces of writing advice. Hopefully my phone is still recording the video for this. I hope that was helpful. I'd love to hear if you have any advice that you've heard that you feel like is just classic, it stands the test of time, and it's really been helpful for you. I'd love to hear it. You can send me a DM on Instagram @KatieWolfWrites. All right, see you next week. Thank you for listening.

 

 

Katie Wolf