Here I shall just list some writing tips you can have from me and then talk a little about each tip.
1.
Write a lot. I don't know how much I've heard someone say, "Ooh, I don't have time to write." Well, that's simple, make time. I started writing when I was 7, but I didn't get good at it until the summer of 2012, where I wrote a story called
Feed which got a lot of positive reviews on a creative writing site I got on at the time, but now, since I've written about 18 stories and I've finished one book since then, I can say that I am publishing worthy.
2.
Finish your work. I am a bit of a hypocrite here because I
NEVER finish anything I write. I have only finished the first draft of one book, which is
The Risen and I wrote it for NaNoWriMo 2012. Here's a list of stories I've just stopped writing to write something else:
I wrote a book called
Blackout about zombies in the 7th grade, last year, and I planned to write a sequel but I sucked at writing at the moment, though I finished it at 15,000 words and about 18 chapters. I stopped writing the sequel to
Blackout, which I had named
Whiteout to start a lousy series called
The Seven Sanctums, which was seven books in one series. I wrote 9,000 words and 8 chapters of the first book and then quit for another zombie trilogy called
The Quarantine Trilogy. I finished the first book of that at 20,000 words and about 20 chapters but I never edited or anything. Then I quit that to write another trilogy which I called
The Exile Trilogy. I wrote the first chapter of the first book and then stopped, waiting a few weeks before starting up on
Feed, which was a vampire story. I got to 17,000 words and chapter 20-something and then I just stopped. Then I started up on a story about aliens called
Banshee, which I got to 7,000-8,000 words and then deleted it. I then started a story called
Survive, which I wrote to about 9,000 words and then quit for a while (I will come back to that later). Then I wrote 9,000 words and 7 chapters of a story I was told to write called
From the Ashes We have Risen. I then stopped writing that for some mystical reason and then wrote a short 10,000 word story called
Ancient World, I finished the first draft of that and never edited. I wrote a Hunger Games fan fiction that was called
The Runner at first, but I later changed the title to
Surviving the Games and then I wrote 6,000-10,000 words and just stopped. Then about a month later I started a two-part thriller called
Righteous and
Vicious. I wrote the first chapter of each, which they kind of counter each other.
Vicious is about a murderer and
Righteous is about a cop trying to solve the crime. Then I just stopped that to pick up
Survive where I left off and didn't really go anywhere, while I wrote a story called
The Fall of Troy about a kid named Troy who is bullied to death. I think I wrote about the first 1,000 words and decided against it because I couldn't connect because I have never been bullied much. After that I opened a story called
Kidnapped and I wrote the first 2,000 words to it and stopped. After that I picked back up on
Feed for a moment then I turned to
The Risen which I finished at barley over 50,000 words then I shut it away (the manuscript is right beside me). Then I started back up on
The Seven Sanctums, which I actually got to the fourth chapter at 9,000 words and clever thorough outlining and then I stopped to open
The Exile Trilogy again and write
The Ice Queen, which is the first book in that series. I stopped
The Ice Queen for a couple weeks to work on
Survive, which I restarted and got to 11,000 and put on halt again recently to write
The Ice Queen again, which is in progress.
As you can see by that long-winded explanation, I absolutely cannot finish a book at all.
3.
Read. I don't read a lot of books, because I'm really slow, but I read more than the average person (which nowadays is just more than a book your teacher tells you to read). I've read a couple books this year, mostly Adult, some are
The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown,
Dreamcatcher and
Full Dark, No Stars and I am reading
11/22/63 by Stephen King,
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, and
White Horse by Alex Adams. There's only one thing to be said about this;
"If you want to be like the greats, you gotta read the greats."
4.
Enjoy your writing. If you write and you're like me, while you're in the process of typing out those words your mind is like,
"Oh my god this is so amazing I can't even fanboy/fangirl enough about this." BUT (yes, there is a but), once you read over it, even if you're not done writing, you're mind is suddenly like,
"How could I have written this atrocity?! START AGAIN." You have to fight those urges to start all over on a clean slate, you get nowhere by erasing all of your progress. Just remember that instead of erasing you can just edit your work.
5.Lastly,
let others enjoy your writing. You can't know what you're doing wrong if people don't tell you. This is a big issue in my life because I let people read my work and they don't give serious feedback. They say, "Oh it's amazing I really like it..." but they never go into detail about what they like about it and they
never have anything relatively 'negative' to say about it. If there's one thing I know about getting better at writing, it's that (purely as a way to get better and improve) a writer wants negative reviews on their books or stories. Now, I'm not talking a review like, "Omg this sucked plz write a new version of the book it was horrible and i am disgusted." I'm talking something like, "This was a novel I wasn't very pleased to read. It didn't come to my expectations because I thought that [insert critique of story element here] and that you could just [insert suggestion here] but overall I think that the story needed a bit more [description/back-story/explanation/character development,etc]
That's all I have for today!
