Tips and Tricks
I feel like indulging myself in something beyond mindless cleaning and keeping my cats out of the trash can so here are some tips and tricks to make your writing feel more fleshed out.
Knowledgeable Writing
And I cannot stress this enough, write what you know. The more you research it and the more you try to understand it the more you sound like a text-to-speech system trying to include everything you'd learned in the last forty-five minutes. If you need to go back and look into some things, that's fine, but to stop in the middle of a chapter to research anything from the point system of tennis to how long the human body can survive in less-than-ideal circumstances is fruitless and overall harmful to your progress.
That being said if you are extremely knowable about natural poisons and how they could affect the human body or anything with a similar mass, keep in mind the audience you're writing to. Not everyone understands the difference between belladonna, henbane, and jimson weed.
Don't be afraid to validate yourself, a quick google search is not nearly as harmful, as making yourself feel like it's just not right and fretting about it for the next quarter chapter.
If you don't know, you don't know, there's no shame in it, you slap one of these [], bad boys, in there and review at a later time. Let momentum carry you if it's there.
Critic Management
You are your worse enemy, and your worst critic, literally. There are moments when your writing looks comparable to a toddler's and it's a part of the process. People who look down on you will always compare you to someone better or more talented but that's just smoke and mirrors, they have far more time and experience and you just haven't gotten there yet. Until you die love, time's the only thing you got.
Write for yourself, first. Yes, one day you want to be published and have a fanbase that writes fanfiction and draws fanart of your wonderful process, though, do remember who you started writing for, and why. More often than not I am writing because what I want to see and read and interact with is not there, so I need to put it there. Sure, it sucks sometimes, but you've got to want it, or you've got to need it, those are the choices.
Write it out and see, sometimes it's shit, sometimes it's this wondrous thing you didn't think you were capable of. That's writing, and sometimes our skills are flexible, sometimes we wonder if we ever really learned how to write or if we're randomly pulling this stuff from our ass hoping it's at least comprehensible. That is writing, it's a craft, and you're not always going to be good at it, that's where the going gets tough and you've got to be tougher.
Write, Keep Writing, Yeah- Keep Going
Trust me, it's really easy to notice a mistake three chapters back that disrupts your whole plot, and you think, let me fix it, just real quick, and now you've rewritten chapters three, four, and six, and envisioned your entire plot. Shit happens, and shit will keep happening but that's life. Try not to edit things in the middle of your novel. You'll notice so many mistakes and begin to doubt yourself as a writer but that's the writing process, mistakes are going to happen, you're writing will grow with you and you will grow with your writing. Make a note of it, physically, and write it somewhere correlative to whatever it's referring to (because you won't remember it, trust me.)
On that note, write things down, I have separate notebooks for every serious WIP (and one I use for when I cannot for the life of me find the other ones) I have in progress right now so I can randomly jot down things I need to revisit, keep in mind, or adjust. It's a paper trail and if you're anything like me you'll hate yourself for forgetting those little details. It'll help you immensely in the long run when you start editing and working on the second, third, and sometimes even ninth draft.
It's draft lovely, your first one at that. It's a rough outline of an idea you had last night or that you've had since you were a child. It's meant to be on paper, grammatical errors, plot holes, inconsistent characters and speech patterns and all. It's supposed to be rough, it's supposed to be imperfect, it's supposed to. I promise, your writing is an extension of yourself most time and you've got to admit at some point, that you don't feel all that perfect, no matter how much you love yourself. We have bad days, your writing has bad days too. It's okay, that's why we edit, take all its hard edges, and sand them down to something more tolerable and we mold it into something we consider perfect, in all its imperfections.
Do not be discouraged by progress. Whether it's a lack of or overwhelmingly sum of, take it all in, take a break when you need it and tackle it piece by piece, arc by arc, chapter by chapter, line by line if you have to.
Don't Forget About You
Taking care of yourself is believe it or not a part of the process. You can't forget to eat and drink water and rest your eyes. You can't write for six hours nonstop, or at the very least you shouldn't. Regrettable things come from the general act of self-neglect.
Water is important, so is realizing what you've done is all you can do for the day. Whether it was a chapter, or four, there's a limit to everything and it doesn't make you less of a writer if those limits aren't consistent.
You are writing a legacy love, it takes time, it takes energy, it takes effort. Moderation is key to everything and I'm sure the last thing you want to do is neglect whatever you're working on in a burnout.
Take time for yourself you crinkly little gremlins, water is important and so are sleep, food, and eyeball breaks for the blind bandits such as myself. It can be a lot but shit what are you gonna do? Try?
