Miss Violet Hunter writes

As an artist I can give you a snapshot into a world.

But a writer.

A writer can take you there.

They can weave together words and create a portal to anywhere. You can visit those places instead of looking out a window and wishing to be a part of it.

A writer can give you a story.

But an artist.

An artist can show you the exact emotions behind everything.

They can paint a picture worth a thousand words without ever writing one. They can show you every single emotion, every single thought in a second. They can show emotion like a writer never could.

Do an outline, whatever way works best. Get yourself out of the word soup and know where the story is headed.

Conflicts and obstacles. Hurt the protagonist, put things in their way, this keeps the story interesting. An easy journey makes the story boring and boring is hard to write.

Change the POV. Sometimes all it takes to untangle a knotted story is to look at it through different eyes, be it through the sidekick, the antagonist, a minor character, whatever.

Know the characters. You can’t write a story if the characters are strangers to you. Know their likes, dislikes, fears, and most importantly, their motivation. This makes the path clearer.

Fill in holes. Writing doesn’t have to be linear; you can always go back and fill in plotholes, and add content and context.

Have flashbacks, hallucinations, dream sequences or foreshadowing events. These stir the story up, deviations from the expected course add a feeling of urgency and uncertainty to the narrative.

Introduce a new mystery. If there’s something that just doesn’t add up, a big question mark, the story becomes more compelling. Beware: this can also cause you to sink further into the mire.

Take something from your protagonist. A weapon, asset, ally or loved one. Force him to operate without it, it can reinvigorate a stale story.

Twists and betrayal. Maybe someone isn’t who they say they are or the protagonist is betrayed by someone he thought he could trust. This can shake the story up and get it rolling again.

Secrets. If someone has a deep, dark secret that they’re forced to lie about, it’s a good way to stir up some fresh conflict. New lies to cover up the old ones, the secret being revealed, and all the resulting chaos.

Kill someone. Make a character death that is productive to the plot, but not “just because”. If done well, it affects all the characters, stirs up the story and gets it moving.

Ill-advised character actions. Tension is created when a character we love does something we hate. Identify the thing the readers don’t want to happen, then engineer it so it happens worse than they imagined.

Create cliff-hangers. Keep the readers’ attention by putting the characters into new problems and make them wait for you to write your way out of it. This challenge can really bring out your creativity.

Raise the stakes. Make the consequences of failure worse, make the journey harder. Suddenly the protagonist’s goal is more than he expected, or he has to make an important choice.

Make the hero active. You can’t always wait for external influences on the characters, sometimes you have to make the hero take actions himself. Not necessarily to be successful, but active and complicit in the narrative.

Different threat levels. Make the conflicts on a physical level (“I’m about to be killed by a demon”), an emotional level (“But that demon was my true love”) and a philosophical level (“If I’m forced to kill my true love before they kill me, how can love ever succeed in the face of evil?”).

Figure out an ending. If you know where the story is going to end, it helps get the ball rolling towards that end, even if it’s not the same ending that you actually end up writing.

What if? What if the hero kills the antagonist now, gets captured, or goes insane? When you write down different questions like these, the answer to how to continue the story will present itself.

One of the biggest struggles of being a writer is often feeling like you’re not good enough, no matter how much you’re writing. Today, writer Cassandra Lee Yieng shares an outlining method that’s helped her move past feelings of doubt and create the stories that she wants to write:

Much has been said about conquering the blank page, be it called writer’s block or imposter syndrome. We’re often inundated with brusque advice like “write an outline”, “fake it till you make it”, and “just write” (Reminds me of that Pirates of the Caribbean scene). It’s easy to presume that the people offering that advice have a tough exterior, and nobody likes being intimidated. To counter that, I’d like to shed light on my writing journey, and how I helped get myself out of a writing funk.

My university major was math, but one of my most devastating writing experiences was a Huffington Post piece on the math of snooker. A simple error—an oversight of a miscalculation—stopped my other submitted posts from being published. I could no longer reach the broad readership I once enjoyed, and I stopped blogging for at least a year.

not writing

writing

people reading their stories

A Writer’s Hierarchy of Needs

For The New York Times Book Review. 

              Analyze stories.

Don’t just listen to what other storytellers say you should do, figure out what you like about the stories you enjoy and learn to replicate that.

Want to learn about pacing? Examine stories you think flow fantastically. Want to learn about description? Study your favorite author’s descriptions. Want to learn about characterization? Critique your favorite characters.  Want to learn about foreshadowing? Explore how it’s done in stories where the plot twist blew your mind.

Storytellers giving advice to other storytellers is fantastic and useful, but you will never know something as thoroughly as you know the things you figure out for yourself. 

And by analyzing the stories you love instead of listening blindly to advice, you’ll never be swayed by the bias of other writers and you’ll never take in advice that’s suited for a story you wouldn’t enjoy writing.

After putting my writing on hold for several weeks, I decided to jump back in. I expected to find all sorts of problems with my story–inconsistencies in the plot, lack of transitions, poor characterization–the works. But what began to stick out to me was something to which I’d given little thought in writing.

Filter words.

What are Filter Words?

Actually, I didn’t even know these insidious creatures had a name until I started combing the internet for info.

Filter words are those that unnecessarily filter the reader’s experience through a character’s point of view. Dark Angel’s Blog says:

“Filtering” is when you place a character between the detail you want to present and the reader. The term was started by Janet Burroway in her book On Writing.

In terms of example, you should watch out for:

To see

To hear

To think

To touch

To wonder

To realize

To watch

To look

To seem

To feel (or feel like)

Can

To decide

To sound (or sound like)

To know

I’m being honest when I say my manuscript is filled with these words, and the majority of them need to be edited out.

What do Filter Words Look Like?

Let’s imagine a character in your novel is walking down a street during peak hour.

You might, for example, write:

Sarah felt a sinking feeling as she realized she’d forgotten her purse back at the cafe across the street. She saw cars filing past, their bumpers end-to-end. She heard the impatient honk of horns and wondered how she could quickly cross the busy road before someone took off with her bag. But the traffic seemed impenetrable, and she decided to run to the intersection at the end of the block.

Eliminating the bolded words removes the filters that distances us, the readers, from this character’s experience:

Sarah’s stomach sank. Her purse—she’d forgotten it back at the cafe across the street. Cars filed past, their bumpers end-to-end. Horns honked impatiently. Could she make it across the road before someone took off with her bag? She ran past the impenetrable stream of traffic, toward the intersection at the end of the block.

Are Filter Words Ever Acceptable?

Of course, there are usually exceptions to every rule.

Just because filter words tend to be weak doesn’t mean they never have a place in our writing. Sometimes they are helpful and even necessary.

Susan Dennard of Let The Words Flow writes that we should use filter words when they are critical to the meaning of the sentence.

If there’s no better way to phrase something than to use a filter word, then it’s probably okay to do so.

Want to know more?

Read these other helpful articles on filter words and more great writing tips:

Filter Words and Distancing Point of View

The Reasons Editors reject Manuscripts

But I think some people don’t understand what that means to me. 

To me, an outline means that I know: 

Where the story is going. 

What beats it’ll take getting there. 

The major content I know I want to write.

How that content can be reasonably connected.

Where character development decisions should take place.

What the climax will entail.

What choices the characters will be forced to make during the climax to fulfill or deny their developmental arc.

It also means that along the way I might…

Randomly move multiple scenes to a completely new settings.

Rearrange scenes to make for better pacing.

Throw in conversations I never imagined the characters would have.

Completely change one of my main character’s voices in the third chapter.

Have a random side character mysteriously foreshadow grudges certain characters are holding.

Realize certain characters have legitimately been holding said grudges.

Add in new character arcs for said characters to get them to work through their grudges.

Watch as the main ship progresses way faster than intended.

(Cry over the main ship.)

Let the protagonist chose to go by an alias because he’s more insecure than I thought.

Watch as his brother ruins his alias attempts four chapters later.

Create an entire new arc that revolves primarily around the protagonist wanting to sleep in a proper bed after camping for three weeks. (And do a lot of last minute plot adjusting to make the pacing still work for this bed-related arc.)

Forget one of my main characters exists for five chapters.

Suddenly add her into an arc she wasn’t supposed to be in, to make up for it.

Be bamboozled as the love interest refuses to sit still long enough to let their leg heal and ends up with a permanent injury. 

Flat out re-outline entire chapters because the new idea worked better with the character development or pacing.

Realize that the symbolism I had for a certain thing has actually meant something different all along.

Add in a motto I didn’t realize was a huge part of two of the main character’s lives in the previous book.

Take about ten thousand notes on what needs to be adjusted in the next draft.

Cry because I think the novel will be too long.

Cry because I think the novel will be too short.

Cry because I love it too much.

Cry because it’s definitely the worst thing ever written.

So, when I say I’m a True Believer in outlining, I don’t mean that I’m a believer in never letting your story’s surprise you, or never making last minutes adjustments, or never throwing out huge parts of your outline for something better.

I mean that I’m a true believer in letting your story have a foundation before you write it, because any large or complex story built on a weak foundation, like a castle built in the sand, will need to be re-built later.

But the stronger a foundation you build for it, the easier it is to make changes without your entire structure falling apart.

But I think some people don’t understand what that means to me. 

To me, an outline means that I know: 

Where the story is going. 

What beats it’ll take getting there. 

The major content I know I want to write.

How that content can be reasonably connected.

Where character development decisions should take place.

What the climax will entail.

What choices the characters will be forced to make during the climax to fulfill or deny their developmental arc.

It also means that along the way I might…

Randomly move multiple scenes to a completely new settings.

Rearrange scenes to make for better pacing.

Throw in conversations I never imagined the characters would have.

Completely change one of my main character’s voices in the third chapter.

Have a random side character mysteriously foreshadow grudges certain characters are holding.

Realize certain characters have legitimately been holding said grudges.

Add in new character arcs for said characters to get them to work through their grudges.

Watch as the main ship progresses way faster than intended.

(Cry over the main ship.)

Let the protagonist chose to go by an alias because he’s more insecure than I thought.

Watch as his brother ruins his alias attempts four chapters later.

Create an entire new arc that revolves primarily around the protagonist wanting to sleep in a proper bed after camping for three weeks. (And do a lot of last minute plot adjusting to make the pacing still work for this bed-related arc.)

Forget one of my main characters exists for five chapters.

Suddenly add her into an arc she wasn’t supposed to be in, to make up for it.

Be bamboozled as the love interest refuses to sit still long enough to let their leg heal and ends up with a permanent injury. 

Flat out re-outline entire chapters because the new idea worked better with the character development or pacing.

Realize that the symbolism I had for a certain thing has actually meant something different all along.

Add in a motto I didn’t realize was a huge part of two of the main character’s lives in the previous book.

Take about ten thousand notes on what needs to be adjusted in the next draft.

Cry because I think the novel will be too long.

Cry because I think the novel will be too short.

Cry because I love it too much.

Cry because it’s definitely the worst thing ever written.

So, when I say I’m a True Believer in outlining, I don’t mean that I’m a believer in never letting your story’s surprise you, or never making last minutes adjustments, or never throwing out huge parts of your outline for something better.

I mean that I’m a true believer in letting your story have a foundation before you write it, because any large or complex story built on a weak foundation, like a castle built in the sand, will need to be re-built later.

But the stronger a foundation you build for it, the easier it is to make changes without your entire structure falling apart.