do you have any writing tips??
hi ella!! this is a really broad question but hereās what iāve learned so far:
just write, even if itās awful. stab the perfectionist inside you and let your ideas spill out onto the page in all their raw ugliness. itās the only way youāre going to actually start writing. iāve sat at the screen for hours mulling over all the ways i could get that phrase down perfectly, only to just end up closing my doc and not get anything done at all.
donāt write for an audience. write because you want to. write what you want to read.
read what inspires you! i flick through the dream thieves whenever i need that spark.Ā
analyze your favorite passages/scenes. how do they make you feel like youāre experiencing it? how do they do it? how do they have the effect that they have? break it down. understand it ā how the construction of the prose has an effect on the reading process. and try to do it in your own writing.Ā
hereās some nitty gritty stuff: when you want to convey tension, short and clipped fragments are always good.
āsaidā is good. itās so redundant it becomes invisible and the emphasis will be on the dialogue. sometimes you want that. (//Ā āi love you,ā he whispers // āi love you,ā he says. in a charged moment, the second one has much more effect because your focus goes to the dialogue itself instead of the dialogue tag. for the first one, youād start asking,Ā āwhy whispered? whatās going on? are they hiding? why do they have to be quiet?ā the dialogue itself becomes secondary) choose wisely depending on the effect youāre going for.
always start a new line for emphasis.Ā
donāt tell me a character is angry. show it to me. make me infer that sheās absolutely livid with the set of her jaw and the bulging of her eyes and the gnashing of her teeth and the frenzied skip in her step.Ā
and hereās some more advice!
