Young Writers Society

I was bored and had this empty page opened up on Microsoft Word, so I splurged writing tips all over it. I then organised them into sections. Enjoy.


Prose Craft:

-> Adverbs (words that describe an action, eg. quickly, happily, suddenly, loudly, etc.) are bad. If you find yourself using lots of these, go back and delete every single one until you can recognise when is and isn’t a good time to use them.

As a rule of thumb, try to avoid using more than two adverbs per every 1000 words you write.

-> All else being equal, if you have to decide between a common word and an unusual word, always use the common word. Only use more complicated, longer, or esoteric words in situations where it conveys vital additional information.

-> Description is boring. Don’t write too much of it.

Action (ie. things happening; it doesn’t have to be fighting) is more interesting. Write more of that.

-> Show don’t tell.

What this means is: don’t describe important things in narration, show it by things happening.

Eg. Don’t describe your character as ‘she was a badass,’ write a scene in which she kills five men whilst armed with nothing but a lukewarm mug of tea and a chocolate bar.

-> Be assertive in your writing. Get rid of phrases like ‘sort of,’ ‘kind of,’ and ‘rather.’

The sword your character discovers in a hidden panel in his new bedroom is not ‘sort of’ big. It is a big sword. And the lady demonspawn that teleports into said bedroom in order to steal the sword is not ‘rather’ beautiful, she is beautiful. And your character is not ‘kind of’ attracted to her, he is attracted to her.

-> Your first line has to be fascinating and attention grabbing. The reader should be thinking, ‘How odd! I wonder what that means/what is going to happen next.’

As description is boring, it’s usually best not to open with description.


Dialogue:

-> ‘Said’ is your new favourite word. Use it. Whilst it’s acceptable to occasionally use an alternative (eg. shouted, whispered, giggled, etc.), for the most part you should be using ‘said.’

-> People don’t always say exactly what they mean, so don’t have your characters always saying exactly what they mean.

-> Different characters use different words. Because not everyone favours the exact same language: some people say ‘awesome’, others ‘wicked,’ some ‘excellent’, and so on. This should apply to your characters as well. Make sure you know which words your characters favour.


Characterisation:

-> The events of the story should change your character.

Have an internal and external conflict for your character to resolve, and have them be related, so that the solving of the external conflict helps resolve the internal one also, completing the character arc.

Eg. Bob has a crippling fear of water that has haunted him his entire life. We see in the first chapter how he struggles to function in everyday life: panicking whenever he hears a tap running, not being able to bath, and gagging at the thought of drinking water. (‘Why would I want to drink it? Fish poop in it!’) In the next chapter, evil tuna invade the world. As part of his epic three-book adventure in saving the world, Bob has to go scuba diving into the tuna’s watery empire, and this allows him to conquer his fear of water. Bob ends the story as a changed man.

-> No one cares what colour eyes your character has. Stop telling us.

-> Your main character needs to have flaws. Flaws make characters interesting.

Give them anger issues, make them secretly jealous, make them a bigot, make them a compulsive liar, give them severe trust issues — whatever, just don’t make them flawless, because that won’t ring true to your readers. No one is perfect. (Except me.)

-> Your character should do things, rather than just react to things. Characters that do things are interesting; characters that only react to things tend to be boring.

This is why Joker is more interesting than Batman.


Plot:

-> Every single scene must have conflict in it. Conflict is where your character wants something, and something is stopping him or her from having it.

This can be your character wanting to save the world, and being stopped by an evil wizard who wants to destroy it for some reason; or it could be your character lusting after a cute guy in her class, but he only has eyes for your character’s best-friend; or it could be your character wanting to win the football championship, but the other team are just, like, so good.

-> Your story needs a beginning/middle/end.

On a basic level, this can be as simple as: Your character is living her life normally (this is the beginning), then something happens to throw her life out of whack, and many entertaining hijinks occur due to this (middle), until the initial bad thing has been resolved in some way, resulting in life being even better than before for your character (end).

Of course, it doesn’t need to follow that exact pattern. What’s important is having some sort of conflict changing your character’s life — marking the start of the middle — and the eventual resolution of this conflict — this is the climax and marks the end of the middle, and the beginning of the end, which will involve tying up loose ends.

it was good and useful and true in most of the parts at least...
but seriously, DESCRIPTION?!!?BORING!??!! you think Charles Dickens is boring? you think Honore de Balzac is boring? you think Charlotte Bronte is boring?
and also not all people are ungrateful about writers mentioning the eye color... we don't write that one for ourselves as we all know the eye color of our OWN characters.
besides I get really upset when the writer doesn't mention that sort of descriptions...

I have to agree on a lot of these things, but some of them I think are totally wrong.

Description is very necessary. The characters need to see what you see. I wouldn't say don't have description, I would say make description like sprinkles. Just little bits here and there to not bore the reader with large detailed paragraphs with no human interaction.

Eye colors. I have to say that although it doesn't always matter, eyes can play a very important part in books. Especially if for instance it was a fantasy book where one of the characters did magic with their eyes somehow. Or, especially for a romance book, that would be something that the characters would notice.

Oh and . . . don't dis Batman.

Now, see.

There are two types of description. One is dry as a bone, one is actually useful.

The Boring Kind

Block descriptions that do nothing more than simply tell the reader what is in the area. These descriptions rather literally do nothing for the story past give a few details that could've easily been spread out through the characters moving around the scene, interacting with it, discussing it.

There is also over description. Do we need to know absolutely everything about this brand new character or room? Probably not. Do we need constant reminders of how unbelievably hot the character is (up to and including their gorgeous eye colour) every chapter? Not in the slightest. Especially if you're trying to amp up romantic tension. If you constantly describe one character over and over again, you've killed the tension because everybody knows who the character is ending up with.

Oh, yes, excessive amounts of backstory and world history fall under here, too. Readers really don't need to know anything past the bare minimum to get the story. A lot of that boils down to "show, don't tell": if your world is an empire, no need to tell us why it became an empire unless your plot is completely centred around overthrowing it. If it's just a side thing, show the details instead. An empire will have a bunch of different customs under one umbrella, with the only standardized thing being administration. As the characters travel, show the difference in each region that's been preserved despite the standardization. That is a much more effective way of describing "an empire" than simply saying "they conquered everyone a few centuries ago."

The Good Kind

Aka, description that moves the scene forward in one way or another.

Description that creates mood
Outlined here.

Description that characterizes
These are little things that reveal the person's character. These include:

- The tone in which descriptions are said. This is the difference between a sarcastic "wonderful" and a dramatic "how awful!"
- A small detail like mentioning how the character always wears a certain colour during formal events.
- The overall state of their room; what's organized and what's not.

Chances are, if somebody has done large amount of descriptions well, it's because they've done more than simply describe. They have characterized and/or set a mood with what they have written.

The vast majority of people do not do this, therefore their descriptions are incredibly boring.

Glad to see this is generating discussion and debate! I thought that particular point about description might be a stickler for some.

Rosey’s post, by the way, is fantastic, and everyone should read it and memorise it. However, anyone that can describe when and how to use description as clearly and eloquently as Rosey can is not the target audience for these tips. I honestly doubt she took anything new away from my post.

Description is tricky, and modern audiences don’t take to it well; readers are liable to skip your description if they’re getting bored, but will never skip action or dialogue. This is because description is static; when you’re describing something, nothing is happening. With dialogue, action, or internal narration, things are happening, things are moving forward, and thus these things are more gripping to read.

I’m not saying you cannot use description. Not at all. However, you need to use it intelligently. The description has to be doing something beyond merely describing the scene: it should be setting the mood; or revealing information about the plot, about the characters, about the world, or about your themes.

You can even write a lot of description, and it’ll be absolutely fine, so long as you’re writing it in an intelligent manner.

However, these tips are intended as a crash-course for more inexperienced writers. Writers who likely will be throwing in description that the reader doesn’t need to know, and doesn’t advance the story in any meaningful way. Description for description’s sake can be dreadfully boring to read – especially if a lot of it is dumped en masse — and that is how most inexperienced writers use it. They picture the scene in their head in a particular way, and erroneously believe the reader needs to know many irrelevant and minute details in order to recreate that exact scene. Cutting out much of this needless description will immediately improve their writing.

I highlighted eyes as they are a particularly common case of this. Description of eyes can be done well: see Harry Potter, for example, where Harry’s green eyes are his sole connection to his dead mother; and they not only affect how he perceives himself, but also affect how other characters treat him throughout the books (Snape, most notably).

Again, it’s a case of the description doing more beyond simply describing something in minutia. If you’re telling your reader that your character has blue eyes just because that’s the colour eyes he has, and it has no other bearing at all the story, then I would argue that is bad writing and should be cut out. There is no need for us to know something so inconsequential — it will not even aid us in picturing the story in our heads, as eye colour is an incredibly unimportant part of most people’s appearance. You’d do better to describe the character’s nose shape, even.

Yes, eye colour can play an important part in a fantasy story, but unless you’re doing something new and interesting with it (see: The Stormlight Archive by Brandon Sanderson, in which eye colour dictates peoples’ class) I’d suggest you stay away from giving humans special coloured eyes. It’s overplayed and rather clichéd at this point.

I might know the theory, but applying it is a completely different matter. You do not want to see the introduction to my novel until I have polished it because that thing needs so much work.

If I were to add one tip to this crash course, it would be:

Readers do not need to know everything at the start. This goes double if you are writing fantasy or science fiction.

For the love of all things interesting do not cram as many worldbuilding and/or backstory details as possible in your introduction. Give us the bare minimum to get an idea of what is going on then keep moving the plot forward.

This is a very true and salient point. Many people seem to think they need to start their fantasy novels with a big ol' prologue that is just a massive info-dump of the world's history. But it's almost always completely unnecessary, and my advice is usually to just cut it out and start with Chapter One.

What can be equally bad is dumping loads of information right near the end of the story in order to explain the convoluted mystery of the plot. This often takes the form of one character (usually the antagonist) essentially giving a lecture to the main character, and answering all of their questions.

As you say, instead of dumping all of the information quickly, it should be gradually filtered throughout the story.

I was mostly referencing an explanation of mechanics. We do not need a massive list of why things happen or how much magic is present in the area (unless, of course, you're in medias res trying to deal with a magic explosion) plus your MC's class and role right at the beginning. This is what we call infodumping.

There is also avoiding the whole "I just woke up and I hate life here's why" which I see far too often.