Young Writers
for
Advice
A series of videos for kids who know they want to be writers
When I was 9 years old, I already knew I wanted to be a writer when I grew up.
Over the next few years, while I was in middle school, I wrote almost every school night, often for an hour or more. I wrote stories, poems, essays, and weird blobs of words that weren't any of those things.
I loved writing -- most of the time. But sometimes I was frustrated because the piece wasn't coming out the way I wanted it to, or I was stuck on one part and didn't know how to move forward. Worst of all was when I had the urge to write, but I didn't have an idea to write about.
I couldn't find a lot of practical advice about how to write. Most advice I found was about getting published. I wanted to be published someday, but first I had to write something to publish!
Now that I'm a published author, I want to share the advice I was missing as a kid. If you know in your heart that you're a writer, these videos are for you.
Today’s advice is, "Shut up and write." That means, don’t talk about your projects until they’re finished.
Often, when we’re working on something we’re really excited about, it’s really tempting to tell people about your project.
But there are several reasons why this is a terrible idea.
01
If you tell people your ideas, they can take your ideas. And if you don’t have your idea in writing, you can’t prove that it’s yours.
02
Sometimes when you talk to people about your writing, they’ll give you feedback you don’t need or want. If you’re excitedly describing the plot of your new novella, and someone says, “That sounds boring,” or “Wasn’t that already a movie?” And you’re like… Suddenly, it doesn’t seem worth it to finish.
Weeks or months later, you may have stopped writing that project you talked about. And then someone says, “Whatever happened to that thing you were working on?” And that’s really annoying.
03
04
But most importantly, once you tell somebody about your story, you don’t need to write it. You’ve already put the story into words. They’re just spoken words, not written ones. And now that you already told someone the story, you lose the urgency of writing it. You’re kind of done.When you talk about your writing, all the energy comes out through your mouth rather than your hands. You need to conserve that creative energy and use it for writing, not talking. So unless you are talking to a writing teacher, or coach, or someone who is specifically there to help you with your writing, do not talk about what you’re writing!
So you started a project, and it was going well. You were able to work on it in chunks—you put in some writing time, then you went on and lived your life, and when you came back to it, you were able to pick up right where you left off. Then comes that terrible day when you pick up the project, and you have no idea how to proceed. You know that what you’ve written is good, and you want to keep working on it, but you can’t. You are stuck.
Here’s why: You lost the voice of the piece. The “voice” of your writing refers to the overall mood and attitude. Some voices are plain-spoken. They use simple words. They use short sentences. To the contrary, there are voices that differ distinctly, voices that are grandiloquent, utilizing more complex words and sentences, blah blah etc. Voices can be chummy with the reader or distant, funny or serious. The voice shows up in things like word choice, sentence length, and overall tone. When you’re stuck, often it’s because you were writing in a voice, but you lost it. The character stopped telling their story, or your narrator walked off the job. That’s why the words no longer flow.
So you have some choices:
01
You can try to pick up the voice again. Try reading your work aloud, then continue speaking aloud using that same voice to describe an object or person nearby. Speak in that voice until it feels natural again, and/or until everyone nearby is annoyed with you.
02
You can use a new voice going forward, knowing that you can either go back and change the voice of the old part to match the new one, or leave the old part as it is.
You can switch narrators or points of view. If the detective narrator you’ve been using isn’t speaking to you, try listening to the killer, see what they have to say. When you put a stalled project away, you make room for a new voice to tell a new story. Then you keep listening for as long as it speaks.
03
LARYNGITIS
OF THE BRAIN
Here’s a writing secret for you: You don’t have to finish every project you start. Sometimes, just starting it is good enough. Now, this is NOT TRUE in your general, everyday life. But it is true of writing. If you start writing something, and it’s not going anywhere, you can quit and still be a winner.
Here’s why:
01
When you start a project, you got the idea down so you won’t forget it, which is a Step One that people often miss.
02
All writing is good practice. If you wrote a page, or even a paragraph, you practiced putting your ideas into written words. And all the practice adds up.
You might feel differently about the project later. In a few months, you might take a look at the thing you started and you might feel inspired again. Or not.
03
04
Quitting a project allows you to clear your mind and make space for some new idea that you’re more excited about. The thing is, not every idea is a “good” one. But you don’t know which ones are “good” until you start writing them. If you start an idea and you decide it’s not good, why would you continue working on it? You can put it aside and judge it again later. However, there are two good reasons to finish writing projects. Finishing something is so satisfying. And if you want to get it published, you gotta get it done. Nobody publishes unfinished work. But if a project is not working out, you can walk away from it without guilt. I do it all the time. You’re allowed to go ahead and give up.
Many writers worry about perfecting their spelling, grammar, and punctuation. But that’s not necessary to do great creative work. Worrying about spelling and punctuation in a first draft will only slow you down. As long as you can read what you wrote, and you understand what you mean, you’re fine. Just keep going and don’t stop for commas.
Creative writing does not need to be grammatical. Many great novels are narrated by a character who speaks in imperfect English. Some writers deliberately break the rules of grammar, or they spell words the way they sound—instead of “going to” they write “gonna.” Most real humans don’t speak with perfect grammar, so your characters don’t need to either. Some people are able to learn all the rules of grammar and practicing spelling a lot. That does not mean they’re good writers. Some are, and then some of them completely lack creativity. So you can be a great creative storyteller who paints vivid characters that readers care about, without being technically perfect. And I would much rather read a thrilling but sloppy story, than read a technically perfect story that’s boring.
The time to worry about spelling and grammar is when you are about to show your work to an audience. That’s when you’ll want to look over your work and make sure the verbs are in the right tense, the spelling is readable, and you didn’t do anything weird like ending every sentence with an exclamation point. Until then, don’t sweat the spelling!
DON'T SWEAT THE SPELLING
The
ABC
Method
Today’s advice is not something I came up with, but it’s the most effective writing method I was ever taught, and it’s called the ABC method. Apply Butt to Chair This means that you sit down to write and you don’t get up until you make some words come out of your brain and on to the page. If you think you have to wait for inspiration in order to write, you might go a very long time between projects. Writing can be difficult, it requires concentration, and most humans are rarely inspired to do hard things. But you can sit down to write even if you don’t feel like it.
The first step is to tell your body and brain, “I am sitting down to write now.” Even if you get ravenously hungry or you have to check something or your cat wants to climb all over your keyboard, you’re going to resist the urge to get up right away and do something else. It will take between 60 and 120 seconds for that feeling to go away, you just need to outlast it.
This is why ABC works: In order to write, you have to sit there and think. You can’t take a walk and think, or play a game and think, or do anything else besides sit in front of your writing, or a blank page, and stare at it and think. Sometimes you won’t write a single word, sometimes you’ll have a huge breakthrough.
Either way, you showed up to work that day. You actively tried to invite inspiration, even though you didn’t feel like it. If you have applied butt to chair for a full half hour, and nothing has happened, you are allowed to walk away and declare success. Your butt was applied to the chair and your brain was applied to the page, and that’s the only way to make progress with your writing. Who knew that sitting and staring could be so productive?
DRAW
A
BLANK
Sometimes your story requires your characters to move in space and time. If you have a scene of someone having breakfast at home, and the next scene takes place at the lunchroom at school, you need to move your character from home to school and from morning to lunchtime. There are two ways to do this.
One way is to describe everything that happens to your character as they go from one place to another. Your character puts their dishes in the sink, your character gets their jacket on, your character walks to the bus, your character rides the bus…you get the point.
The other way to move characters in space and time is to jump. So your character goes directly from breakfast to the lunchroom with no explanation of what happened in between. And there’s a magical way to do it so your readers don’t get confused, and it's called blank space. When you add a couple of blank spaces between the end of one scene and the beginning of another scene, the reader understands that you've jumped in space and time.
In this example, readers don’t need to know how your character got from home to school, they just need to know what happens once they’re there. So you end your breakfast scene at breakfast: “As I finished my juice and rose from the table, I vowed never to speak to any of them again.” Then…blank space! And then you pick it up at lunch: “The lunchroom stank of rotted meat and despair, but at least I got to sit with Ebony.” So you let the reader know where they are when they land. You give them a clue as to where we are now in space and time. For instance, "the lunchroom." Or, “That night, she thought she heard it again.” Or, “Three months later, nothing had changed.” And that’s it. You skip over all the boring parts that don't have anything to do with your story. Blank space is like a time machine for a reader. So if you have to move a character in space and time, draw a blank!
MAKE
IT MESSY
You can’t always avoid messes in life, so you might as well get used to them. The thing is, your writing is not always going to come out perfect on the first try. When you start a project, and it’s not coming out the way you imagined, it can be very frustrating. But please remember, this is going to happen every time you try to translate your ideas into words. Of course the idea is going to be better in your head , because in your head, it's perfect, and that's the only place “perfect” exists. So you have to let your first draft be imperfect.
This means:
01
Don’t try to perfect the first paragraph before going on to write the second one. If you spend an hour crafting every sentence, you are interrupting the flow of ideas on to the page. Write ordinary sentences, you can fix them later.
02
Making it messy also involves using placeholders. If you spend too long sitting there trying to think of the perfect adjective, just put in the “BLAH,” in capital letters so you'll be able to find it later. If you’re working on a soccer scene,, and you’re getting all bogged down trying to describe everything, just write “SOCCER SCENE,” in all caps, and move right along. I talked about this in the Eat Dessert First video: You don’t have to write in order.
And let your writing be physically ugly. When I was young, some thoughtful person bought me a really beautiful notebook, and I was scared to write in it, because it was so pretty, and I knew I was going to scribble, and scratch stuff out, and I thought a notebook that nice had to have the best words inside. So I started it in my best handwriting, and then I messed up on the first page, and I never picked up the notebook again. Which is why I now use cheap spiral notebooks from Staples. I can scrawl all over them. Making it messy also means cleaning it up later. You will need to do a second draft. The good news is, it's always easier to fix writing than to write it in the first place, so your second draft will be easier than your first. So if you wind up with a first draft called AWESOME TITLE GOES HERE, and it’s been cut and pasted a million times, and scribbled on, and it's a total mess, you're doing it right!
03
EAT DESSERT FIRST
Sadly, I am not talking about actual desserts today. I’m talking about ways to make your writing easier, which is pretty sweet (and I am so sorry for that pun but not sorry enough to take it out). Writing is easier when you do the fun stuff first. You don’t have to write a story in order—you can jump around in the writing as much as you want, then go back and put it in order later.
So start a project by writing the parts you like the most. This will make you eager to sit down and write. It will help you get momentum, and that can carry you through the rest of the project.
So if you like writing battle scenes, write the battle scenes first. If you have an idea for a speech the narrator is going to give toward the end, write that speech. Do whatever is easiest and most fun for you. And skip writing the boring parts. If it’s boring for you to write, it’s going to be boring for the reader to read.
The Eat Dessert First philosophy also helps when you don’t know what to write about. If you need an idea, think of some fantastic, scrumptious thing that could happen to you, and write about that. Congratulations, you just inherited 100 million dollars, and your worst enemy got eaten by a shark! Writing can be difficult, but it can also be fun. Have fun with your writing whenever you can. Enjoy your dessert.
Things Have To Change
What makes a story good? What makes a story interesting, or worth telling, or more than just a string of words like the ones I’m spitting at you now?
It’s pretty simple:
To make it a story, something has to change. Because if there's a girl, and she does a thing, and you describe it, and then she does that thing again, and you describe it again, and she does it again, and you describe it again, that gets boring really, really quickly.
In order to be a story, things have to change. Characters change in one of two ways: Internally, meaning they change themselves, or externally, meaning change is forced on them from without. Examples of internal changes are: The character makes a decision. “I’m going to become the most popular person in my class.” Or the person has a realization. “Trying to be the most popular person in my class is killing me.” Or the person changes their mind about something. “I no longer care about being the most popular person in my class."
External change is anything that affects your characters from the outside, not something they asked for or something they chose. This is the kind of change that is forced on you by, for instance, parents, friends, school, society, nature, or even the supernatural (your dragons, your fairies, etc.). External changes take a couple of different shapes: Physical changes, like your characters move. A new life event, like the character’s parents divorce. Or a new person, whether it's a new sibling, or a new wizard in town.These are the external changes that are going to affect your character and cause them to make new decisions. They can't do things the way they were always doing them before. And that’s when things get interesting. So in order to be a story, something needs to change. Otherwise, it’s just a bunch of words in a row.
This means that any time spent writing is better than no time spent writing. Ten minutes a month is better than no minutes a month, and if you wrote for ten minutes this month, you can legitimately feel good about that. Sometimes writers set unrealistic goals for themselves. I remember thinking, when I was in sixth grade, “I’m going to write 5 pages a week,” or, “I’ll write for an hour every day.” That sounded reasonable to me.
But in real life, I rarely wrote five pages in a week, or an hour every day, which made me feel bad about myself, and that made writing feel less appealing. It would have been much more realistic for me to say, “I will write three times a week, for like a half hour, probably, or not.” That would have been way more accurate. And as it turns out, that was enough, apparently, because I’m a writer now. So please don’t get mad at yourself for not sticking to some quota you made up.
Also, stop making up quotas. It doesn’t help. What does help is giving yourself credit for the time you do write. Anytime you work on your writing, you can record it, either mentally or in writing, which is something I did when writing my first book for adults. For every fifteen minutes I spent writing, I made a check mark on a pad. And that was motivating. I liked seeing those check marks stack up. I felt proud of the time I spent working, instead of feeling like I wasn’t doing enough and was failing somehow.
You might try setting an alarm for ten or fifteen minutes, and simply try to communicate ideas through words until the alarm goes off. When the bell rings, you’ve earned a check mark. It’s like a unit of satisfaction. You can reset the alarm and go for another check mark, or you can stop there after ten minutes and proudly say, “I wrote today.” It’s simple math. 10 is greater than zero, and something is better than nothing.
SOMETHING IS BETTER THAN NOTHING
LOOKS
DON'T MATTER
When you’re describing a character, you usually tell the reader what the person looks like. Hair color, skin color, height, body shape, outward gender, age. This information is supposed to help readers picture the character. But it doesn’t always tell you who the character really is. Do you know the type of old lady who is always in front of you on line at the store, the one who has to talk to the cashier while slowly digging out her change? You know who I mean, can you conjure her in your head?
It doesn't matter what she looks like, we all know who she is. Her looks don’t matter as much as her personality. But we do want to give the reader enough information so they can imagine the character. And, for sighted people, what we see visually when we look at someone feels like important information. So here are some visual clues about your characters that you can give the reader that mean more than hair color or body shape:
01
Clothing can say something about the character, especially if it’s something the character always wears, like a ball cap, or loud colors, or black nail polish. Or if there’s some notable quality about their clothes—they were worn-out, they looked brand new, they were too big for her. But just saying, “She wore jeans and a green shirt,” tells us very little about the person.
02Facial expression: someone who always looks sour, or above it all, or like they’re trying too hard – that says a lot about their personality. Same with body language. Of course, you have to describe anything physical about your characters that affects the plot. In the Wonder series of books, the main character has a facial deformity that drives the plot of the book. In Judy Blume’s “Blubber,” kids torment a girl because she’s fat, so it’s important that we know her body shape.
Otherwise, try to use the visual clues that tell the reader about a character’s personality. Because in writing, personality really is more important than looks.
write
it down
Today’s advice is going to sound really basic, but so many people skip this crucial first step, and then they wonder why they have trouble writing. When you have an idea, even if it’s just a phrase, you must literally, physically, write it down as soon as possible.
Whether that means entering it into your phone, or typing it on a computer, or writing it in a notebook, you have to take the idea out of your head and put it someplace where you will be able to find it later. Because even if you are a very brilliant genius, even if you have a fantastic memory, no human can remember everything they think of. And there's nothing more frustrating than thinking, “I had such a great idea! And I can’t remember it!”
When I say “write things down,” I don’t mean you need to stop and write the entire idea right then. You don’t. You just have to summarize it in a couple of words. So if I think, "Oh, I should write about the time I got locked out of my apartment," I don’t have to start from the beginning, like, “It was a Thursday, and Iit was raining, and I was looking forward to getting home…” I just write “time I got locked out.” That's it. This goes for every writing idea you have, even the small ones. If I think of the phrase, “The sun cut like a hot knife,” I need to write that down. It might not go into the thing I’m working on at the moment. But I need to be able to find it later. When you take your ideas seriously, you get more ideas. And when you let your ideas go, they are gone. Ideas are precious. So any time you have one, wherever you are, stop and literally, physically write it down.
When you’re writing, you're going to find that you need to make cuts and changes. Maybe you went off on a side story, or the piece is too long, or there were jokes in there and the piece turned out to be serious. Whatever it is, you know that something needs to go.
But it’s hard to cut out things you worked very hard to write. It might have taken you a day to find the exact adjective you wanted, or you might have spent an hour sculpting a sentence, and you're not going to want to cut it. You're going to want to keep it, even if it's not serving the story. So instead of deleting that sentence, or that paragraph, or that three-page scene, you just move it.
You start a document for those things—I usually call mine some version of the word “scraps,” right now it's called “scrapulence.” Then every time you cut something from your project, you paste it into your scraps, and then it's not gone. This makes it so much easier to cut, because you’re not losing the work forever. If you change your mind about something you cut, you can always dig it out of the scraps and put it back in. For me, this only happens about one out of every twenty-five times I cut something, but I’m always really glad I didn’t throw the cuts away. Pasting all your cuts into a document also gives you an awesome document full of cool words and sentences and ideas, and this document comes in very handy for inspiration when you don’t know what to write. So don't take out the trash!
DON'T TAKE OUT THE TRASH
When you write dialogue, when your characters speak to each other, you will often find yourself using the word “said.” “That sounds basic,” she said. “Basic can be good sometimes,” they said. You might start to find this too repetitious, and start looking for synonyms, other words that mean “said.”
My thesaurus suggested uttered, articulated, declared, pronounced, stated, verbalized. I beg of you not to use any of those words to replace said. Use those words all you want, where they’re appropriate – if someone articulates what they’re saying, by all means, say “she articulated.” But there’s no reason to replace said with another word just because you’re sick of said. You don’t have to put a “she said” on every line of dialogue.
If two characters are talking, as long as the reader knows who spoke first, they can keep track of alternating lines of dialogue. So, “I’m looking forward to the weekend,” Paisley said to me. “I’m not.” “Why not?” “I’m just not.” You don’t need saids for each line. You can use a stage direction instead of a said. This is where the character does something during the conversation. “Paisley smiled at me. ‘I guess I’ll see you later.’” So we know Paisley was the one speaking, without having to say said. There are some situations in which you might want to look for a synonym for said.
Just Say
"Said"
One is when the character is showing emotion. “I’m tired of your complaining, she yelled.” Or when the dialogue is a form of action. “Stop complaining, he threatened.” “You stop,” she retorted.” Or, “she replied.” Other than that, just use the word said. It’s a good, useful word. You use the word “and” all the time without changing it to plus, additionally, besides, also. It does its job and it doesn’t call attention to itself. So reserve declaring for actual declarations.