Quick Tips
For the last month, I’ve been taking an in-person writing class. Part of the class is critiquing each other’s work. Reading work from folks outside of my critique circle and with various skill levels has been interesting. It’s also given me a chance to come up with a list of writing tips.
Here are my Quick Writing Tips (in no particular order):
Don’t open with the weather.
Careful with the metaphors and similes. One or two, sprinkled here and there, add flavor. Too many overpowers the whole entree. (See what I did there? :-0)
Read your dialogue out loud to hear if it sounds natural.
Watch your sentence length; long sentences are exhausting.
Go through and take out most of your adverbs.
Got through and take out most of your “that’s.”
Resist the urge to give us all the background info up front; just get to the action. But….
…make us care about your MC before you throw him or her over the proverbial cliff.
Don’t be wordy. You won’t sound literary; you’ll just sound wordy.
Got a quick writing tip to share?
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Great tips! I think I need to print those out and just do a quick breeze through every time I write a chapter.