Speaker 1: Hey guys, it's Shailen. I'm here today with another video. So in today's video, I'm going to be talking about the writing advice that changed how I write. My favorite pieces of writing advice. These are pieces of writing advice that either I found when I implemented them kind of instantly improved my writing, or it's just advice that clicked with me. Most of these I remember when I first heard them and I went, oh, that makes so much sense. There's obviously tons of great writing advice out there. Not all of it resonates with everyone and I'm not saying that these are rules, but this is writing advice that resonated with me. It changed how I write it in some way, either clicked or clarified something about writing for me. And so I find these to be like my top 12 writing tips. If the reader can imagine something happening without needing to be told, then you don't need to show it. This is one of those ones that I think I just saw on the internet. I literally think it was in a Tumblr post. I don't know the person who first provided me with this advice and it really clicked something for me because when I was a new writer, I had this impulse. I felt like I needed to show you everything in order to make the story believable. I felt like because this was realistic to happen, I had to include it, you know, like let's say there was a scene where the characters went to the hospital because someone was injured or ill. I felt like I had to show the drive to the hospital and what they were feeling and how they were treated when they got to the hospital. I don't know. And all these technicalities when really you could just cut to the next important moment of the plot. And this was such a good piece of advice for me and my writing habits to just be told. If we know what happens, we don't need to be told or we don't need to be shown a whole scene, right? Like we could just be told then we drove to the hospital. We don't need a scene of them in the car driving to the hospital. And this really helped me whittle down my stories and my plot to only include what is necessary and not have all this redundant stuff that I was including because I felt it was realistic. It was realistic in the sense that yes, in the narrative of this character's life, this does happen. As my personal writing style, I like to just focus on the important moments and kind of cut anything else. This was such a great eye opener for that. So my next favorite piece of advice is to use strong verbs. I don't know where I first heard this advice, but I know that it was kind of just among friends. My university cohort at one point, we all just got really into verbs. We all started talking about verbs all the time and we got super into using funkier verbs. And I do remember at one point the professor was talking to us in our workshop and she was like, all of you guys have really been working on your verbs lately. Like all of your stories, you've had such great verbs. And I know that it's because you've been talking amongst yourself because I know that I didn't tell you to do that. You've been talking about verbs. You know you're cool when you and your friends just talk about verbs. Yeah, we literally thought we were like the cool kids of our writing program. But this has become one of my favorite writing tips because I think it instantly improved the quality of my writing to just focus on having stronger verbs. And verbs are like my favorite thing now. I have employed some odd verbiage in my work in the past. Once you start, you kind of get addicted to it. You can't stop. It instantly improved the quality of my prose to start veering out of familiar verbs and using more unexpected verbs that feel more visceral and exciting and surprising within the sentence. And even sometimes getting into weird territory, making them up, verbing nouns. Every single time I show an example of writing where I've made up a verb, some party pooper leaves a comment and is like, otherwise good writing, except that this isn't a real verb. It is now, my guy. Let today be the first day of the rest of your life. My next tip is a bit related and it's to avoid ing and to be verbs. So ing is the past participle form where it ends in ing and to be verbs are any conjugation of the verb to be. Learning to cut these things really, really improved my control of language. So I had a professor who had a bunch of things she wanted us to cut as much as possible from our writing. And it really taught me how to rethink language by forcing myself to cut as many to be verbs as possible, to cut as many ing verbs as possible. Going through that process where even though it was, yeah, pretty rigorous going through a story and literally pruning as many as possible, it really did strengthen the pros, helped me really see how to use language. A lot of people will say that it's ridiculous to put those kinds of constraints on language, but sometimes when you put a constraint on language, you learn how to push yourself so much further. So it was having to write with these very strong constraints that gave me the control over language I have now and taught me how to line edit, taught me how to write cleaner. Even though I'm not obsessive about it in my work now, I will let many an ing verb slide. Knowing, hey, it's good practice to cut this when you can, also did really help just make my pros cleaner and smoother. The next really, really impactful piece of writing advice in my life was, it's not show don't tell, it's describe don't explain. I remember this very distinctly. It was a note that a writing professor had written in the margins of one of my stories and I had a flashback and the flashback was a bit expository and she'd written in the margins, even in flashback, describe, don't explain. And that clicked something for me. I was like, that's what show don't tell is. Showing is just describing. Telling is just explaining. I talked about this in my video on show don't tell, but that changed how I saw show don't tell because I think it's so much more approachable and I wish we could rebrand show don't tell to describe don't explain because it makes more sense. You hear describe don't explain, you know exactly what to do. So it's something that really clicked things for me, even though obviously it was advice that I knew, I knew what show don't tell was, that small change in phrasing had a big impact on me. The next piece of advice is one that I bet a lot of people will disagree with. So if this doesn't seem right for your story, that's totally okay. Please keep in mind that not all advice is for all writers, but it really resonated with me and it was, if your story is boring, slow it down. Don't speed it up. I remember exactly where I read this. It was in the Glimmer Train Bulletin Archive. So I highly recommend the Glimmer Train Bulletin Archive as a resource. One of my favorite places to go for interesting craft topics and discussions is the Glimmer Train Bulletin Archive. So Glimmer Train was a literary magazine that is now sadly no more, but you can still read the Bulletin Archives online and they're just brief craft essays by a bunch of different writers, but they're on topics that I bet you've never heard of before. They're on very specific, interesting topics. And there was one, and I don't remember which one it was because there are so many. I'll see if I can find it, but I probably won't be able to. The writer writing it had said, if your story is boring, slow it down, don't speed it up. It might not be boring because it's too slow, it's probably boring because there's not enough to sink into. Slowing it down increases the richness. It gives the reader more to invest in. And that resonated with me a lot. It felt true to my own experience as a reader, that the stories I tend to feel most compelled by are not the ones that move quickly, they're the ones that are rich and detailed. My next tip is probably the one you guys were most expecting. Be specific. I talk about specificity non-stop in every single craft video I make, but I genuinely think it's essentially the key to good writing. Vague writing I think is generally weak, and specific writing generally will be stronger. This was so useful for me in understanding how to write description, and I don't remember the first time I ever heard this, but it was in university at some point, where I realized that writing strong description was not about having the most complex or weird phrasing, it was just about picking more interesting and specific details. And if I could just pick more specific details, the interest of the description and the language would be there inherently, because it would be interesting words describing interesting things, whereas describing vague things in overly embellished terms was just creating purple prose and overly tangled writing. So that was so important for me. Learning to prioritize specificity probably had the strongest impact on my writing going forward than anything else. The next tip is one that I remember from a very specific professor, and it's a very specific tip, but it's one that also really resonated with me, and it was to find the hope and despair in every scene. I really liked the way that she talked about this. Hope and despair is the pull of tension. It was specifically the idea to find the hope and the despair, and find the despair and the hope. If a scene is only despair, then there's actually no tension, because there's no possible way forward. But if there's no despair in the hope, then those joyous moments also don't have any tension. So understanding that balance of balancing the hope and the despair, finding the hope and the despair, finding the despair and the hope, I thought was really interesting. It was advice I'd never heard before, and it was something that really resonated with me. The next one is a bit of a reframing of common advice, and it's actually from the same fiction professor that talks about the hope and the despair, and it's that your character needs to yearn for something. We've all heard characters need to have goals, but I had this one professor who wouldn't say what's the character's goal, would say what is the character's yearning? What do they yearn for? And that changed how I saw goals. It's not about what's this concrete thing I want to achieve, even for an internal reason. It's what am I yearning for? What do I crave in my life? That little difference in phrasing, I think, especially as a writer of literary fiction and writing more character-driven work, was super important for me for understanding how goal worked in that style of writing. I do not know the origin of the next piece of advice, but it's that characters' contradictions are what make them most interesting. The reason this really resonated with me is because I think it is why people are interesting. People are contradictory. People are so complicated. I think it's almost hard to conceptualize how complicated people are. Every single person is so complicated. Inherently, people have contradictions. There are inherently contradictory aspects about people. Contradictory within their beliefs, contradictory within your expectations of them, contradictory within their personality. I think a big issue is thinking that a contradiction within a character is weak writing or is inconsistent characterization when contradictions are what reveal the most interesting aspects of a character. It's where the humanity and the realness of them is because it's so real to life. We are very contradictory creatures. So I think finding contradictions within a character to be one of the most compelling aspects of learning about a character, exploring and writing a new character, and so that's advice that really really shaped how I view characters. The next piece of advice is another line editing tip. It's a fairly obvious one but it really did change how I write and it's to just cut as many words as possible. Like reframe your sentences to be as concise as possible. Learning to trim the excess off my sentences is what helps me learn how to make description pop. And I think philosophy I have regarding line editing is the fewer words you have, the more the important words will shine, the more the important words will pop. They don't get muddled in a bunch of uninteresting words. This is learning to cut, you know, those more like bulk words like unnecessary adjectives or adverbs but also cutting like weasel words, condensing constructions. Learning how to like line edit rigorously and cut any excess word was one of the most useful skills I ever learned as a writer and it really really helped me tighten up my prose which helped me tighten up my storytelling. I'm really glad that I had people in university who really pushed me to work on the prose aspect of my work in terms of concision and economy. I'm glad that I was forced to do the work to learn how to do that. That skill of learning to edit for economy and line edit really intensely probably changed my writing for the better more immediately than anything else. So the next tip is one that I really really like and it's from a specific professor that I had in university, great guy, and he would always talk about artistic incongruity. This was one of those things that put into words exactly what I was looking for. I think this is just a term that he made up but he always talked about how that's where the interest of writing comes from is in the artistic incongruity. So things that don't quite make sense or not that they don't make sense but they're unexpected or a bit askew in an artful way. He had us do this exercise where we wrote a bunch of nouns and then we wrote a bunch of adjectives that we would expect to go with the noun and then we had to make it artfully incongruous and there's one that I always remember. The example was an innocent baby is not artfully incongruous because obviously a baby is innocent and so he turned that into a knowing baby and I just really liked that, a knowing baby. Finding the artistic incongruity, I always thought that that was just a really cool concept. I've been better for it. So my final tip, I don't think that this was ever something that I heard in a specific moment but it's just something that when I realized it was the base of how I approach writing and it's the question you should ask yourself in every aspect of your writing is how can I make this more interesting? In terms of detail, like when you're picking a detail asking can I make this more interesting when you're creating character, can I make this more interesting when you're writing a scene, can I make this more interesting? There's no need to ever let that up or sacrifice that I think. In my own work I really don't want to ever let slide a scene that serves a utilitarian purpose but is not interesting. I don't want a single scene that's not compelling, at least from my perspective. I don't want a paragraph that just serves a utilitarian purpose but is not interesting. If I have a moment like that in the story I ask myself how do I make it interesting? Ultimately the reason I find this so impactful as a philosophy behind writing craft is because I think in terms of your story being enjoyable to read, that's the most important thing. I'll read pretty much anything as long as it's interesting. I think that that's the most important quality that writing can have is to be interesting because the opposite is for it to be not interesting and I don't see the appeal. I find that's the guiding question that I always ask myself through the brainstorming phase, through the writing phase, through the editing phase, how do I make this more interesting? Sometimes it's as much as changing the setting, like putting the characters in a more interesting setting, giving the scene a more compelling aspect, I don't know. In all aspects. I have a very old video on making your writing more interesting so I'll leave that below, it's really really old. So those are the 12 pieces of writing advice that change how I write. All of these pieces of advice I can kind of trace back to either a specific moment or to at least a significant period of time where that started to become clear to me. These are things that either I just find really interesting and compelling and they make sense to me. They articulate something that I want to articulate, like artistic incongruity, that says what I want to say, it's the perfect term to express what I want to express, or they were things that I had kind of an aha moment and when I first read the advice or was told the advice I went, oh, very interesting. I don't know, for whatever reason, they left an impact on me. Of course I'd love to hear what your favorite pieces of writing advice are in the comments and I just also want to say that if there's a piece of writing advice that I talked about in this video that you don't like, that is totally okay. In every video about craft, someone doesn't like some aspect of what I say. And there's rarely right or wrong if a piece of advice doesn't fit your personal philosophy or fit your style or your goals, then you don't have to implement it. But it doesn't mean that it is necessarily bad. All of these things have impacted me for the positive, but it's okay if they don't work for you. You certainly don't have to apply them and you also don't have to leave a long rant about why you hate it. Writing advice is rarely universal, it's actually very personal and I think writing advice is about curating your own set of rules and guidelines and tools that make sense to you and that you like to turn to and these are all things I really like to turn to because they make sense to me. Alright guys, so that's all for this video, thank you so much for watching. If you have any questions, you can always send me an ask on tumblr and I'll see you in another video. Bye.