Tips for Aspiring Writers

Two things before we dive in:

1. I love to teach, so I’m thrilled to share what I’ve learned about writing and publishing with as many people as possible
2. It still feels funny to give advice like this because I’m still learning this stuff too

That being said, I wanted to provide an overview of the “path to publishing” for anyone who wants to write a book. In this post, I will give some advice and resources to help bridge the gap between “story idea” and “publishing a book.”

Writing Advice

• Define your intention. Why do you want to write a book? Why this book? What do you expect at the end? Be real with yourself, give yourself a target, and keep that goal in mind as you work. If you dreamed of traveling somewhere far away, you wouldn’t just hop in the car without a destination or a GPS, would you? Visualize where you see this book taking you; even if the destination looks different than what you had in mind from the outset, you’ll at least know you got there if the book is there with you.
• Write every day. No huge undertaking gets done quickly, or intermittently. Small steps add up to big results over time — there’s no other way to complete a long journey. We can’t microwave a novel (I mean, you can literally, but it’s not a great idea). Give yourself permission to write just a little each day, to write poorly each day, whatever it takes to make it so easy for you to write that you can’t avoid it. Sometimes I just spend a few minutes doing voice-to-text on my phone while I’m driving or taking a walk or washing dishes, and I end up with a couple (autocorrected) paragraphs that I didn’t have before. Are they gold? Most likely not. But they give me something to work with next time I continue my writing habit.
• Trust the process. I know we’re all creatives, and we want to follow our muses wherever they lead us, but we need some guiderails and signposts on this spirit quest. The writing process help break this wild, meandering adventure into steps, each with their own qualities and intentions. If a scientist decided they didn’t feel like following the scientific method, would you trust their results? I admit writing isn’t a science, but there’s a writing process for a reason, and following that process helps move the gears on this endeavor much more reliably than developing some bespoke process of your own. Take the time to plan, draft, revise, and edit before publishing. If you get stuck on any of the stages, consider the following resources:

Writing Process Resources

Prewriting

• The Snowflake Method. This method helps you take even your smallest ideas and flesh them out into summaries, paragraphs, and even whole chapters and books. I like to use it to get from an exciting premise (“In a world where tacos eat people, one brave girl saves mankind…and dinner”) to a more detailed plot summary and character descriptions that help me define where I want my story to start.

Drafting

• Overcoming Writer’s Block. This blog post gives some practical examples of what to do (and not do) when you get stuck with your writing. Remember: this happens to all of us, and it is definitely frustrating. Don’t beat yourself up.

Revising

I’m sure you’re a wonderful writer with great ideas and a solid command of storytelling and conventions. But…you’re not the best reader of your own work. None of us are. Luckily, there are plenty of people out there who are willing to read your manuscript and give you feedback. But what kind of feedback are you looking for — revising or editing?

Revising and editing are both stages that involve “fixing” your writing, but there are some blurry lines between their definitions. For example, what I consider “revision feedback,” some people call “substantive editing.” Here’s how I differentiate them:

• Revising involves creative decisions — that is, there is more than one way to fix a particular problem, based on the writer’s stylistic choices (like how to show a character’s emotional state rather than telling the emotion)
• Editing involves fixing writing conventions — meaning there is usually one right way to fix the problem (like where punctuation belongs, or grammar rules)

For revision, I recommend using beta-readers. Two caveats:

• You have to pick the right readers for your writing, and
• you have to be open to criticism.

Some good places to find beta-readers are:

• Goodreads (I’ve used this several times — it’s also a good place to get reviews once your book is ready for release)
• Facebook groups (search for groups that fit your genre/style)
• Critique Circle (a very encouraging group of fellow writers, with free as well as paid memberships)

Editing

For editing, you can go one of two routes:

• Use AI. It’s not as scary as it sounds. You’ve probably used Grammarly before, and there are better and better AI programs every day that can help catch those conventional errors. ProWritingAid is a solid choice if you want the speed and accuracy that cutting edge technology can provide.

• Hire a person. If you don’t trust HAL to catch your mistakes, it’s worth it to pony up for a professional human editor. They are trained to catch all the mistakes writers tend to make, and they are (at the moment) still the best at understanding context, which influences even our grammatical decisions. You can find great, low-cost editors on Fiverr, or you can find a high-end editors through services like Blue Pen.

Closing Comments

Whatever you choose to do, don’t rely exclusively on friends or family for feedback. Their support and encouragement is certainly helpful, but you want some objective eyes on your writing to help you see how it will land with readers outside your social circle. The more people you can get feedback from before you publish, the more insight you will have about what works and what needs clarification, elimination, or improvement.

This should be plenty of info to get you started and carry you through to the last stage of the writing process, Publishing. In my next post, I’ll go into some detail about that step, as well as some resources for traditional, hybrid, and self-publishing options. If there are any other tips or requests that you have for this post or future posts, comment below.

In the meantime… Happy Writing!