A Beginner’s Guide to Writing Good Stuff
Writing, like any form of creativity, has pitfalls. We don’t notice them most of the time. We don’t think they are necessary to worry about.
But when we see them in someone else’s writing, we cringe.
Every writer has trouble with at least one of these pitfalls (and if they don’t, they are lying to themselves), and that doesn’t make anyone a bad writer. In fact, noticing and working on avoiding these traps makes you a better writer!
The key is to notice them—to pay attention to your own writing as well as the writing of anything you read. So, I’m taking a moment to outline them.
This isn’t an all-inclusive list. I’m still learning about these traps, and how to avoid them, and I will forever be learning. This is just… say… a beginner’s guide to writing good stuff.
The List:
1. Avoid Cliché phrases, tropes, movements, and all of that. This is beginning to be a cliché piece of writing advice, but it’s important. Using clichés will make you look like an amateur if you use them wrong. Some people say not to use them at all, but that’s impossible. Clichés are unavoidable. There are tropes for a reason, and it’s impossible to write outside of them completely, but as writers we need to make sure our clichés aren’t just the same as everyone else’s. So, if your story premise is cliché, or your meet-cute is cliché, then maybe try and turn things around. Put a twist to it, or find another phrase to describe something. You can’t avoid them completely, but you can bring something a little different to the table.
2. Adverbs, adverbs, adverbs. They, like clichés, are things writers might want to avoid. Sentences like, “Quietly, she walked across the room,” are weak and common. This doesn’t mean that you should never use them but try having more fun with your writing and show how quietly she is walking across the room? “She walked across the room, her calves aching with the struggle of keeping her steps soft.” Disclaimer: I’m not sure if that sentence I just wrote works, but it’s a start, right?
3. To-be or not to-be, how should we verb? Well, we shouldn’t verb with to-be verbs, aka am, are, is, was, were, been, and being. To-be verbs slow your writing down. They are a state of being, not an action, and generally you want your writing full of action (even if it’s soft and subtle action). Granted, this does not mean that you should go and delete every to-be verb in your piece of writing. More… use them with caution. Highlight them and see if they are necessary. See if maybe you can do what we did above and spice up your writing by finding new ways to describe things.
4. Passive voice is lame. It can be useful, but the majority of the time, passive voice should be avoided (do you see what I did there?). Passive voice causes you to use more to-be verbs, it causes you to ‘tell’ and not ‘show,’ and it brings your reader out of the story because passive voice is slow. It sounds academic, but in the boring way and not the “Cool! We are learning stuff!” way. Disclaimer: you shouldn’t use passive voice in academic writing either.
5. Intensifiers aren’t always bad, but they are rarely good. Yes, they ‘intensify’ stuff, but they make writers use more passive voice, to-be verbs, and adverbs. Follow along the same tip I had with the adverbs! Instead of saying, “She felt very sick to her stomach,” with “very” being the intensifier, try saying something that details what she feels: “Her stomach gurgled in an unpleasant manner, reminding her of how it felt to be aboard the Jolly Roger—the boat swaying beneath her as she leaned over a foul smelling bucket.”
6. All-knowing characters. This is on a more story-building level of writing than the technical stuff we’ve covered so far. 99 times out of 100, an all-knowing character is unrealistic (the 1 time being an oracle, a god, or something of a similar level). Your characters don’t share one brain. I noticed it was a problem in the book series I recently read, and it is one of the only things I actually disliked about the series. All the characters had the exact same knowledge, even if it made no sense for them to have that knowledge. Make sure it’s realistic if your character knows something that happened to another character in the book. If you need to, make a spreadsheet of your characters and the events that they know, just to keep track of everything. That’s what I do.
7. Character stereotypes. I’m talking about the Mary Sue, the broody protagonist with a tragic backstory, the small but exceptionally bright nerd, the girl who doesn’t see herself as beautiful but is clearly the most gorgeous person and everyone loves her. This is boring. This has been done millions of times before. This is unnecessary. Create interesting characters. Give them interesting backgrounds. Let them have interesting desires. Make them be morally grey. Break the flat stereotypes that have annoyingly befallen the fiction of our time. And, most importantly, have fun with it!
8. Killing your minorities. I’m starting to see things breaking away from this (thank goodness), but I don’t want the new generation of writers to fall into this trap. It’s common to make an LGBTQ+ character have a traumatic past, a horrible present, and no future. However, this has a horrible effect on the LGBTQ+ youth as well as on the whole population. This goes for every single minority. I’m not saying that you should never kill a character who is in the minority, but please take a look at who you are killing and why. If you are killing your only character who doesn’t fit into what your ‘norm’ is, then maybe you should ask yourself why you are killing them as well as why they are your only minority character.
9. Bad representation is worse than no representation. Don’t yell at me, especially since I just told you guys to write more characters who are in the minority. I’m NOT saying to not represent people. I’m saying to do your research and represent your characters RIGHT, especially if you are writing a contemporary or historical fiction story. Don’t fall into stereotypes or create ‘token’ characters but provide accurate and true representation. If you feel as if you cannot properly represent your character—whether it be their gender, sexuality, race, life experience, ability, or literally anything else—then you shouldn’t be the person writing that story from that point of view. Do your research, aka talk to someone like the character you’re trying to write who is willing to discuss their experience (and then talk to a second and third person), and make sure you aren’t harming people with the characters you create. And, when in doubt, don’t write about an experience that isn’t yours.
On the other side of this coin, if you are creating your own world (in fantasy or sci-fi) then ask yourself why something needs to mirror our own world. If you really look at it, you’ll find that it doesn’t. In a fantasy world, create your characters and don’t make them have to live the experiences of our world. That’s what fantasy is for, right? Have your representation, but charge your world with different problems than our current world of racism, sexism, homophobia, abilism, and everything of the like.
10. Searching for the words and not using place holders. We are heading into a different category of writing advice. The first was technical, the second was more story and person oriented, and this one is more personal. When you are writing, sometimes you just can’t think of a word. I know how that feels. It gnaws at you until you end up erasing the entire sentence or open a new tab to look up the word you want. Don’t do that. Instead, pick a word for yourself to use as a placeholder. I like Elephant (it was an example I saw once, plus elephants are important to my family). Make sure it isn’t a word you use normally in your writing or in your story. After you are finished writing, use ‘ctrl f’ and look at every time you have used that word. Now you can look at it with a cooler head and maybe look up some words without disrupting your flow of writing.
11. Plain old not writing. Yeah. That’s a huge thing to avoid: the avoidance of writing. If you want to be a writer, you have to write. You don’t always have to write good with good English and good grammar, but you HAVE to write. Short and simple.
12. Taking your first draft too seriously. Yes, I want you to churn out good work. Yes, I want you to get published. Yes, I want you to like your writing. However, you can’t take your writing too seriously. Let your first draft be a rambly mess. Let yourself use to-be verbs and adverbs and passive voice. Let yourself mess up. Then you can fix it all in one of your many rounds of editing. It’s just… more important to actually write than let yourself get caught up in obsessing over how bad your writing is. A popular writing meme that’s going around Instagram right now says something along the lines of, “looking at your first draft and saying that you’re a bad writer is just like having a bowl of flour and saying your cake tastes like crap.” So yeah. Don’t be discouraged. Let yourself write without judgement, and then let yourself edit.
That’s it. That’s my guide. 12 steps. 12 things to watch out for. 12 Dancing Princesses. Take my advice and go forth. Or don’t take it and go forth. You do you, I guess, but these are the things that I’m working on, and these are things that just about everyone can benefit from thinking about. Of course, there is always more to learn than just these 12 things, and I’m sure I could write an entire blog post on each tip, but as I said before… this is a beginners guide to writing good stuff.