Harsh but fair – tips for making your fiction writing better than ever. 2

These tips are fast and furious. Don’t take them personally if they apply to you. Constructive criticism is sometimes hard to hear, especially if it’s about work you love and believe is perfect.

Believe me on this one point: It hurts because you know, deep down that it’s true.

Rather than allowing yourself to be upset, hurt or damaged by criticism, take it another way. Criticism is invaluable, immeasurable, worth more than money.

I say that because once money is spent, it’s gone. Critique, if listened to and actually heeded, can be used time after time to improve your skills in writing. It’s the gift that keeps on giving.

Listen. What I’m about to share with you is writer’s gold. If you recognise in your own work, traits that I list here, don’t get angry, upset or snippy, get practicing and lose the bad habits.

Do yourself and your writing a HUGE favour and your readers and characters will thank you for it.

Learn with me because I know there are some things in here that I should/shouldn’t be doing and I need to improve too!

Pictures from Google Free To Use Image search

For my background, check out these other tips.

Here

Part 1

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Think about what you skip over when reading a book. Long descriptions of scenery? Over-wordy descriptions of things?

The chances are, if you skip over those things in a book, others will too and in that case, you know that you really shouldn’t put the same things into your book – don’t you?

Again, stopping the flow of the action to describe something that’s not moving the story along or not adding to the story puts the brakes on for your readers and BANG! they’re lost to you. They’ve thought of something they must do or even, something they’d rather be doing and who knows when they’ll pick up your book and start reading again.

The upshot of that is they’ll not finish the book in one sitting and they’ll not be clamouring for your next book – and you’ve lost a fan, a reader and a customer.

Have you noticed that I space-out the paragraphs in my blogs? That’s to make it easier on the eye. It’s the same in books – to a greater extent.

Massive paragraphs appear daunting to the reader’s eye sometimes. I like a little ‘white space’ on the page I’m about to read. Think about that when you’re writing, space-out the action, pace it well and the reader is yours, captive and engaged.

Inviting? Pleasing to the eye?

The advice above is especially true on Page 1. Your opening page is your ‘hook’. Don’t open with the weather… please! The reader wants to see who they’re being introduced to at the earliest opportunity. Give them people, characters, personalities as soon as you can. Once they either like or loathe someone, they want to follow to see what happens to them.

Characters on a journey, an adventure... let's follow them...

If you have a ‘prologue’, lose it – or at least hide it in the story somewhere.

A prologue is nothing but backstory and that’s fine.

Backstory is good as long as it’s not ‘info-dump’.

Don’t drop the backstory on the reader’s head and expect them to suck it up and be fine with it. Again, the story needs to flow and if it doesn’t flow, your reader will close the book, get up and go and do housework – or worse, still… pick up someone else’s book.

Back story can be just as fascinating as the story itself if you do it properly.

Make the reader want to know more about your characters and weave that backstory in. Give the character a reason to tell his story to the reader. A compulsion to do something – be that a double-tap on each kill (one hit wasn’t as dead as he thought and recovered enough to give the hitman enough trouble to warrant the double-tap being implemented in future hits) or checking the mailbox twice a day (the postman once came back to deliver a letter he’d missed and because she didn’t check the post box again, she missed an important letter that should have been dealt with immediately) – will give such a reason and foundation for that backstory.

So will a conversation, but that has to be written well too.

Info-dump can be clumsy if not delivered well and finding new ways to deliver it is down to you.

Description of characters is another important factor. Of course you want the reader to see that horrific scar down her face, taking out her eye so it’s a dead, milky orb, but you don’t need to go much further than that.

Teach your readers to think for themselves. Unless a characteristic is vital – like the dead-orb for an eye – it’s not important that you TELL your readers what the character looks like in vast detail.

My characters for example:

Red – she has red hair, a slim build and isn’t short.

Erzebet – dark hair, slim and petite.

Zack – one of my newest characters and I don’t know what he looks like yet, apart from the fact that he has muscles. I’ve left that down to the reader because if you try to force your will on the characters, the reader will not connect so easily.

Give the reader free rein to visualise and they’ll do a much better job of describing the character than you can because in their mind’s eye, they’ll actually see the character.

It’s all about immersing your readers into your story, making them feel like they’re actually there, living it with you.

Put your reader at the side of you, in the middle of the action and they’ll be disappointed when they have to stop reading and that means they’ll pick up the book whenever opportunity presents itself… which in turn, means your next book will be an instant and compulsive purchase and you have the start of a fan-base.