Tag: tips

Top 10 Favorite Tropes

Everyone knows what a trope is, right? A person, place, or thing included in a story–book, movie, or video game—used so frequently that anyone who has read more than one book can pick out.

Writers are warned to avoid tropes; told they make their writing worse or predictable. I say that with thousands of years of storytelling and human experience to draw from, tropes are recognizable for a reason and, as long as a writer puts in effort to freshen up the idea, tropes are a fun part of the writing process that can connect your work to the history of the craft. And if there is one thing I love, it’s near pretentious sentimentality like that.

In the spirit of praising tropes for their impact on literature, I decided to make this top ten list.

1) Treasure Hunts

I’ll attribute this to my favorite moves growing up. Muppet Treasure Island, The Goonies, Indiana Jones: I loved anything with a good treasure hunt. Bonus points for the wild and crazy traps that the main characters had to overcome along the way. I feel that either with the technological advances or our rapidly decreasing attention spans that show are moving away from this type of story and sticking with races and explosions. Which is a shame: bring back my bone pianos and riddles about invisible bridges!

2) Off Gender Hobbies

This one is something that I noticed more in 90s and early 00s media. Like the episode of Fairly Odd Parents where Timmy becomes a girl for a day to choose a good present for Trixie. This leads him to find out she likes video games and comic books. Their day together helps him feel better about getting a scalp massage and manicure while watching soap operas at the end of the episode. This was huge to me as a child who liked knights and knives more than jewelry and tea parties. It made me feel normal and helped me to realize that I didn’t have to restrict myself to choosing between ‘girl stuff’ and ‘guy stuff.’ I wish more people would bring this back, especially without any added subtext.

3) Redemption Arcs

Who doesn’t love a well-thought out redemption arc that isn’t contrived and that centers around a villain actually making character growth? See what I did there? This trope has the unfortunate symptom of too many authors wanting a redemption arc but not wanting to take the time to properly write them. This often centers around handwaving, or completely ignoring, any sort of character development in the ‘redeemed’ character. If a character is going to be believably redeemed, they need to hit their lowest point, whether physically, mentally, or emotionally, and realize that they just can’t continue what they are doing. After all, they chose their side with conviction. They should have a reason for overcoming that decision or it will never feel genuine.

4) The sassy talking weapon or mascot trying their best

You know this character. The talking sword, the computer with an attitude problem, the cute cat who thinks it’s a lion: they are fun to watch and read about because they offer levity and personality to any situation.

5) Rival friendships

The rival or arch nemesis doesn’t have to be an evil person. They usually just don’t like the protagonist. That doesn’t mean they don’t like anyone, and that’s very rare; even for a lone wolf personality. This is why I love when they are given real friendships. Someone to help them through their struggles and often helps them realize when it is time to give up.

6) Rivals or villains with a moral code that the hero can sometimes get along with

Just because I’m trying to take over the world doesn’t mean I don’t have standards. Rivals and villains normally confront the protagonist on sight. Occasionally, by the time they hit the scene someone else has already put the hero on their back. A rival or villain who are not really evil as much as just antagonists will sometimes help them to the hospital with a note saying they will be back to totally defeat them later. Other times, they will put in the effort to help themselves with only mild suspicion and a few over-exaggerated threats strewn into the mix. I live for those interactions which show the humanity of everyone on different sides of a conflict.

7) Fights that are more like a game

Give me the wild eyed, grinning fights with powers between friends or rivals. Ones with banter and over the top moves that they can only use because of their respect for one another, even if they don’t always see eye to eye. It’s especially fun when they wind up laughing and exhausted in a draw and are toted away to recover over food and conversation.

8) Rivals joining forces with the heroes

If you haven’t guessed it, I like rivals and heroes who come around to being friends in the end. This is normally one of the things that pushes them to that point, or at least to the point where they care and trust each other enough to not just throw hands the second they see each other from that point forward. When someone so loathsome comes along that the hero and normal rival or villain team up together; it makes them all relatable and leads to emotional growth and I love it.

9) Grizzled adult changed by the love of a child

Naruto killed me so many times with this. The traumatized men who recognized the suffering they went through in someone else and strove to change things for that child. Before that, my favorite example was in the Redwall series. In one book, an otter (who was experiencing PTSD and possibly psychosis of some sort from being tortured by toads for an extended period of time) is dragged along on an adventure because his brother needs to go and no one trusts the otter, who is still running on feral survival instincts, to not murder them all in their sleep. Through a distracted moment, a happy-go-lucky squirrel boy, who takes no nonsense for grumpy breakfast skippers, makes a connection with him through not showing fear and talking to him like he is still a person. By the end of the journey, though he still has his issues, the otter is leagues better thanks to his new best friend.

10) Emotional release

I didn’t really know what to title this, so let me explain. When a character has gone through hell and has put up that angry front to cope, and they find a friend/someone else they can trust, and suddenly, they KNOW they don’t have to deal with their pain like that anymore. The abuser is gone, they can trust and love again, when the burden of the world falls away in a cool breath of air. That’s one of my favorite moments in a story. I love when a character who has been through so much finds that safety and happiness.

I think I found something of a theme in there. What are your favorite tropes? I’d love to read your comments and find out! Thanks for reading.

Balancing Writing and Revision

Writing is a long and sometimes difficult process. Some days, it feels like you just can’t write no matter what you do. Others, it’s like a burst pipe streaming content onto the page at all hours. Mostly, it’s a steady medium which is enough to get your ideas down on paper. However, no matter the speed of writing, there is always one thing that needs to be done throughout the process: editing.

While looking through some tips on the lesser known sides of writing, I came across many different ideas on how the editing process should work and what should be avoided. I’m going to point out the top five ‘do’ ideas that have worked for me, and the top five ‘don’t’ ideas that I feel need the most attention.

My Top 5 Editing Do’s

  1. Do a brief edit every few chapters. How many that ‘few’ is will be up to you to decide; five, ten, or twenty could all be appropriate depending on your style and the size of your chapter. Some would put this in their ‘don’t’ category, but I find that it’s helpful to overall story progression to go back over, do a brief look over for typos, and check the overall pacing and plot progression. It’s especially helpful if you’re stuck in a rut and feel like nothing is happening. It can be helpful to step back and take in part or all of the story again to help put the one sequence you’re working on into prospective. It can also be helpful for keeping details like injuries or upcoming events fresh in your mind so you don’t have a scar that disappears for long periods.
  2. Do take a break before diving into your editing. If you’ve been struggling to put words on the page, you’re likely going to be frustrated with your story once you end that chapter. If you’ve just gotten off of a six-hour binge of writing, you’re most certainly going to be exhausted. If you feel like you still need to keep going that day, take a fifteen-minute break to drink water, make sure the blood circulation in your legs is still going, and take care of any other health or sanity needs that you’ve been putting off. This not only will help you to clear your mind and allow you to have a fresh take on the issues at hand, it will also prevent that nasty, aching feeling in your body that will be a major distraction to anything you try to do.
  3. Do edit for one thing at a time. There are many different things that you’ll need to be looking for during edits. Grammar, spelling, flow, overuse of a word or phrase, consistency; all this and more will be striving for your attention. It can be overwhelming when you attempt to switch back and forth between tasks. This is why you shouldn’t do that; especially at the end stages when you are working with your entire work. Take one piece at a time: get rid of those red and blue squiggly lines on your first read through, then search for any word that stuck out to you during that read-through, and then you can move on to more in-depth things.
  4. Do have multiple edit cycles. I’ve already mentioned how you should edit every few chapters and edit at the end for a list of things. To add to that, you will likely have multiple edit cycles like this. You will also eventually involve others in the process and will need to repeat the cycles afterwards. Don’t just look it over once and then mail it to the publisher, you won’t really like the outcome.
  5. Do involve others. When I was younger, I knew what editors were. I was mistaken to think that they were optional. Beta-readers are still a new concept to me, though I did have my mom and a few friends look over my old pieces. That doesn’t tend to work if they are super nice or don’t know how to give feedback. Neither process is optional, and if I’m not mistaken, can also take several tries to make sure your piece is as good as it can be. Skipping either step will likely show drastically when the final product is scrutinized.

My Top 5 Editing Don’t

  1. Don’t skip editing. This may be obvious but it bears keeping in mind, don’t skip the editing part of the novel writing process. People will be able to tell. If you are aiming for traditional publishing, they will be able to tell too. Especially an editor you hire will be able to tell that you skipped the self-editing process and will fill the pages so full with red on small details that there won’t be room for serious edits.
  2. Don’t wait until the end to edit. Again, some may disagree, but I feel that if you don’t go over your work occasionally, you are more likely to have plot holes, inconsistencies, and be completely overwhelmed when it comes to the final edit. Balance is key, so it’s also important that you…
  3. Don’t go overboard with the edits. While multiple rounds of edits are extremely necessary, there has to be a cutoff point. Editing every chapter more than a quick glance over is pushing it, trying to edit every page as you go is only going to grind you process to a halt. You need multiple cycles of the editing process, but if you’ve done five rounds of beta reading with ten self-edits in between, you’re never going to get your book published. Perfection is an illusion, it’s unobtainable. At some point, you’re going to have to take a deep breath and go for broke.
  4. Don’t lowball hiring an editor. You get what you pay for is as apt here as it is in most other industries. If you are searching for editors and one sticks out for having dramatically slashed prices, chances are they are going to have dramatically slashed results as well. Going for the most expensive isn’t the answer either, necessarily, but you don’t want to spend money on something cheap only to turn around and realize you have to buy the more expensive option anyway.
  5. Don’t rush the process. By the time you reach the final editing stages, you’re probably about done with your book, your writing, the colors black and white, and anything and everything associated with the process. There can be a temptation to rush through the final stages and just get through with it. This would be the greatest disservice you can do to yourself and your novel. Hang on for a bit longer and make sure all your hard work has the biggest success imaginable.

Writing Tools

Today, I want to talk about a novel writing tool that I didn’t know existed until recently when I was searching random templates on Microsoft Word. That tool is the Microsoft Word Novel Template. The program also has a book format, story format, and non-fiction format that offer different nuanced changes to the overall style, but the novel template offers the most detailed tips as well as a few extra features that seemed lacking in the others. I’ll outline some of those features and perks so you can decide if it sounds like a good match. Later, I may go over the other templates in a single comparison article to point out what’s different, better, or lacking about each.

Quick and Easy

This template really takes the guesswork out of formatting. Between the fill-in-this-here bubbles and the blue text tips scattered throughout, it doesn’t take a computer genius to put a story in an acceptable layout that you and your editors, agents, and beta readers will love.

Most major pieces of formatting are either done for you (header, footer, page count– all done), selectable from the styles bar on the Home tab of the ribbon, or spelled out in detail like you’ve never used them before. This is good because I’ll admit I had never used the page break tool in Layout and would have had to search it online if the steps weren’t written out for me.

Amusingly, some of the tips are surface level writing tips like: “use the opening few paragraphs to hook you reader’s interest,” “use visual writing,” and “make sure there’s enough motivation at the end of your chapter to keep the story moving forward.” It’s a mixture of funny and mildly terrifying to think of someone opening this kind of in-depth template with zero prior work done on their novel. Perhaps that’s just me.

Layout

There are several pages of information that are available before even reaching the actual story content, ranging from necessary to optional, this template has in store for you to fill out.

The first page is, rather obviously, the title page. There are boxes to fill in: any agent information that you may have if you are going a traditional publishing route, the title, your author name (which can be your legal name or a pen name), the approximate word count to fill in at the end, and your legal name and contact information.

Second is one of the technically optional features that I think is very necessary; the table of contents. I don’t think I’m the only one who gets a bit indignant when books don’t have one of these, even if they don’t title their chapters. Don’t make me flip through trying to figure out where something I’m trying to reference is located! Please?

The table of contents is also an active table in the document. As you add chapters using the heading and sub-heading styles you are able to hop up to the table of contents page and right click to update the field. Once updated, not only will your chapters be in the table of contents, but they will appear in the navigation side panel which makes it easier to jump from one point to the next while working.

The next major bit of formatting are the header and footer that appear on all but the title page. The header contains the author last name, title, and an automatically tracking page number. The name and title are linked to their title page counterparts and the page number is even programmed to use lower case roman numerals up until the Chapter 1 page like a fancy novel. It’s even smart enough to keep track of your table of contents taking up four pages or you adding an extra page because your novel is split into three books. (I picked the habit up from one of my favorite childhood authors, Brian Jacques and now stories seem a bit odd without it.)

The footer contains the full author name and a year insert for copywrite information. You wrote it and if you decide to print out your 200+ page manuscript for some reason, you’re going to want people to know when they come across the pages that it’s owned.

The final bit of layout to mention are the heading, scene, and body formats. Each one helps you to keep your chapters consistent from start to end.

Things I Learned

Apart from now knowing how to operate a page break and what tables and headings are good for in a word document, there were a few things about book formatting in general that I had either never noticed before or completely forgot that were pointed out to me in the blue tip text. Somehow, I managed to take two college level creative writing classes, score high nineties in both, and still never had most of these things pointed out to me.

When you start a new chapter, the title is located 1/3 of the way down the page. I found this to be true in most of my books and reason I might have overlooked it because many of the books I’ve read don’t care much for blank space. They usually have a square illustration in that gap before the chapter heading that can seem more like an illustration choice than a formatting one.

The opening paragraph of a new chapter or a new scene within a chapter is not indented! This honestly blew my mind; if there’s one thing that elementary school taught me about paragraphs it’s that they are always indented! Except if they start a chapter as I quickly learned when I searched through my bookshelf for confirmation.

I had known it was possible to have more than one scene in a single chapter, but what I didn’t know was that when formatting a novel, you will use a center aligned # to indicate the break. The template does have a new scene style on the Home tab, but it doesn’t affect the navigation side bar or anything else, so it’s much easier to just ctrl e in my opinion.

This last one was more of a reminder; you don’t underline things in your novel. I think the wires were crossed for this due to writing reports for classes. You definitely underline things like titles in those reports (or some of them anyway, there are so many different rules) however, when it comes to novels, italics are your best friend for emphasis.

Conclusion

Overall, this is a very helpful tool for a writer, especially one further along in their process. There are a few features that don’t pan out exactly as expected, but overall it makes formatting simple and quick. And if you can check one thing off your nightmare list of things to research and piece together yourself, a smart writer will take it.

In my current novel, I have finished Book 1: Debut and transferred it from the working documents onto the novel template so I could see it in all its pulled together glory. So far, I have 252 pages of content, 31 chapters, and 67,314 words. My table of contents is already two pages long, and I’m excited. Thank you for reading this post, and happy writing!

Monday Motivation

Today seemed like a great day to tackle tips for staying on track with writing, or whatever you’re working on. I’ve had a TB test for work, a blood draw, and found out I have a cavity; so I need a positive spin on a grumpy Monday. Everyone has had a moment where they thought they couldn’t press on another step so I’m going to talk about some things that I have used before and rate them on their effectiveness.

Disclaimer: This sort of this is, obviously, subjective so feel free to try or ignore what I have to suggest. I’d also love to hear what helps you! Thanks for reading and commenting.

Take a Nap

I have always used dreams as a source of inspiration in my writing. At least the ones that make sense on some level of reality anyway. If I’m feeling overwhelmed, lost, confused, or frustrated, a nap can help me set aside the issue and come back to it with a fresh mind and possibly new inspiration.

Effectiveness: 55%

Reason: Easy to overdo and not always an option if you’re trying to write within a time constraint. Dreams also don’t care they have the ability to inspire your writing and might just stick you with the stressful “wake up only to realize you’re still asleep sixteen times in a row until your brain starts to malfunction and you have to will your body into consciousness” nightmare.

Work on a Different Project

This one is going to get under the skin of some people. However, there are times when I just can’t look at my WIP for a second more or I’m going to cry because I can’t deal with the emotions or the one spot I’m having trouble navigating. To both pull away from the issue while still being productive, I’ll pick up another, often less developed, WIP and start to work with it. It can be anything from working on the long outlining process to writing a chapter or two for a casual fanfiction. It is a good way to come at the problem from a different angle. Sometimes you have to take a break from fantasy politics to explode an alien attack ship in order to realize that there is an entirely different way for your elves to handle the meeting; aka what the exploded aliens realize they should have done to not have their guts scattered across an asteroid.

Effectiveness: 85%

Reason: You’re always working on something so you aren’t wasting any precious time by staring at a blank page and waiting for the answer to jump out at you. The downside is if you don’t keep yourself in check you can be like 19-year-old me and have 12 WIPs open at once and spend precious years screaming at a blank page and waiting for one of them to grab your attention more than the others. Never a good look. There is also the chance of getting your story streams crossed which can both be a simple sign of a writing style or come out looking like a copy paste extravaganza.

Just Write Something

This is the one that is most common to hear, just keep writing. You’re never going to get through your work unless you are putting words on the page. It doesn’t matter if you are stuck for a week and only manage 500 words a day. This sort of stagnation will pass and the next thing you know you’ve spat out three chapters, totaling 11 pages, in an eight-hour binge. It will always balance itself out eventually.

Effectiveness: 80%

Reason: Many would disagree with my thoughts on this but, even with the best intentions, there is only so far that you can go if you’re walking on broken feet. If you are seriously stumped and getting to the point where you are questioning life and everything involved in it, you need to step away from the problem for at least some time. Skipping around, writing nonsense, and forcing things to happen are all going to cause you greater problems and hours of alterations or total rewrites in the future. If your problem is more motivation than inspiration, that’s when this tip will be most effective. Yes, that little game on your phone is pretty but you need to buckle down and produce something if you’re going to get past the first draft.

Do an Activity

Preferably, this is exercise or something at least semi-social. Writing, even if based on a time and place far removed from the here and now, is attached to our feelings and interactions. Dialogue will sound better if you interact with people. Nature descriptions will be more vivid if you get out into it. It’s much easier to write if you’re not jittering from your third coffee as you reach your ninth hour at a desk.

Effectiveness: 75%

Reason: From what I’ve heard, many writers are introverts and have small social batteries. I am like that to a degree, mostly I have a hard time finding friends who are cool with the fact that I prefer watching things than participating in them on many occasions. Exercise is a good part of this too, though depending on health and the weather it might be hard to do. Just remember, even if you are stepping away for something other than a different project, never do nothing. Unless you’ve scheduled some me time as a reward.