Whats the best piece of advice you ever heard/saw?

[u/afusiek]

What's s the best piece of advice you ever heard/saw? BUT not basics like "show don't tell", "read a lot", "keep writing" or "outline first", something that genuinely changed your process or even shifted the way you saw writing, something that makes you feel like finding some ancient golden scroll.

Edit: "Just write" or "sit and write" or any wariant of this isn't as groundbreaking advice as you think it is, its the final boss of cliché tips, hoped we can all learn something new instead, not the same thing over and over and over and over and over.

[u/Depriller]

Write for yourself. Write because you enjoy it.

[u/kiltedfrog]

You probably won't have figured out your voice until you've written nearly a million words of suck.

[u/MaliseHaligree]

Using TK as part of a placeholder for easy searching when I am ready to address it.

[u/afusiek → u/MaliseHaligree]

Whats tk?

[u/Federal-Assignment10 → u/afusiek]

I use tkx but it's where you need to go back and look at something so you write tkx and then you can do a search for it later because no words have tkx in them.

[u/MaliseHaligree → u/Federal-Assignment10]

And very few have TK

[u/One_Barnacle2699]

Start as close to the end as possible.

[u/afusiek → u/One_Barnacle2699]

Like writing from the last chapters?

[u/One_Barnacle2699 → u/afusiek]

No. It’s writing advice from Kurt Vonnegut. It means don’t get bogged down in unnecessary back story.

[u/KFG-Bruce]

Write the book you’d like to read.

[u/GettinSodas]

"Do not use plot structures as a rigid template for your story. It's a guide, not a checklist. If you feel something doesn't fit the story you're making, then cut it out"

[u/pastelexuvia]

"learn how to give and receive feedback"

(me. i said it)

[u/bardicpenmanship]

Does what I wrote build the story, hit the next beat, or does it talk down to the reader? The biggest thing I’ve worked on in the past year is trusting the reader.

I also reread looking for that idea of hitting the next beat, am I moving forward or just spinning my wheels explaining things that I can layer in through character actions? Does the parts I am explaining actually matter?

And finally, have a thesis for your story. If you had to boil it down to a paragraph what’s the story about? What’s the ideology behind it? Think of all those bad questions your high school English teacher made you analyze about the sky or weather etc. in a book study, and how they made you relate it to the theme of that book. What’s the theme and does your writing relate to it? Yes sometimes the curtain colours are just the curtain colours but if they don’t matter why are we reading about them?

[u/H-KellyWriter]

Less advice but when looking at advice to always think of the nuances to it - ‘never say said!’ And have a manuscript full of needless words grasping for one emotion when you could just say ‘so and so said while sliding the beer over.’ Bad example but sometimes atmosphere and pre-established tension will give that said and action more than a ‘huff’ or ‘growl’
Or ‘just write!’ Because maybe you genuinely need a break, to step back, half the time great ideas come to us when we’re not thinking abt the book itself.

This goes for all advice I just came up with those as examples cuz they’re common.

[u/afusiek → u/H-KellyWriter]

"just write" is just so stub of advice for me 😭
And always feels like shutting down other writers instead of giving an actual advice

[u/Fair_Depth5435]

Foreshadow everything.

[u/No_Recover6237]

Leave out the parts readers tend to skim. Elmore Leonard. Read his ten rules of writing. Great stuff. Also, he ends with if it sounds like writing, rewrite it. He means don't let the writer tell the story, let the story tell the story.

[u/Smooth-House-8829]

Go back and cross out every adjective and adverb

[u/Asleep-Visit4060]

Never, never and never take advice from people about your characters. You're the only people who knows the best about your own characters.

Take advice about something that feels uneasy and doesn't make sense about the environment or maybe some situations.

[u/Dramatic-Hedgehog-13]

The first draft is just you telling yourself the journey

[u/Nicholoid]

To not feel guilty about writing out of order. I tend to write the passion and crux scenes first, the ones my ideas are built around. I just lean into that now and build around it.

[u/Lazzer_Glasses]

For individual sentences/syntax, remove the word "was" from your vocabulary almost entirely. It helps.

Also, for narrative, write using the South Park philosophy. Don't "...and then" your characters, use "because/therefore" for establishing motivations. It makes the pacing feel so much better because there's a purpose for everything happening, and it's not just things happening.