Writing Advice & Tips

Ever wish you could go back and tell your younger self some of the wisdom you've gained?

Things you could have used sooner?

Would you have listened?

I don't know if I would have listened to this older heavier version of myself, I like to think I would, but in all honesty I think I'd laugh and blow myself off with that infamous teenager attitude and snark.

But if I could give my younger self some advice it would be this:

• Everyone has to find their own writing strategy. It's great to take examples from famous writers and those you look up to, but at the end of the day you are always going to be you not them.
• If Harry Potter had been your idea you would have written it differently, and the story wouldn't have been the same. Likewise your writing style and ideas are unique, no one will ever think exactly like you. Your stories are unique for that reason.
• Put in the leg work to create your world. For Me this helps make the story and characters more real. Just knowing what kind of world they are living in and what is happening in their Universe, the world, their country/city/town/village, and their personal world makes a night and day difference.
• Every Experience you have furthers your ability to write and connect with other people, and is highly valuable in this line of work.
• Write something everyday, even if it's a single sentence or an idea.
• Come up with new ideas every day/week, make a point of it, and they will come easier and easier to you. If you are always writing your ideas down and creating new ones you'll never run out and fall into Writers' Block.

An exercise I've found that helps with improving your idea creation is to go over to Pinterest, you can type in 'writing prompts' which is fun, but I love searching through the photography. Then I pick some of the images and I write a sentence to a paragraph about what is happening or what it makes me think. (sometimes I even write a few pages!)
Example:

Pinterest Link to Image

She raced frantically through the crowds of happy carnival guests, she'd only lost sight of them for a moment. Gasping in the bitter cold she stopped near the lit up merry go round and turned in a terrified circle hoping she'd see them again. Tears began streaming down her rosy cheeks as a light snow began falling, her father was gone, stolen right before her eyes.

• Bad ideas have worth. The worst idea you can think of can be made into something fantastic and amazing if you give it enough thought and time...or it can be merged with a mediocre idea to make something more interesting.
  I.E. if you've ever seen the Twilight jokes on Pinterest you'll know there's a whole slew of people that would have preferred a story about Charlie, Bella's Dad, finding out his friend is a vampire and his best friend's tribe were werewolves then fighting off the bad vampires and protecting their home. And that would have been an awesome story.
• Some bad ideas are bad ideas...but they could be fun, use your judgement and write it down anyway. Maybe one day you'll need a villain that only has bad/poor ideas, just because it is a "bad" idea doesn't mean it is worthless.
• Keep your documents organized and never overwrite the original, make a new document or save it as a new version! This has gotten me in soooo much trouble over the years, it sucks because you know you've written it, but by the time you realize you've rewritten that part and accidentally deleted it, you've wasted a ton of time and have to try and remember what it was. Descriptions of minor characters suffer the most from this as well as settings, it's always helpful to be able to look back and remember what you were thinking when you originally thought of the character or scene.
• If you need to start over, do it. Take the time to make it what you want.
• Explore all your character's pasts, and write little stories or details about them. They could be more important than you know. (Also good material for a separate book, I have minor characters that could have their own stories. It is also great practice.)
• Keep going. Passion is not something you are born with. It is so rare for anyone to have "natural passion". If you like something and keep working on it at some point that like turns into love and if you keep at it people will start saying you have a passion for it. I strongly believe Passion is something you make yourself through hard work and dedication, it is not natural and certainly not there at the beginning.

Those were just a few of mine, perhaps I'll do another one of these (and not so late at night) in the future. :)
What would you tell yourself?
What are some of your biggest lessons you've learned while writing your stories? What would you do differently if you had to start over?