Ten Weird Writing Tips That Actually Work

Here are ten unusual writing tips that I like to use. Let me know your fav, or share one of your own!

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📸 E Q U I P M E N T

[TimbrrWolfe]

"I won't tell you what names I use when I want to like a character less but there are a few in rotation" 😂

[jessicam.g.]

A list, because I like lists:
1.Temporarily change the name of a character with the name of someone you like or dislike to imagine them more complexly.
2.Cut the last thing you wrote as extra words often make it weaker.
3.Stop writing while you still have ideas to have a starting point for the next writing session.
4.Print your manuscript for proofreading, as having a physical copy makes it easier to spot mistakes.
5.Keep sentence-long summaries of your scenes as you write them.
6.Keep a list of topics, ideas--- to follow up later
7.Keep a list of problems for revisions, instead of stopping to fix them while drafting.
8.Sumarize problem parragraphs
9.Swap scenes with a writing partner
10.enter your character's brain.

[yunnazee]

My favorite writing hack is acting out the scenes, I know its super weird but I'm a D&D and LARPER so acting out the scenes to see if they flow well before I write them actually helps me work through plot problems I hadn't thought of while typing up the outline. If you are comfortable acting weird its actually super helpful.

[NateMonoxide]

The best tip I've ever heard is "don't tell anyone about what you're planning to write. Tell them once it's done".
Something about getting people's reactions before any of the work is done means you're far less likely to see the project through. It rings true as well, since all the people I know who often mention they're 'writing a book' have been working on the same thing for upwards of a decade with little to show for it.
There was a psychological study that pretty much reinforced the idea too.

[edenmckinley]

My weird writing tips: 1. listen to music. A ton of music. Three hour How To Train Your Dragon ambience loop has got the creative juices flowing multiple times. Once, I listened to Hurt by Nine Inch Nails for four hours while I wrote a particularly sad scene. I can now sing it from memory.

2. have several documents open on my computer so I can work on another story or look up notes if current story isn't going well.

3. write a poem about how the character is feeling, an element of the world, or a cultural attitude of a made-up culture. Once, I even wrote a love poem from one character to another to cement their relationship in my mind. (My sister read it and pestered me to include it in my book, but I am less confident in my poetry skills than I am in my prose skills.) Poetry never fails to cut to the emotional heart of the subject, whereas prose can get mushy.

4. eat an apple at the beginning of my writing session. Apples are my favorite food, they're nutrisious, and the physical catharsis of chewing something helps my thought process. I also like to have a cold drink on hand to sip throughout.

5. If I need time to think or if the plot is stuck, I go for a walk in the park across the street. I get in twenty minutes of exercise so no one can accuse me of sitting on my butt all day, and pacing helps me think.

6. I often delete the first thing I said rather than the last. Especially in inner monologues, I work up to the point through several sentences, fleshing out the idea, then delete the often weak, unnecessary beginning sentences.

7. write unnecessary scenes in a separate document. These scenes may not even be included in the book. It could be the MC on their deathbed surrounded by grandchildren, it could be a scene of a group of friends playing volleyball or the MC's first date from the POV of the love interest. It helps me understand the character if I know their life outside what happens in the book. I know that the MC can cook nothing but eggs and oatmeal, I know that he will have six dogs who know him only as "Daddy", I know that his future wife will have a miscarriage at age 37, triggering the only real argument the two of them will ever have. It's small details like that which make the character feel like a living being who has a life beyond the story.

[sørinstudies]

I think this is the best advice I've gotten about writing. My college English professor once told the class that when you don't know what to write, just put you thoughts down on the page. For example, you could write "I don't know what to write but I want to say __ and this is the direction I want to go." This has really helped me as I write a lot of argumentive research papers and I need to get my argument across clearly and effectively.
But, I think this could really help if you were writing a novel or poem as well.

[mariayates]

"writers just don't know how to shut up." TRUE!! I have used this tip so much and it almost always makes my prose (or any other writing for that matter) cleaner.

[BuffyFan]

Writing tips that aren't just the standard ones you hear everywhere. 😁

[cjpreach]

MY FAVE WEIRD WRITING HACK. I love to brainstorm characters and plot by taking several sheets of printer paper, laying them out on the table, and putting a circle (which represents a character) in the middle of each page. One for my MC, and others are for supporting characters. I draw a relationship web on each page that shows each individual's CHARACTERISTICS, as well as the ACTIVITIES, BACK STORY, DIRTY SECRET and INTERACTIONS each character has with all the others. The whole story comes to life in the scribbles. P.S. I know all this is supposed to be possible with Scrivener, and other programs, but I can't visualize my story on the computer screen.

[RaptorsCantSwim]

My favourite writing tip is using your story/ main plot as a plot for a tabletop roleplay, like DnD. Seeing other people's interactions with your characters or plot (or world, if it's fantasy) is an eye-opener for all angles of the story. Everything from pitfalls to solutions. Seeing your friend's reactions when their shenanigans make it into your book is also a lot of fun. 😅

[stefo]

Tip 8 is it, my writing increased both in quality and quantity when I realised that what you write doesnt have to be "good" it just had to be writing - you can then just go back and fix it later, but also sometimes what you thought was rough and garbage sometimes actually turns out to be alright. It's better to get a draft down however bad it is and just fix it after the fact

[rickcoona]

I find using Text-To-Speech helpful for not only spotting typos, but catching text that may "Look" like it works but when read aloud don't sound right. making it an easy fix.
I also sit down and interview my characters like picturing meeting them in a coffee shop and sitting down and asking them about their life, history, and loves it makes them much more Dynamic because they will tell you things about their life you had No idea about

[paneljump]

+1 on the 1-sentence summary, and here's a trick if you're using G-docs/Word/similar:
1. imbed that sentence at the top of the scene within the document
2. give that sentence a "heading" rather than "paragraph" formatting
3. (optional) make the imbedded heading text white or very light gray (so it isn't annoying)
4. add a Table of Contents at the top of your doc

Doing this keeps the summary synced with the manuscript, automatically provides hotlinks to let you navigate to the scene, and displays page count. NovelPad is better, especially if you're messy, but gdocs are free.

[dokida]

these tips are SOOOO GOOD hannah. i have one too! something that really humanizes characters i'm struggling with is imagining the kind of music they really like, or grew up with. this might be super specific to my personal experience (and my slightly unhealthy obsession with finding and organizing new music into genre playlists), but i find that the music we listen to says a lot about us, and listening to artists that my character would listen to is a really easy way for me to really sink into their psyche. i like making lil character mixtapes, so i can swap between several different ones based on who i'm focusing on or what part of the story i'm at.
it makes me happy to see you on youtube still after all these years <3 say hi to my fellow saya for me!

[hey_its_jj]

I don’t write my book in order. Ik weird right?
If I have a chapter that has something significant, like a death or plot twist, my brain gets the ideas and if I don’t write it out I will loose the idea before I get to that part in my book.
I have used this for my novel I am currently working on and I have been going strong 😊🎉

[Sally-vkyw]

a good tip is to try put something i’ve experienced whether it’s an event or emotion in my novel because it makes it more personal and of course its easier to write about something you’ve experienced. Even if it’s something like love, loss, betrayal etc. I wrote a story where one of the side characters were in a really toxic friendship which was something i had just experienced and it was so easy to describe how they felt so useless and they put up with all the comments their toxic friend gave them and how they were there for their friend but the friend was never there for them. it turned out really well and it didn’t take much effort to try put myself in the characters shoes since it was something i had experienced firsthand. It was sort of just writing what i had felt at the time. So yeah i would definitely put something personal in my writing 💕💕

[rowan]

#10 is how I do most of my writing. Instead of writing the scenes in order, I write a scene that matches my current mood, situations occupying my mind, etc. It is both cathartic _and_ productive!

[KaiInMotion]

A fun one I've been getting a lot of miles out of recently is to write a scene as just dialogue, write the convos out as a kind of loosely-resembling-a-script format and then going back in and adding dialogue tags and details and other prose afterwards. Only when I know the convo itself is the core focus of the scene and needs to pack the most punch. It helps maintain the flow of the convo instead of distracting me from the interaction.

[s.rtilly]

My writing hack I just made for my shitty memory: When outlining (which I recommend everyone learn to do in some format or another), there are little nuances or details that are referenced like "They go to this hidden place and found so-and-so's spellbook." - if this is a newer concept for the novel, I may actually make a footnote (as I write my outlines in google docs before working in Novelpad (link in the description)) on the hidden place and the spell book. This helps in a few ways. 1) Making a footnote makes you think of the thing and thus you may remember it more. 2) Footnotes are non-intrusive. I can skim past that little number if I know what the reference is. 3) If I forgot, the reference is there, in detail, but away from the section itself so it's not clogging up the flow of the point. This may be excessive but that's what I need lol I also color code the names of every character in my outline. It's a great visual to see if a scene is too crowded or chaotic or if too many people are mentioned (info dumpy scenes).

[harrisonmccartney]

One of the best pieces of advice I ever got was from Oakley Hall's The Art and Craft of Novel Writing. He basically says that to liven up the scene, finding a way to balance the action, description and "drama" are essential. This helps writers avoid being list-like with their details, or making dialog that turns into a speech, two things which can slow the reading to a crawl. It's best to give a little detail, offer some character sentiments or have them act in place of their dialog, with the action bringing into focus more details, and then show some consequences of their words or actions upon the scene. Basically making sure that the scene is dynamic by not being stuck in just one mode of storytelling, whether it's descriptive storytelling or verbal storytelling or narrative storytelling; always make sure that you're juggling bits and pieces of each in.

An example for those who might need one to understand:

Jake Towns walked back into the cabin from the soaking rain, shaking his boots upon the wirebrush doormat trying to scrape the mud from his soles.
"If this ain't the worst weather we've seen in a minute, " he said, fluttering the tail of his longcoat to free it of water, "You'll be lucky to get out of town by next Tuesday. We don't get rains here often, but when we do they like to stick around for a week."
"It won't stop me, " Jason Cargill said, the blade in his hand reflecting the light of the lamp, illuminating the wood shavings that fell to the floor from his whitling, "I've rode in worse conditions than this. This is piss, but it's not a flush."
Jake removed the gray newsboy cap from his shiny head and battered it against his knee, then tightened it in his grip to wring out the water.
"That so? I wouldn't do it, 'less I had to."
"Well, you don't have to."
"Neither do you, " Jake started removing his outerwear, dumping them to the floor where their drippings had already started to produce a puddle.
"You don't know what I have to do."

As you can see, the dialogue is given room to breathe with action, the details come to life with characters interacting with them, the implications of the characters and their attitudes are discernable by the way they talk and their actions; Jake is coming in from rain trying to get dry while Jason is sat down whittling a piece of wood with a knife, showing Jason's bold confidence and Jake's wary lived (and evident) experience with the reality of bad weather; and lastly details are filled out not only by compiling them into a list of doormats, lamps, wood shavings, and puddles, but are gradually revealed as the scene calls them each into action. The doormat is there because Jake is rubbing his muddy soles on it, the lamp is caught in the glinting of the blade, the wood shavings are the product of his whittling, and the puddle is the result of Jake's wet clothes. Not only do they fill in the scenery of the cabin, but they're all given notable purpose as we come to them. All of it combines to tell a quick story of a man's determination to ride the next day regardless of the weather.