This post was originally published at Novelicious.com and is now at WritingTipsOasis.com. WritingTipsOasis.com acquired Novelicious.com in June 2022.
We recently asked Katherine Webb, author of The Misbegotten – for her top five writing tips.
Just do it. Writers write. Simple.
Don’t get paralysed trying to make each word or sentence perfect. Give yourself permission to write the worst first draft ever written – you can always go back and revise. But get something down – the empty page is your enemy.
Get it read, and listen to criticism. Obviously, not everybody will like your work. But if you show it to twenty people and they all have the same criticism of it, then you can think about trying to work through that in your script. Or not – a lot of people want to write entirely their own way and that’s that – but you’re really limiting your chances of getting published that way, not least because an editor will always, always ask for some changes, and you need to be ready to work with them on that. People who read my early books kept saying that they were too slow to start, and that there was not enough plot drive. I wrote a more complex plot and I cranked up the pace – to what felt to me like break-neck speed, but really wasn’t –and that book was The Legacy, the first one to get published.
Rethink. Redraft. Edit.
Just do it. It’s worth saying twice! Not only when you’re in the mood; not only when you have your favourite pen; not only when it’s cloudy outside, or you’ve had a good night’s sleep: whenever. Just do it.