25 Ways to Improve Your Writing by Brian A. Klemms, 2011

1. Flow

- A piece of writing is a living thing. Our goal should be to serve it and do what it wants, to be its instrument.

- The flow of words from our mind to the page is impeded in two main ways: - A. If we try to make the story do something that it doesn’t want to do. - B. If something in us isn’t ready to face the full implications of the work’s theme and

emotions. - Solution: At the start of each writing session, especially if you’re having trouble

moving forward, literally ask your work-in-progress, “What do you want to do? Where do you want me to go with you? Why are you stalling?”

- This is a psychological trick that almost always creates an imagined response, along the lines of, “This scene is boring. Why are you making me do it?”

2. Precision- Your subject remains inert until you add the precise detail that brings it, in the

reader’s mind, to life. You need the key, specific details to bring the world of the piece alive.

- Advice: Develop the habit of dedicating time to reviewing your work with precision in mind. How would that scene change if you add a sweet tang of honeysuckle to the breeze? How might this character change if you fasten the top button of his shirt?

3. Voice- Your voice is how you write, the way you handle language, your style—if you have

one.- Develop your own voice: - “I write like I think. I like spontaneity. I push and pull, change speed and rhythm,

balance short and long sentences. I compare it to jazz riffs and drum rolls. I’m economical with words, but I won’t interrupt a nice solo.”

- Advice: Rewrite a page of your writing in the style of someone you admire. Don’t worry about losing yourself in the process—you’ll be doing just the opposite.

4. Originality- Originality is like voice, an elusive quality that cannot be created; it exists or it

doesn’t, all you can do is hone it.

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- Advice: If you’re in a rut, change something in your routine. Write in a different place; write longhand; dictate into a recorder; switch point of view; remove every modifier in your text and start over—something.

- Exercise: Print out a page of your writing, cut it into quarters and rearrange them. Retype the text in this quasi-jumbled state. Where before your logical brain laid things out in an orderly fashion, you’ll now see them in jump cuts and inexplicable juxtapositions. Return to your work and revise with the best of these angularities intact, to the point they serve the piece, without reordering them back into comfortable reasonableness.

- Honor the deeper, inherent logic of your work by allowing its quirks and hard edges to show.

5. Imagery- Show don’t tell - Try making vague moments more vivid by replacing explanation

with imagery. - Exercise: Rewrite each of the following statements in a way that shows instead of

explains: Her hair was a mess. The garden was ready for picking. I hate broccoli. You always change your mind. The moon is full.

6. Pace- Advice: Get in to each scene as late as possible, and out of it as early as possible.- There’s no need to begin scenes by laboriously explaining how characters arrived

there, or to open an article or essay with excessive setup or introduction.- Practical tip: “When revising my novels, I experiment by cutting the first and last

paragraph of each scene. Suddenly, a sequence that dragged can become   speedy.”

7. Unity- Method – Selective Repetition - A detail or remark or even just a unique word

mentioned early in your piece can be echoed later, creating a sense of wholeness through the reader’s recognition of the previous mention.

- Practical tip: Reread a piece you’re working on with an eye toward finding that element you could repeat in a subtle way, and then look for a place later in the piece where you could drop it in.

- Ask yourself: If you had to cut all the details or images and retain only one, which one would you keep? That’s the one you want.

- Be subtle in doing this.

8. Sentence structure- No advice regarding it, just sit down and write whatever moves you, following only

one rule: Don’t bore anybody.

9. Word choice

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- Frank O’Hara: “If you think in pictures, write. If you think in words, paint.”- Advice: If you’re stuck on a word, sketch what it is you’re trying to describe. It

doesn’t matter how good you are at drawing. - (What matters is the employment of a different skill set, a portion of the brain distinct

from the one that has been searching for the mot juste.)- Or consider a soundtrack for the scene. Let the scene play out in time along with the

music, or read it aloud with the music as background.- When you employ a different depictive medium than mere words, different

associative threads (or synaptic connections) can be brought to bear on the task.

10. Rhythm- Rhythm is the subliminal message in writing. - Practical tip: Choose a dramatic passage from a published piece you admire. - How do you feel when you read it? (Notice your breathing, heart rate, posture and

emotions.) How did the writer provoke this response? How do word pairings and sentence and paragraph structures contribute to its momentum? How do these rhythmic choices serve the piece’s meaning?

- Now, write a passage that echoes the patterns you’ve discovered. If the first sentence is three short words, yours should be, too. Where a descriptive image blossoms for a paragraph, let yours do the same. Communicate emotion through your rhythm.

11. Inspiration- Daydreams are our primal storyteller at work, sending us scenes and topics that our

imagination or subconscious wants us to investigate.- Each day, we should devote time to reviewing our daydreams and determining which

of them insists on being turned into a story.- Don’t push away those daydreams that make you uncomfortable: The more shocking

the daydream, the more truthful about us it is. Embrace that truth.

12. Balance- Creating a sense of balance in your piece is similar to creating unity (see the opposite

page), but the repeated element is even more obviously connected to its earlier use.- A classic example: In The Great Gatsby, as F. Scott Fitzgerald introduces us to the

Buchanans in early summer, he emphasizes the breeze blowing through the room, billowing the curtains and the women’s dresses. Later, the same characters seated in the same place are shown in the heat of summer as weighted down, dispirited, languid.

- The connection between these descriptions creates balance and gives the reader a keen (if not necessarily conscious) sense of progression. It also implies that the characters are no longer free and airy, but encumbered by the circumstances that have arisen.

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13. Clarity- Elements:- A stake in the action - Readers need one. Drop the first shoe early to get them

listening for the second, and give them something to care about.- Logic - It’s the most important element of clarity. If you’ve written something that

doesn’t quite connect, try saying, out loud, “What I’m really trying to say is …” and then finish the thought. Sounds crazy, but it usually works.

- Bumps in the Road: Check your work for brilliant phrases that you’d love to use somewhere, anywhere—but that interrupt the momentum. I used to cut and paste my elegant gems into a “futures” file; it rightfully became a cemetery.

- Verbosity: Avoid longish, meandering quotations by paraphrasing. Save the quotation marks for particularly revealing or quotable statements.

- Jargon: Save it for cocktail parties—unless it’s the everyday language of your audience.

14. Effective details- Realize the importance of contradictions.- Exercise: Go to a good people-watching spot or a place you want to describe. What’s

the thing that doesn’t quite belong? Pair one or two more typical attributes of the thing/person/scene with this anomaly, and judge the impression. If it differs from what you meant to describe, figure out what’s missing. Add as few details as possible.

- Often, we read a description and think, If this is there, then that has to be there as well. Many writers then think that both details must be included, but usually the opposite is true.

- Provide the stronger, more typical of the two, and the other is implied; the reader’s mind supplies it automatically

15. Creativity- It is the secret sauce of the writing life.- Tips: A. Switch genres. Write a poem before diving into a narrative piece.- B. Review incomplete writing for a scrap of idea or language; let it lead you in.- C. Keep a file of art, poems, quotes, pressed flowers—whatever ignites your

imagination. Sift through it when you need a spark.- D. Grow your own list of triggers. Repeat what works until it doesn’t; then try

something new.

16. Simplicity- Billy Wonder, film director: Subtlety is good—as long as it’s obvious.

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- Tip: What really matters is whether or not something is clear. Each day, as you revise the pages from your prior writing session, take a few minutes to ask yourself, “Is this clear? Will the reader understand it?” If you’re not sure, revise until the answer is yes.

17. Avoiding clichés - They signal your lack in creativity.- Still, depending on your audience, a well-placed cliché can be more effective than an

explanation.- Solution: Imagine in detail the thoughts and traits of your characters.

18. Communication- For each piece of writing ask yourself: - (1) Who is my audience? Imagine the people you’d most like to reach.

- (2) What do I want the experience and result of this piece to be? What do I want readers to know or believe? How do I want them to feel? What do I want them to do when they’re finished reading?

- (3) How will I measure my ability to deliver on these goals? Workshop it in a writing group? Post it on my blog? Submit it to a publication?

19. Tension- Tension results from two factors: resistance and ambiguity.- Tension results from external or internal opposition to achievement of the goal

(resistance), or uncertainty as to the narrator or character’s understanding of the situation in which he finds himself (ambiguity), specifically its perils (psychological, emotional, physical).

- Advice: In every scene strive to heighten tension by doing one of two things: Enhancing the forces impeding achievement of the goal, or confusing/complicating the narrator or character’s understanding of the situation.

- Practical tip: At the end of every writing session, take time to find and stress those elements within the narrative that serve these purposes. Trim away elements that do not, unless they add necessary color.

20. Evoking emotion- To evoke emotion the reader must be made to feel the situations in the story, to

experience what the characters experience. A case o stimulus-response.- Writers can achieve this effect if they take the sense of sight for granted and

emphasize the other senses, thus crafting multidimensional descriptions and scenes.

- Practical tip: Since details of sight alone almost always create a flat effect so when revising, take a few minutes to make sure that each scene has at least one other sense detail.

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21. Figurative language- Figurative language can enrich our writing, adding nuance and depth, - But figurative language calls attention to itself, it can easily descend to cliché and/or

asks for the reader’s complicity, all of which could break your reader’s focus.- Advice: Use figurative language sparingly, strive to make it fresh, and understand the

implications of the comparisons you’re making (directly or indirectly).- In creating metaphors trust your subconscious -> Risk a reach toward an unlikely

comparison rather than a safe one.

22. Objectivity- The perils of subjectivity arise largely from over-identifying with a subject, narrator

or character in a narrative, and making it (or him or her) the vehicle for a thematic point in which the author himself is overly invested.

- Solutions: - A. Place a trait, belief or habit that is repellent or inexcusable or just plain odd.

(allows a moral and psychological distancing from the character)- B. Rewrite the scene or section from the point of view of someone other than the

object of sympathy (forced disconnect)

23. Revision- Revision: A. Willed by the author himself B. Requested- Practical tips: - (1) Reduce by a third the word count of one of your recent efforts without losing its

essence. - (2) Don’t constantly reread what you’ve written; if you memorize it, self-editing will

be tougher. Put it away for a few days. Then read it fresh.

24. Language- Consider: - 1. Could a different word bring even more energy or resonance to a poignant moment

through sound, subtleties of meaning, or syllabic rhythm? - 2. Could the setting be conveyed more vividly? Is the natural world palpable?- 3. Is the emotional tone consistently resonant? Are there neutral words or passages

that could be more charged?- 4. Does the language powerfully enact the action?-

25. Style- E.B. White: “Style takes its final shape more from attitudes of mind than from

principles of composition.”- The key: Write in a way that comes natural to you.

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- Focus on presenting your piece clearly, in a way that connects with readers.- Practical tip: Imagine a single reader sitting across a table from you. Spend a

half-hour relating your piece to that reader, as clearly and honestly as possible. Spend another half-hour striving to make the piece more clear, more honest, more affecting.

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