On a sunny day in June 2013, in a quiet Swedish town tucked up against the Baltic Sea, my rescue kitten died.
I missed Djet more than it should be possible to miss a kitten. Despite blood transfusions, hospitalizations, and sleeping on the floor beside him to help him get to the litter box, he crossed the rainbow bridge.
The house was empty without him. Unmoored, I searched for purpose. That was when I remembered the book I had written years earlier and the editorial review I had received that had sent me spiraling into despair. I decided I would rewrite the book as a legacy to Djet’s memory.
How I Wrote My Debut Novel
Four years later, my debut novel was published. It won a slew of awards. I was given an agent via Wattpad (where I had originally serialized the story), who managed a bid from Alibaba to create a full cast dramatization in English and Chinese. It was a magical time.
To this day, the book still sells, even without any marketing.
But I didn’t just sit down at my laptop and out popped my book. (If only!) I ended up writing four versions before it was done. And, I wrote another book to practice one part of the craft so I would have the confidence to do the last round of edits.
I spent ten or more hours a day, every day, learning the craft, writing, falling, and getting up again. Determination to honor Djet’s short existence was a strange motivation, but it kept my nose to the grindstone even when I had to rip everything up and start over again.
Editing My Debut Novel
After I completed my initial revision, I crossed paths with Kath, an editor who was the perfect match for my needs. I couldn’t believe my luck when she took me under her wing: an award-winning author signed with London’s RCW Literary (check out their client list – it will make your eyes water) who also happens to teach the craft of writing at Faber Institute.
If anyone could help me turn my “wooden-puppet two-dimensional characters” into real, living breathing characters, it would be her.
In the four years I worked with her, my whole understanding and approach to writing and storycraft changed. She taught me things she’d learned from other writers, her agent (also an award-winning author), and her editors.
5 Things I Learned About Writing
The five things she taught me are just too good not to share. And so, without further ado, here are the five things I learned from another writer, who’d learned them from other writers.
#1 Always Anchor Your Reader in the First Sentences
Have a quick look at the beginning of this post. From the first sentence, you knew exactly where and when you were and what was happening. There was even a taste of mood, an awfully sad thing happened on a beautiful, sunny day.
One of the most important things you can do for your readers is to anchor them in place and time.
Readers need to know where they are spatially in a story. If you are writing in multiple POVs, then you also need the reader to know whose head they are in, ideally in one or two sentences.
As storytellers, we have a lot of power. The mind doesn’t know the difference between seeing something happen in real time or reading fiction. So long as you give the reader a solid anchor their mind will believe what they are imagining is real.
Each time you start a scene, imagine what it looks like. Walk around the ‘set’ of your scene.
Explore everything. Is there sun streaming through the window and there’s a warm sunny patch your character who’s always cold could stand in? Familiarize yourself with your scene’s dimensions, objects, temperature, and its positives and negatives. Then distill those details into one succinct sentence that takes the reader into your world.
#2 Make Every Word Count
Less is always more. Trust your storytelling. You don’t need to over-describe anything or pepper your dialogue with adverb-filled tags.
There is no better mantra than this: Every word in your story must earn its place. If it can be cut and the sentence holds, cut it. If it can be cut and the sentence is better, you’re already doing it! Now you just need to trim the fat to see how talented you already are.
As writers, we want to be sure we are clear, but clarity comes with sharp, tight prose, not flowery, wordy descriptions.
Cut, cut, cut and your story will bloom.
#3 Keep Dialogue Tags Simple
Remember I mentioned that I wrote another book to practice one aspect of the craft before moving on to the final edit of my book? It was dialogue.
You might be surprised to learn that dialogue is much more powerful than we realize. I had veered into the dreaded adverb territory because I didn’t trust my ability to write strong dialogue.
When your dialogue is strong, you don’t need adverbs to emphasize mood. A good writer can get away with using just ‘said’ or ‘asked’ (or in the present tense: ‘says’ and ‘asks’).
It’s scary to use ‘said’ or ‘asked’ when you really, really want to say ‘she said sarcastically.’ But if you tell yourself you can only use ‘said’, you’ll write the dialogue in a way that your reader will hear the sarcasm in their head.
Also, for some reason, when you use ‘said’ or ‘asked’ the reader’s eyes skim over it, so it doesn’t feel repetitive to them. As long as your dialogue is strong, your tags just keep things neat.
#4 Use All 5 Senses
For some writers, sensory descriptions can seem extra. When you’ve already described your setting, and your character’s violet or cinnamon-colored eyes, shouldn’t it be enough? No. It’s not enough.
Unlocking sound, color, texture, temperature, and scent takes your reader deep into your world. They will believe it’s real because their senses tell them it is.
When your characters are feeling and sensing things most readers will relate to, or at least be able to try to imagine, you’ve got a captive audience.
Now, they are experiencing the clear, warm, Caribbean waters rushing past their feet as they perch on the extra-warm edge of the catamaran, wishing they had brought a towel to sit on. They squint against the diamond-white sparkle of the sun on the waves. The salt in the wind tastes briny on their lips. They drag their fingers through their drying hair, stiff with saltwater. You get the idea.
The trick is to combine your scene setting, character POV, and sensory details in a succinct way. A good exercise to develop this skill is to do this to yourself. Say you are out in a park walking your dog.
Make yourself the character in your story. What are you seeing, feeling, and smelling? Are you warm or cold? Is it windy? Or, are you hot and desperate for a drink of water? Has your dog just run into the lake and come back and shaken itself all over you and now you smell of wet dog?
When you write, you are your character. Be them and experience their world through their senses.
Then, share the most relevant and important parts. Anything that enhances or contradicts the scene’s mood is a bonus. (Like it having been a sunny day when my kitten went over the rainbow bridge).
With this shift in perspective, you will get the hang of allowing yourself to write sensory details into your narrative. In time, it will come naturally to you. You will slip into your character’s world and the story will tell itself.
#5 Read Widely in Your Genre
This one is self-explanatory. If you’re not reading, you’re not gaining insight into what readers are reading, you’re not honing your craft, and you’re not feeding your creativity. Read everything in your genre.
But also absorb marketing copy (clever ways to use words!), Substack thought pieces, and nonfiction. Keep your mind full of words, and the words will come out to play when your fingers hit the keyboard.
The wonderful thing about learning from other writers is they have already walked the path we are walking now. Their wisdom can give us a head start writing the kind of prose that might otherwise take years to reach on our own through trial and error.
Finally, the most important aspect of your journey is to believe in your ability to tell a story and to trust that there will be people who will want to read it.
Happy writing!
Crossposted from the Fictionary Blog