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Thursday, January 10, 2019

Writing Tips -- 2019 New Years Resolutions For Writers

Here’s a list of New Year’s resolutions (or just writing goals/challenges if you’re like me and don’t exactly make official resolutions). There are a wide variety of them that will be useful to people at varying experience levels, so just pick the ones that appeal or apply to you.


Write 100 words a day, at least.  Preferably on every current WIP.  This one’s great for busy people that have a hard time getting themselves to make progress on their stories.  A hundred words isn’t much at all, so it’s a good way to chip away at projects bit by bit, and as the months go by, there will eventually be a decent amount of writing accomplished.


Write in a different POV style.  This can be in terms of writing a POV you aren’t used to (perhaps you normally write in third person, and want to write in omniscient POV for this challenge.)  Or, this could be in terms of challenging yourself to write in a POV you dislike(maybe you like writing in third person but normally hate writing in first person.  Writing a few short projects in first person could help you learn to write first person in a way that you like or help you figure out exactly why you dislike this POV).


Thoroughly research a different physical condition and write about it.  Again, do your research and write about it in a way that doesn’t disrespect people in real life.  But, let’s say you’ve never written a blind character before. This would be an opportunity to come up with one and explore what it’s like to be in that char’s shoes.  In this case, it would be good to figure out exactly what caused their blindness to make the research more precise.


Take at least one or two of your most prominent characters and give them a Myers-Briggs personality test.  Then, incorporate your findings in the character somehow.  This can be useful because it will force you to consider the character’s habits and thoughts more.  Also, once one understands a character’s personality type, it can be fun to research and incorporate quirks that that personality type is known for.


Research an obscure philosophy and consider adding it to your character’s story world.  Maybe not the entire philosophy, and perhaps in your story world the philosophy would go by a different name, but philosophies have a huge impact on how societies form and how people behave and thus can give worldbuilding a nice kickstart.

Find a culture, philosophy, mindset, species, etc. you’ve invented for your story world that is represented by multiple individuals, then make sure those individuals actually act like individuals.  Even when two people grow up in the same culture and have lots of similarities, they will always have differences that will eventually make a huge difference in their lives.  Extroversion is usually valued to some extent in the United States, for instance, so I’ve learned to get out there and talk to people when need be, but I’m still highly introverted and often avoid unnecessary conversations.  But practically no one will handle social contact in the same way. Different people have different levels of talkativeness, and they also have different types of social situations they will embrace or avoid.

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