My Thoughts and Explanations on Popular Writing Advice

Do you know what is everywhere?  What litters the streets, lingers on sidewalks, and a lot of the time is delivered to people who didn't ask?  You probably read the title, the answer is advice.  Unsolicited advice is given everywhere but that is not what I am going to talk about today.  Instead, I will share my thoughts and explain pieces of advice that I may not listen to all the time, but I did, technically, ask for.  And that is writing advice.   

Most of the pieces of advice I have found are valuable and in general good tips, so I will explain each piece of advice in the best way I can and give examples.  Even if you are not a writer and reading this now I hope you can still find something interesting.  

No. 1: Show Don't Tell 

If you have explored any amount of writing tips or advice on Pinterest or Instagram then you know this is one of the most common sentences thrown around.  Maybe it made sense to you the first time you heard it, but not for me.  It was a while before I really understood what it means to show and not tell in writing. 

He Fainted. I will be using this as an example of telling. 

She saw.  He heard.  She remembered.  He walked.  These are all filters and they are all telling the reader exactly what is happening.  There are times when it is okay to use these filters but in general, you want to exchange them for something more interesting, more vivid.  

Instead of writing he fainted, I could write: the floor swayed beneath his feet and he fell, crashing down to the hard cement floor.  

Only leave what is important, if it doesn't matter that the floor is cement or hard that take that out, those words were in my example but I can't tell you if they would matter to your story or not.  

Instead of she saw I could write: and then a startling scene appeared before her.  

Filter words like she saw or he fainted are undescriptive, that is another reason to avoid them.  You can say so much more by showing your readers rather than telling and by taking out and replacing the filter words.  

'Show don't tell' includes but can also go beyond removing those filter words, if a character dislikes hugs, don't say those specific words but put that character in specific situations where they can show that character trait.  As a reader and a writer, I really enjoy seeing these character traits unfold and grow and change when I have not been explicitly told that a certain character dislikes hugs.  It is much more interesting when a character starts by not enjoying hugs and slowly develops and changes and ends up being okay with them at the end.  

No. 2: Write What You Know and Write Characters Who are Not Like You

I have heard both of these as writing tips: Write what you know and Write what you don't know.  I understand both points of view, write what you know so that your work can be the most authentic and true as you wrote what you have seen and experienced.  It also seems valuable to write about how it feels to bury your toes in the hot sand of the desert even if you have never been to a desert.  Or from the viewpoint of someone Jewish, someone who believes differently than you do.  I think writing from someone's point of view that you may not understand challenges you.  

What shouldn't you do?  You shouldn't jump into something without researching and understanding an event or person that you are writing about.  And you shouldn't make up those situations yourself.  It would be better to research and learn from people who have experienced those things and gauge for yourself if you can step into another person's shoes in that way.  Ask those questions.  Learn if that person would deem it offensive for you to do so.  

#1  Other than that I think it is important to write about what you don't know.  Write about someone who has different beliefs, just because you wrote it, doesn't mean you agree with it.  Most people don't agree with the actions of the villain in the story, but it goes beyond that.  Write a character who is an atheist and who doesn't believe they need religion to be a good person.  Or write a character who follows a different religion than yours or one that you don't know much about.  Use writing to learn more about other people and more about the world.  

No. 3: Change the Weather 

I had a hard time finding a third and final tip to talk about, but I managed.  This is a writing tip that I find really interesting in creative writing.  With creative writing, there are times that it just seems like a scene isn't working and I stumbled upon the tip: Change the weather.  If it's sunny, make it rain.  Describe how a breeze begins to blow through the trees.

This changes the scene and from my personal experience makes it much more interesting to write and get into since something changed.  

Thank you for reading 

That concludes my thoughts and explanations on three pieces of writing advice.  I hope you enjoyed it even if you don't do much creating writing.  Have you ever been given a piece of advice that took a while to set in and for you to understand?