Top Five Tips to Elevate Your Writing
From a Former Big-Five Editor...
Needless to say, I have a lot of writing tips stored up after so many years editing professionally – but if I had to give just five, these are the top tips I would share with authors. If you do all of these (and avoid the things I mentioned in my last post!) you’ll be a long way towards having a really polished book.
1. Read in your genre
Read widely! Read everything! But especially read in your genre. The absolute best way to learn how to write is to unpick how someone else does it, what works and what doesn’t. It is so obvious when someone has written a book in a genre they don’t read themselves – you need to know what readers of that genre expect, what the conventions are, what things you absolutely need to include (or not include) in order to create a satisfying story. And when you know all of that, then you can start to play with the rules to make your novel original and avoid clichés – but you can’t do that until you don’t know what the rules are.
I know that some authors do not like to read – particularly in genre, but sometimes at all – when they are in the middle of writing something. Sometimes this is because they worry they will lose their voice by reading someone else’s, or that they’ll lose faith in their own unedited work when reading something that has been polished to publishable standard. This is fine! Take a break whilst you are in peak writing flow. But do make sure you are well read in your chosen genre.
If you do worry about losing your own voice in the midst of reading someone else’s, that leads me nicely onto my next tip:
