Tag: Writers Tips

Writing

Raise your writing bar – Master how to eliminate that passive voice.

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Passive Voice, Active Voice, Eliminate Passive Voice, Readers Attention, Raise Writing Bar, Professional Writing

An important factor that holds your readers’ attention from the get-go is the voice your article/book/post is written in. Readers prefer active voice sentences and writing in the active voice communicates our message effectively. The active voice makes your writing stronger, less wordy and tiresome. It clearly identifies an action and who is performing that action.

On the other hand, writing in the passive voice which is a common mistake that could easily slip into your writing fails to hold your readers’ interest and simply makes your writing boring and hard to read.

Mastering the skill of writing in the active voice is easier than you anticipated and less tedious than finding those little grammatical errors and typos. One way to know if you are writing in the active or passive voice is to find the subject of the sentence and decide if the subject is doing the action or being acted upon.

How to Recognize and Eliminate Passive Voice

In the active voice, your subject is doing the action.

  1. Jake ran past the man.
  2. Susan cooked the food.

In the passive voice, the subject is acted upon.

  1. The man was run past by Jake.
  2. The food was cooked by Susan.

Reading these two sentences you know that it doesn’t sound natural or seem right.

Another easy giveaway of the passive voice is to look for verbs stuck together. A passive voice adds other helping verbs such as ‘to be, being, has been, will be, are, is, was, were’ to a verb that could stand alone.

You can instantly fix your passive voice by rewriting your sentence so that the subject of your sentence comes before the verb.

Your active voice resembles spoken language. When we speak, we automatically speak in the active voice and our writing should mirror this.

For instance, you would never say:

My bicycle (subject) was ridden (action) to the park by me.

Instead, you would say:

I (subject) rode (action) my bicycle (object) to the park.

As always there’s an exception to the rule where the passive voice is preferable: Read more…

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Writing

Cultivating Your Passion To Write…

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When it comes to something like writing, it’s easy to have all of the brightest ideas in the world when you’re not at home. But, when it comes to getting them on paper, the mind is blank, and motivation has disappeared almost entirely. Of course, though, in a lot of cases, drive to write isn’t just a matter of having ideas. Along with this, you also have to find ways to cultivate your passion and make it into something which doesn’t feel like work. To help you out with this, this post will be going through some of the best tools you can use to achieve this sort of goal.

Before you can start thinking about this, though, it’s a good idea to understand why you’re doing it. People are very simple, at their core. By giving yourself simple queues, while also learning and improving your skills, you will make it a lot easier to feel good about spending an evening behind the laptop. Along with this, these sorts of methods can remove issues like writer’s block. And they can also improve your appreciation for other people’s work, knowing what they have gone through to produce it.

Tools To Use

As something becomes easier and you are making fewer mistakes, it will usually become more enjoyable, as you’re spending less of your time fixing things. Writing is no different, and learning a thing or two could be one of the best ways to help you to stay driven with your next big piece. You can work on your effortless English skills through a variety of methods. Though, online courses and study resources tend to be the best for those with busy lives.

Once you’ve got some learning under your belt, you can start to think about the inspiration you can find from other people’s books. A lot of people find that their drive to write is at its peak when they’re in the middle of a book they really like. Always keep your eyes open for new books to read, as this can be one of the best ways to keep yourself motivated.

Along with the learning, you do throughout your studies, you will also want to continue to learn during your career, too. As a part of this, you should be constantly looking at blogs and other resources to find little hints and tips. This will help you to keep up to date with your skills, and will also help you to avoid slipping into bad habits.

Finally, as a way to get some inspiration, writing prompts can be one of the best tools out there. Being given a concept to go from with your story will help you to avoid the issues found with writer’s block. You can find websites around the web which are dedicated to helping people share their short stories which are built from prompts. Using a tool like this, you can compare your work to others, while also getting some valuable feedback.

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Hopefully, this post will encourage you to take the first steps towards embracing the passion you already have. A lot of people have big ideas for novels or other books throughout their life. But, very few act on this urge and their ideas stay locked within their minds. It doesn’t have to be this way, though, if you’re willing to do the work.

Writing

Don’t Sabotage Your Writing Career Before It Takes Off – Part 4

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Sticking To One Genre Of Writing

Be open to writing other things besides novels. It’s interesting to read and listen to some writers whose basis for measuring other writers’ writing career depends on published novels while leaving novellas, short stories and poetry behind for those whom they term ‘amateur writers.’

Writing, Writing Career, Short Stories, Stories, Novels, Poetry

 

A ‘writing career’ is first and foremost all about writing and earning a living through your writing. Then the second aspect of your writing career is choosing to specialize. Focusing on one area narrows your reach. Some writers struggle to acknowledge themselves as one because they have don’t have published novels in their catalogue thereby underrating their creative channels. Read more…

Writing

Don’t Sabotage Your Writing Career Before It Takes Off – Part 3

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Read The Bestsellers With A Critical Eye

sabotaging writing career - reading best-sellers, cultivate reading habits,

Cultivate Excellent Reading Skills

To become an excellent writer, it doesn’t go without saying that you also have to cultivate excellent reading habits.

No, it’s not enough to read only blog posts and the current rags, but make time for more than the cursory reading of best sellers.

Reading is like an apprenticeship and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with learning from the high achievers of the literary world.

Many people want to become the next big or upcoming author, yet it will amaze you how many of these people don’t bother to read the authors that are successful. I’ve had a number of closet writers tell me that they don’t read best sellers because most of them are rip offs and crap.

Some time ago, I mentioned in a blog post that I was reading ‘A Prisoner of Birth:‘ by Jeffrey Archer, and another blogger went full frontal attack on J. Archer and how he hires a team of writers to do his writing. How he has probably never written a full novel blah, blah.

To say the least, that was a put-off that left a negative impression.

The Quirky Excuses For Not Reading Bestsellers

  • The notion that best sellers are rip-off’s and crap

If the idea of hiring a team of writers to hash out an idea into a book is a crime, then I’ll probably become guilty of such crime myself – hopefully, sometime in the future.

We all know that writing series of best-selling novels is not an easy feat. I’ve not written one yet, but from my writing experience, I can imagine how mentally draining and flat ass working hours are spent constructing such engaging novels.

If a writers life could be made easier by engaging others to help out with a project, then I say ‘good for them,’ besides, they are providing some income to these ghost writers as well as providing grounds for the background writer to hone his/her skills.

When someone takes the pain to describe a best seller as crap, they usually offer lame statements like:

“Oh, I read classics.” There’s absolutely nothing wrong with reading Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, Virginia Woolf, Fitzgerald and the host of dead writers out there, but the problem with this argument is that you can’t enter the huge ever-changing marketplace of books if you don’t know what the trend is and what buyers are looking out for. Read more…

Writing

Essential Writers Tips 8

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Essential Writers tips, Developing story character, Writing, Character traits, story, book, Building believable character, Readers' attention

Developing a Believable Character

Developing your characters for your story or book means getting intimate with these personalities.

Your job as a writer is to give your multiple, complex characters a stage to portray themselves so that others can see who they are.

In order to develop believable characters, you need a road-map of traits that allows you to know more about them than you might even need in your book/story.

Below is a list of things you should consider to flesh out your characters. Read More

Writing

Essential Writers’ Tips 7

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Essential Writers Tips, Improve, Editing, Writer, Professional Writer, Criticism, Alpha Beta Readers, Publishing, Prepare

To Improve, Prepare Yourself For Punishment

A great part of writing and being a writer involves criticism.  A lot of time, we are afraid of having our work scrutinized constructively by others that we pass up opportunities to have them take a carving knife to our revered work.

However, to effectively improve your writing, you have to take certain steps that would certainly cause you to cringe.

If you can afford a professional writer or editor, pay them to look at your work and give you critical feedback without sweetening it. The tougher the criticism, the more helpful for you in the longer run.

The narrow road of the publishing industry is full of rejections and criticisms from publishing houses, editors, agent etc and the sooner your mind opens up to such circumstances the better accustomed you become. Read More

Writing

Essential Writers Tips 6

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Write Dangerously

Telling your best story in the best possible way that you can is the goal of a writer and sometimes this might involve stepping away from conventional writing and taking a risk with your writing.

Risk taking writing pushes your writing out of the box that you’ve nicely fitted it into, to another level.

Grab their attention with that opening line and hold it as you take off from there. In these days of Kindle and fast read, the action gets fast real quick like a jet zooming to take off.

This doesn’t imply that a story shouldn’t have the best calm, soft and gentle opening that’s ever been written, of course, it could, but that opening should be tight and grasp its readers’ attention.

If you are opening up with a love scene, make it sizzle without being off-putting, plant innuendos that make a reader want to know more or even afraid to know more – take a risk and allow your characters to lead their story without stifling and reshaping their thoughts too much. Read More

Writing

ESSENTIAL WRITERS TIPS 5

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Writing, Essential Writers Tips, Fully Present, Experience, Open, Curious, Top Tips, Best Practice, Interactions

Be Open, Be Curious, Be Present

A mind closed in its way of thinking leaves little room for growth. To develop one’s writing capabilities involves keeping the mind open and curious to learn from everything that happens around us because everything is a possible material for your writing.

As a writer, in today’s world where technology has inadvertently affected direct human interactions, it’s become even more pertinent that we are fully present, curious and open to our surroundings. Read More