Every writer wants to improve in their craft. These six tips for beginners will help you grow as a beginning writer.
1. Keep a notebook with details of your characters:
Keeping the essential details about your characters together in one place will help you think better and write faster. You can combine character sheets, timelines, and plot notes into one document that allows you to jot down what happens when while keeping track of who said what. This is known as writing organically.
2. Set a goal for daily writing
Before you know it, your imagination can take control and you find yourself spending hours at a time in front of your computer screen, even though there’s no real inspiration going on in your head. This is something which I have seen happen several times with newcomers – they just don’t know when to stop! You should ideally set a target word or page count each day and then try to complete that every day. Try not to go over this throughout the first draft of your novel.
3. Balancing dialogue throughout your story.
It is important to balance your dialogue so that it doesn’t feel like one side of the story has more weight than another. This can be difficult when you have a long stretch without any speech or thought-provoking moments in between characters’ lines, but this will help keep readers engaged with what they’re reading! The goal for every character in a story should be to make the reader feel what they’re going through. To do this, you need your audience’s imagination on full blast.
4. Don’t be a broken record.
Watch out for repetition because it will make you look like a broken record. Style is a vital part of any story, and each writer has their own unique way to tell the tale. The best way to make your writing more engaging and interesting for the reader is by adding some variety to how you describe things. Avoid using words or phrases that have been repetitively used before because this will only result in a lackluster experience from both sides: readers won’t be able to get sufficiently excited about what they’re reading while writers might feel like their work isn’t worth putting time into anymore due solely on sheer repetition.
5. Writing location.
When you are working on your story, it is important that the environment be one where there aren’t any distractions. A journal or piece of paper at hand can help with ideas for what comes next while also serving as an easy way to note down anything else going through your mind when writing them out later; however, if these things aren’t available then try using a napkin from a restaurant – just make sure not to scrawl over anything! A specific workspace will allow you more peace so don’t worry about getting creative- find something comfortable and cozy in whichever room suits you best.
6. Keep going
Sometimes the words won’t come. You’ll think of something brilliant then an hour later, it’s gone, and you have no idea what was wrong or how to fix it! This happens for many reasons: tiredness from waking early in order to start writing; distractions like social media popping up while trying desperately not to refresh your browser out of fear that this might stop any progress made so far…whatever reason applies – just keep going because eventually, things will improve (or at least I hope). The key here isn’t getting discouraged when faced with challenges such as writer’s block.
We know building a platform is hard so we decided to grow a new platform, share the journey, and invite you to start (or restart or continue) to build yours. The big question is, “How do I find ideas for content?” We’re gonna show you.
The focus right now (and has been for a while) is VIDEO.
Creating. Short. Videos.
60 seconds or less. (Tik Tok)
30 seconds or less. (Reels)
10 seconds or less. (IG Stories)
How Do I Find Ideas on What to Post?
Step 1: Research.
Search for your topic (like on Instagram) using the hashtag for the topic and adding the word problems, fails, or guilt.
For example: If a theme/topic in your book is on gardening, use Instagram’s search to look up posts that are talking about it (and see what other hashtags can be used.
As an example, #gardeningproblems has been used 56,000+ times. It’s not going to reach a huge audience since it’s not super popular, but you can look through the posts and find out what problems they had and how you can provide a solution.
Let’s look at another example. Instead of searching for a theme or topic, you can search for audience. If you’re writing to moms, try the same hashtags, but replace garden with mom.
#MomProblems weighs in at over 1 Million posts.
Step 2: Look at the top posts and recent posts and ask yourself some questions:
What topics are they addressing?
How is their audience responding to them?
What type of photos/mediums are they using? (text-based? memes? selfies? nature? Reels? Stories? etc)
Step 3: Make a list of what worked.
Step 4: Create similar content with YOUR spin. Your voice. Your experience. All directed and funneled toward YOUR target audience.
That is one of the strategies we’re using, too.
Last week we shared our new @SeriousWriter Tik Tok account and in a few days, our best video had 12.8K views. We just checked and it’s up to 33.1K. 😳…and almost 2K in followers.
That Tik Tok channel is publishing advice from a literary agent’s perspective so we decided to test our methods and create a second account.
Because why not?!
The @SeriousWriterFamily channel is sharing publishing advice from a traditional author’s perspective. We haven’t seen a video grow so fast on there just yet but we’re not doing too shabby: 130 follows and several videos with 500+ views.
So we’re learning. And we’re sharing the process so you can do it, too.
Conversely, we’re sharing similar content over on Instagram. The Reels, which we just started doing, are hovering in the 200 view range, with a couple pulling in 1800 and 2700.
Because we like to do things together and because we didn’t want to wait until our September event to start teaching these strategies, we started the One Video-a-Day Challenge.
The goal: to post one 30-second or less video per day on either IG Reels or Tik Tok (or both).
If you’re S E R I O U S about building your platform, take this challenge with us. Don’t wait any longer. Don’t wait any longer.
June 25, 2021 Update:
There are only 8 spots left in the Intensives track: 4 left in fiction and 1 left in nonfiction. Event details here.
Even if you can’t make it to the intensives, we’re hosting a one-day event on JUST SOCIAL MEDIA and we’re sharing the strategies Cyle has used to grow to almost 300,000 followers across his platform (we were wrong about it only being 100,000 followers, so sorry Cyle!).
Are you feeling stuck trying to grow your platform? Try posting one video-a-day.
Join us for this challenge where you post one video a day on either Tik Tok or Instagram (as a Reel).
We’re starting our Serious Writer Tik Tok channel from ZERO so we thought this would be a great time to grow together.
Here’s what’s going on…
We’ve got lots of info on this in our Facebook group so we’re taking all that content we shared and putting it here, in one spot, for you! Be sure to join the Family Facebook group! Cyle and Bethany (the Serious Writer co-owners) are challenging each other on how many views they get for each video. Side note: Bethany is losing. Bigly.)
We’ve been using the Kajabi platform for several years because it manages almost everything we need for business. It’s truly an all-in-one system for email, website, products, offers, coupons, analytics, and more.
If you’re using a piecemeal system to connect all your funnels and parts, you may want to try Kajabi, which includes:
It can be difficult to attract publishers when you have a small social media presence. No matter whether our age, our ailments, or our life circumstances have gotten in the way, at times writers need to take a step back from growing their platform. This may mean that the platform will diminish or lose followers because they haven’t kept up with it as much.
We’ve know writers who have developed vision problems and where staring at a social media scheduler simply isn’t conducive to their health.
With all this in mind, can we still woo a publisher, especially when our platform has taken a hit? If so, let’s dive into the ways to snag that publisher even when experiencing diminishing returns.
Do what you can
If we’ve learned anything about social media, it’s that once you have it figured out, it changes again. Sometimes people do better with a sporadic posting schedule or they must scale back a significant amount.
Find what works for you and your health. No, you won’t have tens or hundreds of thousands of followers. But you prioritize yourself. After all, you can have millions of followers, but if you don’t write well, a publisher will not want your book.
Publishers care about writing first, speaking of:
Continue to read and write
If you can’t work on platform, continue to write.
And if you cannot write, continue to read.
Publishers do care about platform, but they want, most of all, good writing. So practice and hone those craft skills. You will need those the most.
Explain what happened
Many publishers, having experienced tragedy themselves, will understand your situation. Provide a paragraph of explanation about the dip in platform if they ask.
At the same time, show them how you’ve grown platform before in the past, prior to when you needed to step back. This can show them that you have an entrepreneurial and marketing spirit, even if you can’t exercise it now.
Hire an assistant
Can’t do the work yourself? No worries, hire an assistant to schedule posts for you. We highly recommend reaching out to local colleges for students who are savvy with technology and work for reasonable rates.
That way you can show publishers you still intend to build platform, but may need a little extra help to do it. Don’t worry. Best selling authors hire assistants all the time.
