Today, it's a huge pleasure to have the amazing Sangu Mandanna with us, the author of the amazing The Lost Girl - a brilliant dystopia I'm sure you've heard of and I'm sure you should all read! Anyway, today we have an awesome guest post by Sangu about her bad writing habits. Hope you enjoy it as much as I do!
Now, over to Sangu..
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5 Bad Writing Habits
And, as someone who falls prey to all five,
I can promise you your writing life will be so much less stressful and more
satisfying if you can avoid them. The thing is, some of these things seem okay
until you’ve actually fallen into the habit. Some of them seem insidiously helpful, even. But they’re really,
really not.
1 1. “Hmm, maybe I should
quickly read that last paragraph back…”
Er, no. Don’t. This is my worst habit and
it is, single-handedly, the reason I haven’t finished writing a new first draft
in over two years. Do not ever, ever
fall into the trap of thinking you need to ‘quickly’ check over the last words,
lines, sentences, paragraphs or pages you’ve just written. It’s never quick. If
you’re writing a first draft of something, and you have no pressing reason to
a) send it off to anyone or b) finish that something very soon, there is simply
no need to edit it yet. Obsessive
self-checking and self-editing during the actual writing process will just slow
you down.
It’s what I do. I go back and obsessively
check, read and reread almost everything I write. Eight times out of ten I
can’t get beyond a few paragraphs, if that, without doing this. It means my
writing process is slow. It means I get bogged down with self-doubt and tiny
details and lose heart quickly. It means I would probably have a pretty shiny
first draft by the end of it all and probably wouldn’t need much more editing
after the fact – but that silver lining is simply no use to me when it’s almost
impossible to finish that first draft in the first place.
2. “I don’t have the time
to write today.”
Now I’m not one of those writers who says
you simply have to write every single
day. I don’t think that’s true, or necessarily productive (it hasn’t worked for
me, anyway, but if it works for you that’s great!) But I do think it’s very
easy to fall into the trap of using time, or a lack thereof, as an excuse. And
when you fall out of the habit of writing regularly and into the habit of
thinking ‘there’s not enough time, I’ll do it later’, your writing suffers as a
result. And there’s always time. Five
minutes snatched here and there. An hour before bed when everyone else has gone
to sleep. Writing is not always a joy and it’s easy to avoid the tough, boring
bits if you put your mind to it. So I believe there is always time, if you
choose to make it, and when I tell myself there isn’t it’s usually an excuse
I’m clinging to because I feel lazy, I’m tired, I’m feeling disheartened or,
most often, I’m just putting off a difficult or tedious task.
3. “I wonder what my agent,
editor or crit partner will think of this…”
On the surface, this seems like an okay
habit. After all, you’re being a professional. You’re keeping your audience in
mind. You’re remembering that, if you want to make a career out of this, your
book will hopefully be in the hands of thousands. You have a responsibility to
think about that and take those thousands into account (for writers working on
second books, or series, this pressure can be especially intense).
But don’t. Don’t wonder what anyone will
think. It is much easier said than done (as someone who still does it, I know
this far too well!) but try. Write your book for you, no one else. Worry about your audience, agent, editor and
great-grandma later. Finish the book by writing it just for yourself, with
every awkward sentence, colourful swear word, graphic sex scene and whatever
else you thought was right for your
story. If you start pausing in the middle of a scene, thinking ‘oh, I’m sure my
publisher will think this is too graphic for YA, I’d better tweak that’ and
subsequently making those changes, you will become exceedingly, uncomfortably
self-conscious. I am. I’ve almost forgotten what it’s like to write just for
myself and, if you find yourself feeling like you’re writing with someone
looking over your shoulder, it can strip a lot of the joy away from what was
once a fun, exciting process.
4. “Rules are made to be broken, so I’ll break
‘em!”
I believe ‘rules’ in writing are flexible. That they can and
sometimes should be broken if it serves your story. I think, for example, that
it’s fine to use a comma instead of a semi-colon because that comma will show
you something about your narrator’s voice. It shows rhythm, tone, it shows the
pattern of their speech. But sometimes we break the rules for the wrong reasons
and our work suffers as a result.
Some people break the rules out of
ignorance, because they don’t know the difference between the usage of single
quotation marks and double quotation marks and can’t be bothered to find out.
Some people break the rules because they’re lazy. And some people, like me,
break the rules because they need their words to look right. The same obsessive-compulsive streak that makes me
self-edit so rigorously also makes me stop, fret over and often change a
perfect acceptable and correct word to, perhaps, a more elaborate and
complicated word just because it looks better on the page. Weird, right?
Nevertheless, there are many wrong reasons
to break the rules and doing so puts your work at risk. It makes you – and your
story – look sloppy.
5. “Oh, I don’t need to
check this, it’s fine…”
This is the flip side of #1. Obsessively
self-editing is a bad habit. But not checking your work at all is an equally
naughty habit. My issues with #1 mean I don’t often fall prey to this one, but
now and then it does happen. I think ‘I’ve checked this chapter so often I
don’t need to do it today’. So I just send it off. Or, worse, I think ‘I’ve
written this blog post and it’s now 2AM and I’m tired, so I’ll just send it off
now…’
…and the next thing I know, my mistakes and
typos are public.
What do you think are poor writing habits?
And do you share any of mine?
Thank
you so much for the brilliant guest post, Sangu! It was amazing!
As
for my bad writing habits, hmmm… well, they’re probably one and two – I feel
the need to reread and double check, and then get caught up in wanting to make
changes. Not so good when I’m actually
trying to finish the story! And I was
really bad at finding excuses not to write, until I got a tablet that I can
take anywhere and therefore write on anywhere, anytime. Now I’m more antisocial, though, which is a
bad habit plain and simple!
My
other bad writing habit is the way I overthink everything: I get caught up in
what my characters – minor, minor, minor characters included – would wear, their
favourite colours, foods, etc. Planning
your lead is good, but in-it-for-a-chapter characters really don’t need so much
planning! Also, I can never write in
chronological order – I write scenes that have no logical place but I feel
should go in, because it just explains so much about the characters and world.
Sure, I know my plotline and have most of the first book in order, but
what to do with all these little scenes?
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Well,
those are mine. Let us know yours in the comments! :D
And thanks again to Sangu - I hope you guys enjoyed the post! :)
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Eva’s life is not her own. She is a creation, an abomination – an echo. Made by the Weavers as a copy of someone else, she is expected to replace a girl named Amarra, her ‘other’, if she ever died. Eva studies what Amarra does, what she eats, what it’s like to kiss her boyfriend, Ray. So when Amarra is killed in a car crash, Eva should be ready.
But fifteen years of studying never prepared her for this.
Now she must abandon everything she’s ever known – the guardians who raised her, the boy she’s forbidden to love – to move to India and convince the world that Amarra is still alive ...
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