You may want to crawl inside the mind of your reader just so you can explore its entirety, every nook and cranny, and find the sweet spot to hit with your words. Read this Xlibris Author Advice sequel inspired by notable psychologist Steven Pinker on exploring the science behind writing to help you write better.
4. You Don’t Have To Play By the Rules (But Try)
Has your use of a conjunction at the beginning of a sentence stabbed your conscience and kept you rolling and tossing in bed, giving you sleepless nights? Does ending a sentence with a preposition feel like cheating on your diet? Dotting your i’s and crossing your t’s is definitely called for in writing. But while pedantry is not a crime, it is downright boring.
There is no tribunal. There’s no rules committee when it comes to English. It’s not like the rules of Major League Baseball which are exactly what the rules committee stipulates them to be. That would just never work with language. There are hundreds of millions of English speakers and they are constantly adding new terms to the language. They’re constantly changing shades of meaning.
5. Read Read Read
Good writers are known to bury their noses in tons of books. Nothing gets in the way of their reading, not even a busy schedule, because they know that reading is to writing as regular exercise is to the body.
I don’t think you could become a good writer unless you spend a lot of time immersed in text allowing you to soak up thousands of idioms and constructions and figures of speech and interesting words, to develop a sense of writing at its best. Becoming a writer requires savoring and reverse-engineering examples of good prose, giving you something to aspire to and allowing you to become sensitive to the hundreds of things that go into a good sentence that couldn’t possibly be spelled out one by one.
6. Good Writing Means Revising
Swallow your writer’s pride and accept that writing is an altogether different business compared to editing. More often than not, you cannot juggle both; hence, you need a second eye to polish your work. Invest in a professional copyediting service to spot overlooked slips and turn your story into a reader-friendly and (almost) bash-proof novel. Here’s another important function of adding finishing touches to your writing:
Much advice on good writing is really advice on revising. Because very few people are smart enough to be able to lay down some semblance of an argument and to express it in clear prose at the same time. Most writers require two passes to accomplish that, And after they’ve got the ideas down, now it’s time to refine and polish. Because the order in which ideas occur to a writer is seldom the same as the order that are best digested by a reader. And often, good writing requires a revising and rearranging the order of what you introduce so that the reader can easily follow it.
Read the prequel of Steven Pinker’s tips to becoming a better writer here.
Get your self-publishing tips and Xlibris author advice from the Xlibris Blog, the Xlibris Indie Authors Roundup, and the Xlibris Writer’s Workshop.