Your Own Writing Phrase Book . . . or why it's good to steal from better writers!

I try to always keep a notebook by my side whenever I'm reading, and I suggest you should too. Because you never know when you're going to discover a hidden gem of a word or phrase or even an entire sentence that really strikes an inner chord and that you'll want to remember so you can later implement it into your own writing.

But don't make the mistake I did... at least originally.

Years back, I would either literally underline the piece with a pen and/or dogear the page while attempting to fold the tip of that ear so it pointed to the proper place. At the end of the week I would spend an hour or so struggling with keeping the book open in my lap while writing down all of the specific words or phrases or sentences by hand. This eventually left me with a big pile of papers which contained a random collection and no semblance of order whatsoever to reference them without wasting valuable writing time.

Since then I've wised up and now try to keep a notebook on hand so when I come across a particular something that tickles my fancy I pause and write it down. I've also categorized my notebook so later, when I'm writing, I can easily look up the appropriate word or phrase or sentence.

The specific categories are up to the individual writer, of course. Something like "eyes" or "sad facial expressions" or anything else you prefer to make referencing them fast and easy so you only have to pause briefly before continuing writing.

Now, let me get this important point out of the way: do not plagiarize entire passages!

The reason for making and keeping your own notebook of hidden gems is to help elicit better writing from you, not to copy and paste stolen material from other writers while falsely claiming it as your own.

For instance, the sentence (concocted off the top of my head just now): "He leaned closer by impulse, inhaling the intoxicating scent of her lilac perfume while captured by the mesmerizing allure within the dusky smolder of her beautiful eyes."

Writing this entire sentence into your notebook of hidden gems for later reference provides you a bounty of references:

"He leaned forward by impulse..."

"...inhaling the intoxicating scent of her lilac perfume..."

"...captured by the mesmerizing allure..."

"...the dusky smolder of her beautiful eyes."

Any of these examples extracted from that single sentence can be used in a variety of ways depending upon the scene in which you implement them. Perhaps you only like "...the dusky smolder of her beautiful eyes" and so use that bit to describe a character's eyes while disregarding the rest of the sentence.

And that's perfectly fine!

There are plenty of Writers' Phrase Books available for purchase for this very purpose, though I've found creating your own provides you better reference material, especially so for novice writers because you will be taking the bits and pieces of your hidden gems from your own favorite authors whose writing styles and voices you wish to emulate.

Sometimes we have trouble saying something the way we want to but we can't spit it out the way we need to.

So let better writers help do it for you!

Having a notebook of hidden gems helps to remove that word or phrase or sentence from the tip of your fumbling tongue and place it upon the page.

And there's no rule that you must use the exact phrase, either. In fact, don't. Instead, use what you like, and change or disregard what you don't like.

"He leaned closer by impulse, inhaling the intoxicating scent of her lilac perfume while captured by the mesmerizing allure within the dusky smolder of her beautiful eyes."

This sentence depicting two potential lovers locked in stare and possibly about to kiss can easily translate into an uncomfortable opposite situation of:

"She leaned away instinctively, repulsed by the overwhelming odor of his cheap cologne while alarmed by the intensity within the cruel stare of his lecherous eyes."

Now we have a woman attempting to avoid the unwanted advances of an unattractive man who is obviously making her feel uncomfortable and possibly unsafe. That's a big difference between the two, and all from just changing a handful of words.

Never forget: the translations and applications of your hidden gems are entirely up to you.

Maybe you're reading a fantasy novel and come across the sentence "The wizard cast back his hood, revealing a lined and troubled face" which you, who also happens to be writing your own fantasy novel, thinks such a sentence would provide the perfect descriptor for one of your characters, but yours is a female sorceress so you change it to "The sorceress cast back her hood, revealing a lined and troubled visage."

See what else I did there?

Not only did I swap genders and occupational titles (wizard to sorceress), I also replaced 'face' with 'visage' to give it a little bit of personal flare from my own writing voice.

You can also use this technique to help you improve your skills as a writer.

We take the sentence "The air was charged with ancient power" and, applying my Never Use The Word Was 99% rule, we improve it to "Ancient power charged the air."

This is a stronger and more active sentence now that we've removed the word Was ('was' is passive poison to 99% of every sentence it infects, excluding dialogue) and did a little bit of a switch-a-roo to the remaining words, and it could describe the immediate proximity of your sorceress as she whispers a dangerous and powerful spell, perhaps.

I do suggest once you use a hidden gem in your writing that you mark it with an asterisk so you know for future reference that you've used it before as well how many times.

Having your own writing phrase book will do wonders for your writing. Just be patient, because making one isn't a sprint but a marathon. It should take you years to create and your writing career to maintain, not weeks or even months. Remember not to sit and read with the intent of jotting down every other sentence. The magic of this trick is to only jot down a word or phrase or sentence if it pops out at you while you're reading, something that really strikes an inner chord and makes you take admiring pause.

Also keep in mind that context matters. There'll be plenty of times you'll jot something down in the moment because it gripped you by the feels then later, perhaps weeks or even months, when you come across it in your writing phrase book, it doesn't elicit the same emotional response.

That's okay.

Don't get rid of it, instead try to make it something that grips another reader by the feels when they come across it in your book.

Good luck!

One Measly Hour Per Week . . . or the Easiest way to become an Author!

So you wanna be an author.

Great!

But you don't have the time to become an author.

Single sad Indian tear rolling down upon they cheek.

Or maybe you're just lazy.

Fine.

Or maybe you have absolutely no idea what to actually write about.

That's okay, too.

Because I'm going to let you in on a quick little secret: anybody can write a book, no matter who you are, and no matter how busy or lazy you are.

The #1 surefire easiest way to become an author is to . . . (drumroll please) . . . write a blog!

And it doesn't even matter if anyone reads your blog posts because that part is completely irrelevant.

What does matter is that you write it consistently.

Pick something you love or are interested in and write about it.

Conspiracy theories . . . gardening . . . lifting weights . . . doesn't matter!

So long as you are passionate and knowledgeable about it.

The sole requirement is that you must set aside one hour per week to write.

That's it!

The average person types 40 words per minute.

That's 2,400 words per hour.

Obviously you won't be writing at that speed continuously, so we'll cut it down to less than half, resulting in 1,000 words in one hour.

If you spend one hour per week writing a blog consisting of 1,000 words, with each of your blog posts possessing a common subject that ties them together, then after one year you will have a 52,000+ word book ready for publishing!

I say 52,000 PLUS because almost certainly you will write more than 1,000 words during many of your weekly writing sessions across an entire year.

I've done this myself with my book 'On Writing Well' which is a collection of my writing advice blogs, though because I also write plenty of other books, I only have the time to post one blog per month.

But you will bump up that frequency to once per week since you do no other writing.

One measly hour per week.

1,000+ words per hour.

52 weeks a year.

Equals a 52,000+ word book.

Now just gather all of your blog posts at the end of the year, arrange them however you see fit, then go the cheapest and easiest route and publish them at no cost to you through someone like Draft2Digital.

Draft2Digital, by the way, is fantastic and far superior to Amazon KDP, in my humble opinion. Amazon KDP is more restrictive to authors, especially its KDP Select program that locks your ebooks into exclusivity with Amazon for 90 days at a time if you choose to enroll your books, meaning you cannot offer them for sale anywhere else or Amazon will block your book if not ban your account if they find out you violated their terms of service.

Draft2Digital, on the other hand, is not exclusive, as well they provide you a plethora of affiliate publishers upon publishing (Barns & Noble, Kobo, Apple, Tolino, Vivlio, Smashwords, Gardners . . . as well as Libraries such as through OverDrive, Odilo, Bibliotheca, Baker & Taylor, Hoopla, BorrowBox, Palace Marketplace . . . subscription services similar to Amazon KDP Select's Kindle Unlimited such as Everand and Kobo Plus . . . and yes, even Amazon itself).

The great thing about publishing through Draft2Digital is that upon publishing your book you simply checkmark any of the boxes of their affiliate publishers and Draft2Digital does all of the submission work for you through its affiliates! The one drawback is that Draft2Digital has no cover creator, but this is easily remedied by using other methods such as Canva, which you need to pay for but is definitely well worth the cost.

With this tried-and-true method anyone can write and publish one book per year for the rest of their life with little effort involved because their book practically writes itself as they blog.

The easiest place to start is writing about your favorite hobby.

Do you love poetry?

Write one poem per week for a total of 52 poems to publish at the end of one year!

Do you love cooking?

Post a recipe blog once per week and after one years' time, voilà, you now have a cookbook!

I could go on and on but you get the point.

It doesn't matter how busy or lazy you are. So long as you have one measly hour per week to write about something you're passionate about, you too can easily become an author without even breaking a sweat.

Good luck!

Holy Hollywood, Batman! . . . or breaking down the general screenplay plot formula

Since some of you are aspiring screenwriters, and because I like to change the pace of these writing blogs every now and again, let's talk screenplays for a moment, shall we?

A typical modern Hollywood screenplay ranges from 90 pages to 120 pages.

1 page of screenplay = 1 minute of screen time.

There are 24 plot points, or major events, in a movie.

Thus each plot point averages 5 pages.

ACT 1: Six Plot Points = 30 pages/minutes long

ACT 2: Twelve Plot Points = 60 pages/minutes long

ACT 3: Six Plot Points = 30 pages/minutes long

In movies there is something that’s colloquially known as the “10 minute rule”. The idea is that after 10 minutes the viewer will generally have a good idea of whether they’ll enjoy the rest of the movie or not and wish to continue watching or abandon it for another one.

The reason it’s called the 10 minute rule is because that’s when the protagonist usually receives their first inkling of the events (a.k.a. the Inciting Incident) that are about to unfold: 10 minutes in.

Usually the 10-minute mark falls conveniently on a point where something exciting or dangerous or intriguing happens and will convince the audience to keep watching in order to find out what happens next.

This important moment of interest, which is meant to evoke immediate viewer curiosity, is also why a plethora of movies open with a prologue-esque action scene (almost always without the protagonist but about the protagonist; for example in Horror movies the 'monster' attacking an innocent victim so we can get a taste of what the ignorant protagonist will later be up against) while relaying a bit of backstory interwoven with a hint of the story’s impending central conflict, and usually consisting of somewhere around 3 to 7 minutes of runtime.

Most commonly the Inciting Incident takes place in movies as either plot point 2 or plot point 3 to ensure it either ends or begins the 10 minute rule of audience interest, though understand the Inciting Incident can take place in any position of plot points 1 thru 3 and this all depends upon your particular story and how you wish to tell it as well if you include a prologue scene.

So how does this all break down?

Each half of an Act is 3 plot points, with the "third" plot point of that half of an Act being its culmination. Think of these 'series of three' plot points as mini-movies that are all interconnected yet each possessing a climax of its own and you get the point.

Typically . . .

The first half of Act 1 culminates with the Inciting Incident.

The second half of Act 1 culminates with the Key Event.

The first half of Act 2A culminates with the Pinch Point.

The second half of Act 2A culminates with the Midpoint.

The first half of Act 2B culminates with the Punch Point.

The second half of Act 2B culminates with the Anchor Point & Rubicon.

The first half of Act 3 culminates with the Highest Stakes Achieved.

The second half of Act 3 culminates with the Climax & Resolution.

*Please note that variables exist, such as the placement of the Rubicon (which typically happens immediately after Act 2B's Anchor Point but not always); my Stomping Kittens companion piece, 'The Great Fiction Cheat Sheet', goes into detail on this specific point with examples, as well explains the important differences between the Inciting Incident and the Key Event in greater depth), or the Act 3 Climax happening sooner so that the aftermath of the Resolution can have more focus applied (all depending upon your particular story), but in general these are the average placements of the general screenplay plot point culminations.

Dicey Trix . . . or Yet Another 1d6 Creative Writing Method

A simple 1d6 (one six-sided die) is all you really need to spice up the creativity of your writing, because you ask it a Yes or No question then roll for result:

1. No, and...

2. No

3. No, but...

4. Yes, but...

5. Yes

6. Yes, and...

For example, let’s say you are a private detective investigating a murder scene and you’re searching for clues about the killer’s identity, so you ask the question, “Do I discover any clues about the killer?” Then you roll your trusty 1d6 for the Yes or No answer:

1. No, and...

The answer is “No” with an added negative twist; you don’t find any clues about the killer, and you realize the bumbling rookie police officer who arrived before you mucked up the crime scene while haphazardly taping it off and scaring away any potential witnesses.

2. No

The answer is a simple default “No” without any added twists or factors; you don’t find any clues about the killer at the crime scene.

3. No, but...

The answer is “No” with an added positive twist; you don’t find any clues about the killer, but you do discover a potential witness lurking nearby.

4. Yes, but...

The answer is “Yes” with an added negative twist; you find a clue about the killer, but it might have been tampered with or could be a possible red herring planted to lead you on a wild goose chase.

5. Yes

The answer is a simple default “Yes” without any added twists or factors; you find a clue about the killer at the crime scene.

6. Yes, and…

The answer is “Yes” with an added positive twist; you find a clue about the killer, and it narrows down the list of suspects to a specific age or race or gender.

You can use this fantastic method of sparking unexpected creativity for practically any situation while writing on the fly. Just pause, ask a Yes or No question, then roll for result!

8 Red Flags of Writing . . . or How Not to be a Failed Writer

1. Not reading and writing every single day: Do you want to know the ‘secret formula’ to becoming a good writer? Read and write for hours every single day for years. That's it. There’s no magic pill to swallow or special product to buy. It just requires two things most people aren't willing to apply: hard work and dedication. It may take you one year or twenty years or anywhere in between, but if you read and write for hours every single day then you will go from a bad writer to a good writer and, if you persist for long enough, eventually a great writer. It really is a simple as that, and don’t let anyone (especially yourself) convince you otherwise.

2. Not having a daily minimum word count: How do you know if you are a lazy writer who isn't taking your writing seriously? 1. if you get less than 1,000 words per day, and 2. if it takes you longer than 3 months to finish your first draft.

The average person types 40 words per minute. That's 2,400 words per hour. Now obviously you're not going to write nonstop like this all of the time, so we'll shrink it down to less than half of that at a bare minimum of 1,000 words per day—not per hour but per day because why not choose the slow and steady tortoise vs. hare route? So we'll go with getting 1,000 words per day written. That's 90,000 words in 3 months for your first draft.

Publishers have long since discovered that the preferred length of the average novel a reader is willing to invest their time and money in is 80,000 words (this of course varies by genre, as well when writing YA or adult fiction) which is why most publishers’ submission guidelines hover somewhere around this 80,000 word mark. And if you spend 3 months banging out that measly 1,000 words per day minimum for a 90,000 word first draft then you're golden like Ponyboy. Now you just need to polish it through revising, rewriting and editing—which you should also set as another 3 months as your goal for a total of 6 months from scratch to finish if you are a serious writer craving authorship. Anything less and you’re just being too lazy to function.

3. Editing while writing: You know who you are. You spend 10 minutes writing then 20 minutes editing what you just wrote, rinse and repeat, all while trying to make everything perfect the first go-around and after several hours you end up having only a couple of pages written at most.

The #1 rule to writing productivity is: write first, edit last.

Stop spinning your wheels by editing while you write because it only slows you down as well you will have to edit your novel again anyways—several times, in fact. Accept that your first draft is not going to be perfect (actually, convincing yourself that it’s going to be nothing more than a steaming pile of crap when you finish it helps relieve you from all the pressure of trying to make it perfect) and this will relax your mind which does creative wonders for your writing.

4. Procrastinating out the wazoo: Do you know what you’re doing by spending months or even years writing all of that backstory and world-building and charting family trees for every character and blah blah blah? You are convincing yourself that you’re writing when you are not actually writing. In other words you are procrastinating. Stop. First, most of that stuff isn’t even going to be in your finished novel but for brief references. Secondly, your job is to get us to care about your characters as soon as possible by establishing empathy and relatability, and until then we won’t care about the long and rich tapestry you’ve woven as their backstory. Sorry to break the news to you but that’s the truth. When you hit your readers from page one with block after block of boring backstory they will skip ahead if not close your book and pick a new one to read. Remember, if your backstory is so damn important then it wouldn't be backstory, it would be the story.

5. Using NaNoWriMo as your only excuse for writing: If you take your writing seriously then every month to you should be NaNoWriMo. I know so many unsuccessful writers who are lazy all year long and only write sporadically then get excited come October that they are going to write every single day when November starts. News flash: there’s nothing special about November! Again, if you take your writing seriously then every month to you should be NaNoWriMo.

An easy solution for those of you full of ‘too busy’ excuses: go to sleep half an hour later and wake up half an hour earlier. This gives you one hour of writing per day.

6. Planning too far ahead: I get it; you love reading series or trilogies and you want to write one right off the bat as your first go-around but you’ve never written or published anything before. I applaud your enthusiasm, I really do, but you’re putting the cart miles ahead of the horse.

A fun fact I adore about writing is that things will change while writing. All of those wonderful books you’ve spent weeks or months or even years outlining ahead of the first one you haven’t even finished yet can suddenly become null and void because a completely unexpected though undeniably superior scene pops into your head while writing or revising the first draft of the first novel in your planned series and demands you insert it for sake of story improvement, thus changing your story from that point forward in drastically unplanned ways because of that delightful moment of wonderful epiphany. This is why I always refer to plot outlines as starting blueprints only; they are not meant to be paint-by-numbers restrictions but a map of possibilities.

Planning too far ahead also leads you down the dark path of leaving things out (events, scenes, situations, characters, whatnot) from your first novel because you want to save them for future novels as yet unwritten while not understanding that you might be hurting your first novel in so doing.

Also, it is much harder to plot out a trilogy than a standalone novel.

I love using the most famous trilogy as example: The Lord of the Rings!

The midpoint of the Fellowship story by itself is the Council of Elrond when Frodo interrupts all of the arguing with his declaration that he will take the One Ring to Mordor . . . though he does not know the way. But for the overall trilogy, the Council of Elrond is not the midpoint but the Act 1 Key Event.

See the problem?

If you do not have a firm grasp on plot, then trying to map out an entire trilogy as well each of its individual books will lead only to confusion because the plot points won’t match up so they’ll get all jumbled in your head.

Even established authors have a hard time writing trilogies—let alone an entire series of novels—because of this, which is why most of them don’t bother.

That's why it is well-advised, at least for your first several novels, to plan them as standalones.

It’s also much harder to get potential readers interested in reading the first book in a series for several reasons. The series isn’t finished yet, and lots of readers prefer to wait until it’s completed before investing their time and money into it. Readers also have to worry about the series never being finished due to the author getting distracted by other projects (here’s looking at you George R. R. Martin) or even the author’s untimely demise because they’re old and accidents both natural and unnatural can happen (Robert Jordan, author of The Wheel of Time fantasy series, is a perfect example, though thankfully Brandon Sanderson swooped in to save the day while writing a great finish to the beloved series after Jordan’s death). As well the reader must worry that they might invest years in reading your unfinished series only to discover halfway through that they hate what you’ve done with the characters and/or story so that they don’t want to continue reading it anymore and now feel they’ve wasted all that time and money on a series they’ll never finish. Also, there exists the very real possibility that you write a mediocre first book and readers just won’t want to continue reading despite all that you’ve planned ahead for them to enjoy.

Focus on one novel at a time and make it the best you possibly can, at least until you get some experience under your belt. Only then should you try tackling writing a trilogy or a series.

7. Not planning ahead at all: Every writer starts out as a pantser so I get it, you mainstay pantsers enjoy not knowing what will happen in your stories until you write it. But there’s two problems with that: 1. failing to plan is planning to fail, and 2. specific plot points are necessary because other plot points demand it.

Picture yourself a comedian, with the Act 3 Climax the punch-line and everything in your story leading up to it the set-up of your new joke.

You tell someone the set-up then hit them with the appropriate punch-line and they get your joke while laughing. Because the punch-line matches the set-up. That is a well-plotted story.

Now take the set-up from one joke and the punch-line from a completely unrelated joke then combine them. When you tell your joke and no one laughs it’s not because they don’t understand your ‘artistic vision’, it’s because the punch-line doesn’t match the set-up so the joke isn’t funny a.k.a. the story makes no sense.

Never blame the reader for your bad story; they didn’t write it, you did.

Imagine Star Wars: A New Hope as the same story we know all the way up to Luke seconds away from blowing up the Death Star. That’s the set-up to your story joke, and because of it you already know the appropriate punch-line is Luke using the Force to make the otherwise impossible shot that blows up the Death Star.

Now imagine the same set-up but with a different punch-line: just before Luke can make the impossible shot, Darth Vader bumps Luke’s X-wing aside and blows up the Death Star instead.

You cannot have a triumphant protagonist set-up paired with a tragic protagonist punch-line (or vice versa) because that story makes no sense a.k.a. the joke isn’t funny because the punch-line doesn’t match the set-up.

8. Not leaving enough room for the reader’s imagination: Stop over-describing everything and everyone and leave plenty of room for the reader’s active imagination to fill in the blanks. This helps personalize your story to that particular reader because we all possess different imaginations drawing from different life experiences.

If I say my protagonist hopped into his ’98 Buick and drove away, one of you might imagine it as a faded-red jalopy babe-repellent sputtering along the road because that’s what you used to drive, while another of you might imagine it as a finely-tuned glossy-black sex-machine that hits zero to sixty in less than 5, or anywhere in between.

Obviously you want to describe all the essentials of your story, but make sure to leave plenty of blanks for the reader’s own imagination to fill in too.

It’s okay to give a simplified description of a character having long blonde hair or sharp blue eyes and leave it at that because the reader’s mind will automatically fill in the blanks while detailing the accompanying features with people they know, and often of themselves if they relate to or empathize with or admire the character enough . . . which is what you truly want to happen for them so they can feel as if experiencing your story firsthand even if only in their active imagination.

Never forget: the true joy of all stories is escapism.

The better the writer, the easier the reader’s suspension of disbelief.