Quick Fixes: Ways to Improve Your Writing Today

When a person decides to be an athlete or physician or musician, he or she usually expects lots of hard work and no shortcuts. When, then, should people who strive to be writers believe there is a simple answer to unlocking the secrets of creativity and writing a soul-searing work on command?

Strangely, many beginning writers believe just this.

The bitter truth, friends, is that you're going to be working a long time at this writing thing. You're going to write a lot of junk. You're going to work odd hours. You're going to have an ego that is battered and abused as the wreck of the Titanic.

But if you really love writing, it will be worth it.

Sometimes, however, a writer is so close to competency that only a little nudge is needed over the edge. He or she already knows the basics and is a natural storyteller and knows many of the things I discuss in the Web site and comes here to review them.

For those people, only subtle changes are needed.

If you follow the simple guidelines below, you can vastly improve your writing immediately.

• Read your manuscript aloud.
• Cut your manuscript until you can't cut anymore. Then cut another 100 words.
• Simplify your sentences.
• Use one adjective or adverb every two sentences.
• Remove excessive description.
• Replace information with action or events that show it.

Read your manuscript aloud.

No one ever seems to believe this, but reading your work aloud changes everything.

The writing mind and the reading mind have one important difference: the reading mind hears, and the writing mind speaks. It is almost impossible to truly hear your work while writing it; you're only hearing what you mean to say, not what you actually are.

When you read your work aloud, you're stepping back from it. You're listening to it from a new perspective. You'll find out things about your work that you'd never discover otherwise.

Common problems you'll discover when reading aloud include:

• Sentences that are confusing or hard to understand.
• Names that sound or look too similar
• Spelling mistakes (especially words that sound the same but are spelled differently)
• Passages that are long, boring, and superfluous. If you're tempted to skip ahead to get on with it, you've found a problem area.

Perhaps most importantly, you'll detect the nebulous and undescribable problem that the story simply doesn't sound like a story. There's an authorly tone taken by many works that sounds confident and fluid, and you can detect this most easily by reading aloud.

Cut your manuscript until you can't cut anymore. Then cut another 100 words.

The fun of rewriting is that almost any word you remove is good to remove. When you're writing, you're not sure if you're adding the words you should. When you're rewriting, you're always removing the words you should.

Challenge yourself to cut and cut until you are looking at every individual word and weighing its fate like a hanging judge.

Places and things to cut include:

• Adjectives and adverbs. Remove all but one in any given place.
• Whole paragraphs that don't move the story but just sound good.
• Redundant and cliched adjective-noun phrases such as hot sun.
• Words that are usually filler such as that, of, very, about, and like.

Most writers discover what they're writing about as they go. This exploration is the fun of writing. However, you're probably writing two or three sentences that say the same thing in different ways while you're exploring. Look for those clumps and cut to one.

Simplify your sentences.

You're not writing English papers anymore. You no longer have to hide the fact that you don't know what the hell you're talking about with long sentences.

Smaller sentences show confidence in what you're saying. They show efficiency of thought. They help readers speed through your work. The faster a reader can move, the better they'll enjoy the work.

This advice doesn't apply if you're writing for the 19th century idle aristocracy. They've got plenty of time to read books about the migratory patterns of the grouse while the "lower orders" starve.

Oh, wait. They're dead. I guess you'll have to write for this jaded MTV generation instead.

Use one adjective or adverb every two sentences.

This rule seems a bit precise. The point is to reduce your use of modifiers. 80% of them are cliched and unillustrative, anyway. Gray rainy day? Soft skin? Long, flowing hair? They add nothing to your writing. Stalinistically purge them from your writing.

Remove excessive description.

Mumble this sentence until you believe it like your own name:

Only write the important details. No one needs to know it was a wet swamp, a tall building, or a beautiful sunset.

You have one or two details you can present about the important aspects of your story. Choose them wisely.

Replace information with action or events that show it.

No one cares what you or your narrator think. You can only convince your readers by showing them the action. Ma is a drunk? Show her flinging an empty bottle into the crib. Grandpa is a cross-dresser? Show him snapping a new garter belt against his hairy thigh.