tips for writers Archives - Addicted to Writing

6 Cliché Writing (Career) Tips To Benefit From

Posted on March 6, 2013 Written by Pinar Tarhan

You might remember from my When It’s OK to Use Cliches in Your Writing: Hidden Metaphors – Poison’s Bret Michaels Style post that I am all for clichés that work. That post will be followed up with more working clichés (especially in fiction). But this article is dedicated to classic writing tips.

There are more than 6 of course, but today I’m tackling these 6 popular ones.

– Write about what you know

Not everything you know might be fun or lucrative to write about, but I bet some of your vast knowledge is fun, lucrative or both.

Writing about movies, TV shows and music is incredibly entertaining for me. In addition to running an entertaining blog, I got my first assignments on these subjects too.

Then there is the fact that your internal entertainment trivia database can help in finding many fun references and making your points come across in a more remarkable way. Copyblogger does it. Carol Tice does it. It works, and it comes and flows naturally.

It also fits my category Fictional Writers where I cover writers from movies and TV shows. You might want to start with my latest in that category: The Following: When Both The Protagonist and Antagonist Are Writers.

Other areas where I wrote what I knew and sold articles include traveling, business, freelancing, writing and social media.

– You don’t have to be an expert to write about a topic.

slash-gunsnroses — OK, I’d not have minded having his talent. But what are you gonna do…Slash image via fanpop.com.

You just have to know better than the audience you are targeting. Just like you don’t have to play the guitar like Slash to be able to teach a beginner, you don’t need to be light years ahead from the readers of the market you are targeting.

If this weren’t so, our publishing possibilities and writing income would shrink considerably.

That being said, I wouldn’t mind being an expert writer who could write a bestselling book on my expertise area. There is a reason so many books written by professionals turn out to be great reads. Nope, not all of them are ghost written.

– Write what you don’t know.

Time comes when the alternative gets so popular that it feels weird to call it alternative. Raise your hand if you think Radiohead no longer belongs to the alternative rock bands category.

Just like its counterpart, this is a practical and lucrative tip. Especially if these new areas you’re discovering have anything to do with finance and technology.

You know how to research. You can educate yourself about new areas and end up finding a lot of “what you know” and hopefully “what you love” in the process. My new obsession ares are microexpressions in psychology and neuropsychiatry.

– Write about what you love

I quit my full-time job because a)it wasn’t related to writing b)I hated it.

Now, while I am absolutely addicted to writing, I have no interest in writing about things that I don’t care about, or at least find interesting.

This blog is based on this idea. Writing only about what you love (granted it also depends on which areas you love) might take a longer time when bringing home the big bucks. So you have been warned.

But I found the perfect balance by supporting my writing income with part time teaching. Teaching helps me with being more social (as opposed to the solitariness of writing) and prevents me from taking jobs that don’t excite me. Win-win. Oh, and it also worked as an article idea.

– Make yourself familiar with the publication

In other words, research the publication like mad. While it won’t guarantee being published, it is one of your strongest weapons to increase the odds in your favor. Team it up with a great idea, an exciting query and you are good to go.

– Everyone gets rejected.

You’ll get rejected. It sucks, but after a little practice (and some published articles/stories), you’ll learn to shake it off (in a shorter time).

Sure, there might be a writer out there who never gets rejected. But then it is possibly a writer who is not really working. At least not for others.

Even if you’ve eliminated the query process and ensured that clients come and find you, there is a chance not all your ideas won’t knock your clients’ socks off. Statistically speaking.

So yes. I know you heard it before. It’s not personal, and it can be due to a variety of reasons. It is however almost never about your writing skills. It might be about the idea, or how you structured that particular article.

If there is constructive feedback, take it, thank for it, revise and re-slant for another. Yes, there are other reasons but usually the fix is the same: get to the source of the problem (if it is writing skills, that can be improved too), take care of it and don’t let the idea go to waste.

Most ideas can be salvaged through brainstorming, improving and recycling.

So what cliché writing tips work for you? Do you have any favorites?

The Ultimate Cliche of Getting Published Through What You Know

Posted on December 4, 2012 Written by Pinar Tarhan

“Write what you know” is one of the most overly-used advice in writing. It’s such a cliche that you feel like people should stop writing about it already. So why the hell am I doing it?

Because it is a very useful cliche. It works, people take advantage of it and that’s why it has turned into a cliche in the first place. And it has definitely worked for me:

– My first two writing assignments were travel articles on 2 cities I knew well.

– The next one was a 5-piece article series on business management. I have a BA in Business.

– I wrote articles on social media based on everything I had learned blogging.

– I wrote several articles on Freelance Switch, closely related to freelancing.

– My article on writing while holding a part-time job (I loved) got published on Make a Living Writing.

– A city inspired an entire story, while a PR lecture inspired the premise for a novel.

– ……

The list goes on.

As obvious as it is, sometimes we underestimate what we know, or we fail to pitch our knowledge in the most intriguing way.

Brainstorming about things you know is a great exercise for finding ideas but sometimes we can make things a little too broad or narrow. And sometimes we focus on our degrees and researches so much that we forget that what we know also includes our failures, what we have experienced, what others have experienced, what we have seen and so on.

Make a list of areas you’d like to write about. Make a list of what you know, in the broadest sense. Then keep brainstorming, developing ideas, pitching and writing.

I am not saying you should only write what you know. I’m just telling you not to underestimate what you know. It can be a great starting point, whether you are just starting out or just feeling blocked.

It’s not a coincidence that the ultimate bestseller of legal thrillers is John Grisham, who holds a law degree. It’s also not a coincidence that he has gone on to write dramas revolving around baseball since he plays and coaches.

Go ahead. Make your list. You might be surprised about everything you’ve overlooked.

E-book Review: Crafting Unforgettable Characters by K.M. Weiland

Posted on December 24, 2011 Written by Pinar Tarhan

creating-unforgettable-characters — Cover image via kmweiland.com

Like any writer who is passionately and desperately addicted to the act of writing, I love devouring good resources on any aspect of writing, be it fiction or non-fiction. Author K.M. Weiland, whose blog (Wordplay) I discovered while I was going through WritetoDone’s list of Top 10 Blogs for Writers. I can’t say I fell in l love with all of the blogs while some appealed more to me than the others. Weiland’s blog was one of my favorites.

Here’s what I liked about Weiland’s blog:

It is on blogger, so it goes to prove that you can actually have a well-structured, monetized blog even on a free platform. Yes, a hosted blog has its advantages (but also its disadvantages) and her blog looks informative, concise and it possesses all the right widgets. It actually inspired me to take a second look and revitalize my blogger blogs.

P.S. This is not to say she doesn’t own her domain name and run a website under it. You can check her website at kmweiland.com

She offers articles and video. And with her video, she also offers the video transcript so she appeals to different types of readers at the same time. So you can learn a lot about blogging just hanging around her website and observing.

You can browse through her blog posts and pretty much find good tips on whatever problem you are trying to tackle. Instead of generalizing, she has gone to the trouble of giving pros and cons, and examples of good results. One my favorite posts is Most Common Mistakes Series: Are Your Flashbacks Flashy or Flabby? as I am working on a novel with a great deal of flashbacks. Most writers advice against flashbacks, suggesting that only a selected few can actually pull it off.

Well, that is just picking the easy route and generalizing. And guess what, I got the guidance I needed from Weiland’s post without feeling depressed about my choices for my story.

Here’s what I liked about the e-book

– When she talks about creating unforgettable characters, she doesn’t just talk about novels, but she also gives examples from movies. As a movie fan, this makes the advice more memorable to me.

As a writer, I appreciated the fact that she used different examples from different story media- this makes her writing down-to-hearth, diverse and fun.

– Just because she talked about Jason Bourne, it doesn’t mean she doesn’t quote from William Shakespeare. Or Graham Greene. Or Joyce Carol Oates. You get the idea.

– She has included fun and challenging writing prompts that will help not only with our characters, but our plots and future stories as well.

– She has given examples of truly great characters, and the reasons for why we love and remember them. If you have seen/read the work mentioned, you want to go back to it. If you haven’t, you’ve just found something substantial to study. And it makes you visualize.

– You will find at least a couple of useful tips, regardless of what you write, and how your mind works.

– It includes a comprehensive set of questions for you to ask your character.

– It talks about the relationship between theme and character and it also gives guidelines on picking the characters’ names and jobs.

and more.

If I had paid for this book, I definitely wouldn’t have regretted it. This pdf will stay on my laptop, and will be referred to as I keep creating fiction.

I’m off to interviewing my characters now. How’s your character creation going?

What Editors Can Learn from the Movie Up In The Air

Posted on March 30, 2011 Written by Pinar Tarhan

Up in the Air movie poster - starring George Clooney.

Editors are busy people. We get it. They receive a gazillion submissions and manuscripts, most of which aren’t even relevant. We do feel their pain. But then again, for every writer who is too lazy to study the writer’s guidelines, there are many writers who put tremendous effort into researching the magazine, dissecting the guidelines and perfecting that query letter. And there is the endless waiting on the writer’s part, when the writer’s going crazy with all the questions in his head:

-Did they even see the query or did it just get lost in the mail box?

– If they did read the query, did I not get an answer because my e-mail account failed me or because they forgot to reply? Or was it because they just didn’t want to spend time sending out a rejection e-mail?

Did any of these sound familiar? After spending all that time on a query, and spending even more time waiting for the publication’s response time to pass, we are left wondering in the uncertainty of it all. Now, I don’t care how busy the editors are. I want that reply, whether it is positive or negative, right after the response time is over.

This is where the connection (that I made) with the movie Up in the Air comes in. Up in the Air is a romantic comedy/drama starring George Clooney. It is a very bittersweet & entertaining movie and you can read a detailed review (without spoilers) on my entertainment blog. But if you haven’t seen the movie, all you need to know is that George Clooney’s character fires people for a living. If a corporation wants to do the layoffs through an outsider, they get him to do the dirty work. Yes, it is not a pleasant career. And it is not a great moment to hear that you were fired. But it is better to know, as soon as possible, so that you can move on.

With writers, the problem for the most of the time, is that we have to wait weeks, or months to hear we were “hired” or not. Since editors are so busy, wouldn’t it be so find a person who would tell the writers that they simply weren’t right for the job. Writers need to know when they aren’t going to be assigned an article, so that they can pitch the idea to other magazines. Plus, telling someone they are not hired is not as depressing as telling them they are fired.

We need to know. One way or another. So if editors are too busy to reject us, why not let someone else do it? Might be wishful thinking, but I think this idea would actually do both sides a big, fat time-saving favor. What do you think?