Short one today.
What’s the two tools you can use to sharpen your fiction writing skills?
Easy.
Twitter. Why? you’ve got a character limit. Novelists can write 250 page grocery shopping lists. Stick them on Twitter for a year, and they learn to be sparing with text. Greatly sparing.
280 characters – but you’ve got to stop at about 70 characters away from the limit. Why? So people can re-tweet your tweet!
And with the pace of Twitter, you have to write at least seven tweets a day. With time demands what they are on EVERYONE, this means you have to think of things to tweet. And to buy yourself time, after three months you can re-tweet something you’ve written before – you just need to re-write it in different words.
Now you’re learning speed, brevity AND how to express a sentence in different ways.
This is a major skill for editing! When an editor hands you back your manuscript with red lines everywhere and “Change this sentence” on it, you now have the skill sets necessary.
Next tool – Screenplay writing.
Why?
Same reasons. We can write 400 words on a bird singing in the garden. In a screenplay, its:
GARDEN – DAY
A bird sings.
That’s a different kind of brevity. One essential skill to learn to write movies or television is getting past the reader. The reader is someone whose job consists of reading one script after another, and writing a synopsis on it, with recommendations. If you want a recommendation besides “pass”, you’ve got to learn in those brief words how to lead the reader down the page.
I don’t have to tell you what kind of impact this will have on your novels.
It takes writing three or four screenplays to really begin to master that kind of economy of words. my first screenplay was kind of like that, but that’s because I didn’t know what I was doing!
To learn how to lead a reader down the page is crucial for a novelist, because now you’ve got to get an agent past the first 30 pages of your novel.
And then you’ve got to get an editor past that.
If you can lead a reader down the page in a novel, you sold a book deal.
And the ultimate test is the person in the grocery store, holding a paper back book in their hands. They open it, read page one, a little of page two, turn a couple of pages, read a little more.
Your entire mortgage depends upon them setting the book in their grocery cart or not.
So get Final Draft or Fade In. Spend some time taking one of your novels and learning how to lead the reader.
you may find yourself published as a result.
