Writing Tips from Veronica Roth (Author of Divergent)

This is a post from an author I admire. She really is young but has taken the world by her work. Damn, Lord knows I wanted to be like her! So here are the writing tips she shared to hear followers. It really works!

My tips involve a series of stages:

STAGE ONE: Word vomit. (Sorry for the graphic image there.) Just write. Don’t reread what you have just written, even if you don’t remember it and you want to check it for consistency. Don’t do it! You will be tempted to edit, and editing before you finish the draft is the enemy of writing progress.

STAGE TWO: Let it sit for a while. This is a good time for you to reconnect with friends and family you may have neglected while writing, and to recharge your writer batteries, so to speak—go out into the world and remember how interesting it, and the people in it, are.

STAGE THREE: Reread, and make notes. I prefer the Microsoft Word in-text comments, but I have also used notebooks. I try to write down big, plot-or-character-shifting things the first time I reread. Like  ”remove this character” or “the end has to happen differently” or “set up this huge plot element earlier in the story.”

STAGE FOUR: Rip draft to shreds. The phrase “murder your darlings” (meaning: the stuff in your manuscript that you love best is probably the stuff that needs to go—and you have to be willing to get rid of it) has been important to me in developing as a writer. I try to make it a big, dramatic event wherein I save my old draft, copy-past the text into a new document, and start deleting huge sections of text. It hurts, but it’s oddly liberating. The story can become something new now—something better than it was before, something it coulding become if you clung to everything.

STAGE FIVE: Start writing again.

Thank you for reading! Pen and Paper! Here we go!