Every writer gets stuck at times: stuck with a creative project, but also stuck in life. Lara Zielin shares a unique tool that she used to turn her life, and her writing, around.

As a writer, I’m always considering what my characters want. I’m always asking what their motivations are. What will make them happy? What is a satisfying story for them?

But I had never really considered the story of my own life. What was my motivation? What would make me happy?

I began asking these questions at the start of 2018 when I realized I was drowning in unhappiness. Things were fine, except they weren’t. I was the heaviest I’d been in years, and I was drinking a lot.

My work writing novels, which had once been thriving, had also dried up, leaving me questioning who in the world I was since being a novelist was the only thing I’d ever wanted to do.

My husband and I were living paycheck to paycheck. And while we liked each other a lot, our relationship wasn’t exactly thriving. I was drinking to numb all kinds of pain, though I probably couldn’t have said exactly where I was hurting at the time.

It just felt like a terrible ache all over.

Turning the Tables on Fiction

That’s when I went back to writing, but I decided to play with the fiction-writing process and the Hero’s Journey. I wanted to test whether writing about the life I wanted to have could actually help it come to pass.

I began a book I unimaginatively titled Lara’s Life. Every day I wrote about myself like a character, and I wrote about the things I wanted to have happen to this person. It wasn’t great prose by any stretch of the imagination and, some days, all I could manage to write were some basic affirmations.

But there was power in this process. Within one year, my life felt markedly different. In practical terms, I lost 20 pounds, and our finances made a U-turn for the better. I stopped drinking.

But beyond that, I went from being half numb in my life to embracing it and living it fully. I feel totally connected to my purpose and on a better path.

While I want to call this work magical, there are three very practical reasons this worked for me, and why it can work for you, too.

1. This writing process fueled pattern recognition

When you write down what you want to have happen to you, it helps you see more clearly the things that are holding you back. The tension is right there on the page for you in real life, the same as it would be for a character.

When I wrote “Lara loves herself,” I could see more clearly all the ways in which I didn’t act that way on a daily basis. That could be everything from beating myself up for not being perfect to having that third glass of wine at night.

The process of writing it highlighted the disparity between my two “characters” and made it crystal clear where I needed to change. This was especially critical when I wanted to tell myself everything was fine, because it forced me to literally see how my two stories were out of alignment (and that fueled better behavior as a result).

2. Writing ourselves in the third person gives us helpful cognitive distance

Dr. James Pennebaker from the University of Texas at Austin has studied the connections between writing and healing for years. His research shows that writing or “storifying” experiences helps people approach what’s happened to them more objectively and can ultimately provide perspective on and understanding of these experiences.

Thinking about ourselves in the third person is also useful for stressful or difficult situations, according to researchers at Michigan State University and the University of Michigan. The third-person perspective helps people think about themselves as they would others, which matters because we’re often much nicer to other people than we are to ourselves. (Raise your hand if you say things to and about yourself that you would never say to another person.)

Alternatively, if we try writing out situations like we’re a character in a book, it can fool our brain and our emotions into believing the narrative a bit more.

3. Physics tells us that behavior and observation are linked

In quantum mechanics, which is the branch of physics that studies the tiniest building blocks of the universe like atoms and quarks, scientists have tried to measure the physical characteristics of subatomic particles, such as position or momentum, but haven’t been able to pin them down. That’s because the mere act of observing the particles changes the experiment.

“A particle simply does not have a precise position before measurement, any more than the ripples of a pond do,” says David J. Griffiths in Introduction to Quantum Mechanics, Second Edition (Pearson Education, 2005).

In other words, scientists theorize that behavior can be influenced by observation.

If scientists may be able to influence how particles behave just by observing them, then it’s not a far stretch to imagine that we influence our lives when we direct energy or thought (or words!) toward specific aspects of it.

“Intention” is the popular word being used these days to describe just that. If reality is perception, then changing the story of what we’re perceiving can absolutely have an impact.

Try This at Home, Kids

If you’re eager to try this for yourself, it’s pretty simple stuff. Get a notebook and grab a pen. Title your story and write what you want to have happen to you, the same as you would a character in a story.

• How does this character feel?
• Where do they travel?
• Who are they with?
• How do they change for the better?

Don’t worry about plotting out the entire arc of the story. The arc will take care of itself. Just write every day like a chapter and put down whatever bubbles up in your heart.

This process changed my life and reignited my creativity. I believe it can do the same for you, too.

Have you considered writing your own hero's journey as a creative prompt? Please leave your thoughts below and join the conversation.

Lara Zielin is a published young adult and romance author. Her nonfiction book Author Your Life is about using the power of writing to create a better story for yourself.

[Journaling image courtesy Hannah Olinger and Unsplash.]

Holes in your plot will cause readers to lose interest. Not a good situation when you're trying to build a readership. Sin Ribbon shares five ways you can easily avoid this and write more compelling stories that have readers glued to the pages.

Story creation is an art. While art is subjective, most can identify a good movie or good painting. We recognize when something took skill and experience to create.

Loving a story is much like falling in love with anything; we can’t point to any one quality that captures our hearts because it’s the way all those elements collide—the gestalt—that speaks to us.

When crafting a narrative, we know the common ingredients: heart and soul, compelling characters, difficult choices, and life-altering conflicts, but there are a few pitfalls that can be avoided along the way.

1. Do the scenes begin in the right places?

A helpful tip is to start each scene as late as possible, even if it’s in the middle of a conversation. You usually don’t need to explain the ins and outs of how characters migrated from one location to another nor include idle conversation. Every scene must convey new information that drives the story forward. Any event that isn’t achieving that goal can be thrown out.

This includes description. While an author should orient readers in a space, avoid details that don’t contribute to the story.

Think of it like a film. If a film shows a close-up of an object, you know it’s important, but if they showed close-ups of everything, it’d be tedious and overwhelming (and probably boring).

Focus your descriptions on the aspects that contribute to character or plot development. For instance, religious texts or horror movies on bookshelves likely convey more relevant information than the style of a couch or type of wood in the dining room table.

2. Are your characters (appropriately) reactionary?

As the author of your work, it’s surprisingly easy to overlook. You’re blazing through a scene, trying to get to the next sequence, but you haven’t stopped to see if your characters have actually reacted to the events or discussed pertinent information with each other.

Because the story is in your head, it’s easy to forget that it’s not in your characters’ heads.

I’ve seen it several times: A minor character is killed or almost killed for dramatic effect, and the story jumps right to the next scene with little regard for the gravity of the situation.

It’s easy to throw fictional lives around on paper, but your readers won’t feel as invested if you dismiss lives (and deaths) as plot devices or statistical numbers. Even if you have to kill off large sums of innocents for your plot, make sure your characters are processing the weight of the situation and that this impact is visible in their development.

The emotional reaction they have will influence the emotional reaction your readers have.

3. Does every effect have a cause?

Piggybacking off that point, this goes for cause and effect as well. Make sure your effects have causes.

Think of it like planting seeds—small pieces of information that grow into trees, branching into various references and effects throughout the story. Every development must be grounded in a source.

Don’t throw a crucial item, detail, or event into the middle of the story just for the sake of convenience; it needs to have a source and path that readers can follow.

This includes a character’s background; if a character is meek and self-conscious or cocky and arrogant, pepper in aspects of the character’s past to explain how this personality developed.

For instance, a character who grew up in a wealthy family might be spoiled or smug, but these qualities aren’t so believable in an impoverished character.

A story is an interconnected web greater than the sum of its parts, but webs can be catastrophic messes or harmonious configurations. Make sure every character action and event have traceable origins and don’t simply occur just because.

4. Do your characters follow a believable path of growth?

Characters will and should evolve. Every good narrative incorporates growth, but there needs to be a direct line between where a character begins and where they end up. Readers need to see the events that led to a character’s change.

This is another element that is sometimes overlooked for convenience. If your character starts out as a naïve teenager and becomes a hardened assassin, multiple events will be necessary to make that transition not just believable but engaging.

Readers want to follow along on your character’s journey, and that includes witnessing the consequences of the character’s experiences and decisions.

Like the rest of us, characters have morals, biases, strengths, weaknesses, skillsets, and limitations, and while these should evolve over the course of the narrative, it’s important a character doesn’t develop a new skill or personality trait overnight. For every change, you the author must answer the question why.

5. Do your readers have a reason to care?

In grad school, I received a useful tidbit of information: “Don’t kill a character the audience doesn’t know.” In other words, before you throw trauma, loss, or hardship at a character (or kill them off), make sure the audience has been given sufficient reason to care about them first.

Characters need to be relatable and perform actions that convey their ethics, personalities, etc. Throwing readers into the drama too quickly can not only be disorienting but fall on indifferent ears.

Take it from George R. R. Martin, the more the audience knows, understands, and relates to a character, the bigger the reaction when said character is forced to walk through the fire (no pun intended).

This doesn’t necessarily mean we need to know the life story of a character before they die, especially one who dies early in a story, but it’s obligatory to establish why that character is important and what their loss means for the story.

I think of stories like vast, ever-changing universes much like our own, and it’s tough to fit something that size in your head while keeping track of everything.

Don’t get discouraged if you don’t catch these things the first, second, or third read-through of your manuscript. It takes time and practice, so keep at it and it’ll get easier to spot the issues.

Are you able to see holes in your plots? Or do you use a developmental editor to help with that? Please leave your thoughts below and join the conversation.

Sin Ribbon is a storyteller on page, canvas, and screen — the author of urban fantasy novel TEN: Part 1 and creator of the award-winning audio drama In Her Burning: A Surreal Diary. An eclectic blend, she draws from the philosophical and spiritual to spin existential tales of encouragement and consequence. Her works originate from the caverns of introspection, exploring identity, origin, loss and depression, and the quest for meaning. Sin uses storytelling to deepen her understanding of the human condition and connect with others through the message of growth.

If you're confused about the difference between tone and voice when it comes to your writing, Dana Sitar is here to explain and to share how they can both be used more skillfully.

You’ll often hear “tone” and “voice” used interchangeably to describe the way you write — but they aren’t the same.

They have distinct effects on your writing, and knowing the difference can help you understand how to write well for your audience.

Like with speaking, voice is something you take with you regardless of the context; your voice might be high, deep, soft, gruff or (sigh) shrill.

Your tone is what you adjust based on the message you want to share; maybe you’re angry, kind, soothing or demanding.

I work with non-fiction writing, so I usually mean your tone and voice. If you write fiction, think about these for your narrator — they’re the one who needs to connect with the audience. For non-fiction, shape your tone and voice based on your brand and message; for fiction think about the norms for your genre.

Why You Should Care about Tone and Voice

These two elements are central to communicating with your audience. Readers understand your words differently depending on how you say them.

Defining tone and voice in your writing also helps you understand who you are as a writer — and, therefore, who you should write for and what you should write about.

For example, my writing voice is pretty casual and simple. I’m not a good fit to write about the stock market for Forbes, but I can comfortably and appropriately demystify basic personal finance for The Penny Hoarder.

Still, if I write about how to dig yourself out of dire medical debt, my tone will be somber compared with the snarky tone I might use to write about how to add wiggle room to your budget by Marie-Kondo-ing your overstuffed closet of designer clothes.

Swapping either one for the other would make the piece difficult for the right reader to connect with.

What Is Your Writing Voice?

Like your speaking voice, your writing voice projects who you are. It’s the personality you put into your writing. You can develop and tweak it over time, but, basically, your voice is you, and you carry it throughout your writing projects.

Your voice helps the reader understand who you are. Are you their friend or their professor? Are you like them, or are you coming into their world with a different perspective? Are you an amateur or an expert?

Before knowing your message, readers will detect your voice, draw conclusions about you as the author and determine whether they’ll read your writing.

How to Develop Your Writing Voice

New writers are often baffled by the idea of developing a writing voice, but we all do it. In fact, before you’ve “developed” a voice, you have one. It’s just probably not unique; it’s probably a cookie-cutter academic or journalistic voice you learned to pass classes or satisfy an editor.

Techniques for breaking that mold and developing your unique voice could fill their own post — or book. But here are a few basic ideas:

Journal. Write by hand on paper regularly to get your raw thoughts on paper with no goals or audience to shape them. Try Julia Cameron’s Morning Pages exercise if you need a kick of motivation.

Follow writing prompts. They force you to apply your own spin and can help you see styles that show up in your writing regardless of the subject.

Read a lot. It’ll expose you to tons of authors’ voices and show you norms in your genre. Reading out-of-the-box authors lets you see unique possibilities — especially helpful if you’re stuck in that academic voice.

Do some ghostwriting. It lets you try on various voices — and get paid! It stretches your muscles and helps you see what fits.

Define your brand. If you’re early in your career, you don’t have to stick to it, but play around with some personal branding exercises (I love this one from Michael Port) to figure out how to approach your writing.

What Is the Tone of Your Writing?

Tone is the attitude you convey in a piece of writing.

While voice lets readers know who you are, your tone can let them know you understand — and care — who they are.

Will you be sarcastic, funny, friendly, formal or argumentative?

The way you write about a subject gives the reader a sense of your relationship to it and why you’re writing about it. It can also signal that you get the reader’s relationship to the subject and what they want to achieve by reading this piece.

I could spend a lot of effort to be funny in a blog post, for example, which could make it entertaining and convey my unique personality. But if I spend too much time making jokes and not enough clearly addressing the topic in the headline, the reader will leave the piece annoyed and disappointed — if they read far enough to care.

How (and Why) to Adjust Your Tone to Different Pieces of Writing

As with any communication, readers will understand your words differently depending on how you say them. Because of that, the tone you choose for your writing should depend on what you want your readers to get out of it.

Readers might misinterpret a sarcastic narrator in a romance novel, because they expect the tone in that genre to be sweet or sexy. They might not get your point in an op-ed if you’re too formal, because that tone doesn’t make room for your feelings on the matter.

To adjust your tone to a piece of writing, start with your unique voice, and ask yourself:
What is the reader’s relationship to the subject? If they’re experts in the field, for example, consider going formal. If they’re onlookers, a friendly tone could make them comfortable with a complicated subject.

What does the reader want to get out of this piece? Your tone should fit the seriousness (or triviality) of that goal.

What tone is typical in this kind of writing? Readers come to your writing with expectations. If your tone isn’t typical for the genre, they should know why.

In what context will the reader see this piece? When, where and how the reader sees your writing affects how they react to it, so set your tone to get your story or message across with that in mind.

Are Your Voice and Tone Right for What You’re Writing?

If you’re ever unsure whether your voice is a fit for what you’re writing or whether you’re setting the wrong tone, always think about the reader.

What are their goals and expectations? Your voice and tone should put them in the right state of mind to pursue those goals and show them you understand those expectations.

Have you given thought to the tone and voice in your writing? Please leave your thoughts below and join the conversation.

Dana Sitar is an editor at The Penny Hoarder, a columnist for Inc. and a freelancer with bylines including Slate, the New York Times and HuffPost. Her free mini ebook, How to Write Anything (Well) gives you the tools you need to understand who your readers (really) are and what it takes to write for them.

[Laughing woman image courtesy Jamie Brown and Unsplash.]

Writers are natural storytellers. We love to create worlds and characters for readers to get lost in. However, we sometimes make the mistake of including too much!

So, what problem areas should writers look for when trimming down their manuscript? In this article, author and YouTuber Tara East gives us some tips.

A thin first draft may be the product of underwriting, including too little detail or action, and a bloated manuscript may be the result of overwriting, including too much! The following five tips are aimed at overwriters, but any manuscript could be improved through these suggestions.

Whether you are an underwriter or an overwriter, the quality of your prose is dependent upon your ability to provide enough information for the reader to comprehend the story, but not so much information that they become bogged down in detail.

A trim and purposeful story will engage readers. A drawn out and sloppy story won’t.

By cutting filter words, tightening sentences, reducing dialogue tags and combining two or more weak characters or scenes together, your writing will become precise, snappy and attention-grabbing. Our ultimate goal as a storyteller is simple: keep the reader reading.

Here are some of the ways you can trim down your manuscript to improve into overall readability and engagement factor.

1. Cut filter words

Filter words are unnecessary words that act as a barrier between the reader and the story’s action. If you are writing in close third person, a common issue is having your main character narrate the actions of another character.

For example, Lauren saw Anthony open the door. This description has greater impact when written as Anthony opened the door.

You may think that removing Lauren’s POV is pretty insignificant in the face of an entire manuscript, but filter words can quickly add up, especially if you’re writing a 150 000 word epic fantasy!

Cutting filter words will not only have a huge impact on your word count, it will also improve the quality of your prose.

Some key filter words to be on the lookout for are: really, very, just, began, started, sudden, see, look, hear, wonder, feel and think.

Whenever these words appear in a sentence, you can usually rewrite it to better effect. For example, She felt really sad, packs a lot more punch when written as, She was devastated, alternatively, you can show the emotion, She crumbled to her knees.

2. Tighten your sentences

Not to be confused with reducing filter words, tightening up your sentences means cutting unnecessary descriptions, purple prose or repetitive sentences.

For example:
The slick black snake gleamed in the morning light as it slithered through the dry grass towards the small, brown, field mouse.

Now, here’s the same sentence tightened up.
The black snake slithered towards the field mouse.

The revised sentence is communicating the same message, but with far fewer words.

Yes, description is important, but you don’t need to spend 22 words describing how a snake is about to eat a mouse. Be selective with your description and make it count. The reader doesn’t need to know the time of day or that the grass is dry in order to comprehend the scene – so cut it.

Another common mistake is repetitive sentences or phrases; lines that say the same things twice, only in slightly different ways. See what I did there?

Some common repetitive phrases are:

• first priority
• I personally
• repeat again

Another example of a repetitive sentence is: She left via the front door and stepped into the morning light. Leaving the warmth of the house, Becky couldn’t recall when she’d last watched a sunrise. You only need one of these sentences – personally I prefer the latter – to tell the reader that Becky has left the house to watch the sunrise.

Another example is including too many body movements. He lifted his head, looked to the left and right, swiped a curl of hair from his eyes and stepped out onto the street. If you have a tendency to make even mundane movements cinematic, then your word count is going to balloon and the prose will be tedious to read.

3. Unnecessary scenes

It’s time to put on your editing hat and ask yourself some hard questions.

Is that four-page dream sequence really necessary?

Is that page long description of your main character’s breakfast routine important?

Maybe they are. But do these descriptions and events warrant this much space on the page?

The general rule is that a scene should either move the plot forward or show character development. Ideally, it should do both.

If you have a scene that is entirely built around showing character development, revealing backstory or giving the reader a glimpse into the protagonist’s interior life, consider moving that into an action scene.

Let’s say your protagonist is sitting on the couch, talking to her best friend about how insecure she feels about being the chosen one. What if you trimmed this conversation down and fit it into the scene where the protagonist is hanging with her team of misfits’ and formulating a plan. Now your scene is working on two levels, the misfits' plan is moving the plot forward and the protagonist’s self-doubt is revealed.

Of course, not every action scene needs these moments of reflection and not every ‘slow’ scene required exterior action. It’s important that the pace of your novel varies: a novel that is all interior is boring and a novel that is all exterior is hollow. The point is, you as the novelist need to be in control of, and intentional about, the purpose of each scene.

If an interior scene can be combined with an external action scene and both would benefit from this revision: do it!

4. Unnecessary characters

You may think that all your characters are necessary, but this is not always the case.

Let’s say that the protagonist is constantly making fun of her best friend’s little brother, but this best friend is also their love interest. In this case, what purpose is the little brother really serving?

If the only purpose of these interactions is to bring comic relief, then consider combining the role of the little brother with that of the best friend.

Not only does this declutter your side characters, it also provides opportunities for the protagonist to playfully interact with the best friend/love interest.

5. Cut down dialogue tags

If two characters are having a conversation, then you don’t need to finish every line of dialogue with he or she said. Yes, you do need to include some dialogue tags, but if you place those attributions in the right place, then your reader will have no problem following along.

Here’s an example:
“Wow! Filter words? I never heard of that before, but it’s totally a thing. My protagonist is always wondering and feeling,” Martin said.
Claire grinned, “Mine too! I’ve started trimming my WIP last night, and I’m already down five thousand words.”
“Ah, I thought your short story was six thousand?”
“Zip it, jerk.”

Whether you are an overwriter or an underwriter, all manuscript can be improved through the cutting of filter words, tightening sentences, reducing dialogue tags and combining weak scenes or characters.

Trimming a wordy draft can feel like an arduous task, but the work will be strengthened if you cut out the unnecessary information and detail.

Your job as a storyteller is to tell a good story. Don’t let the gem that is the core of your narrative become tarnished by excessive prose. Trim your story and gift your readers with a novel that they cannot put down.

Tara East is a writer, blogger and YouTuber. She maintains a weekly writing blog where she reflects upon the creative process; providing advice, tips, tricks, and inspiration in the hopes that these posts will help others on their writing journey. Tara has four degrees and three self-published YA novels under her belt. To find out more, or to sign up for her weekly newsletter, go to taraeast.com.