Rohan Monteiro's Blog, page 2

To be a writer....WRITE!!

 Folks, Ivemade a copy of this story on Medium. If you like the stark, shiny interfacethat Medium provides, please head over and read the story here. If you wantbleeding cool textures and edgier backgrounds, I dont have it here either , butonly because the buddy I normally rely on for layouts and formatting isguzzling pina coladas on a beach in Goa at the moment and wont be back tillnext month.

Onwards to thearticle...

The problemwith seeking advice from the internet is that people are all too prepared togive it without any thought to how qualified they actually are to be dishingout said advice.

This isespecially true for writing.

You can masterthe intricacies of grammar and bend it to your will, yet good sentences willelude you. You can craft vivid and beautiful plots in your mind but they turninto steaming piles of putrid garbage when they are penned down. And there isabysmally poor advice out there that frankly nobody should listen to, even ifthe writer of said advice has an impressive pedigree. In large part, it isbecause writing is such a personal process. You are attempting to define theboundaries and scope of something vast and limitless like your imagination, andyou are trying to use someone else’s framework.

Good adviceneeds to match your writing style. It's like being given a gun and told to goand now down your enemies. But if your enemy is a nest of cockroaches in yourhome , a gun is just the wrong tool for the job . You’ll probably do moredamage to your house (in this example your manuscript) by shooting gaping holesthrough the structural walls that make it up instead of doing the sensiblething and quietly killing them with a slipper.

What I'mplanning to do here is list what worked for me with the caveat that it may notwork for you. I use adverbs, use the word just, have plenty of to be verbs andpassive voice in my writing. All of these are big no-no’s in the advice givento early writers. I do aim to tweak and fix some of these as much as I can, butoften enough it can happen that the passage in question sounds perfectly fineand editing it for the sake of adhering to a rule doesn’t make sense.

Here are twowriting tips I'm going to share.

Tip #1

The secret tobeing a writer is ..to write. It’s in the name. Be a terrible writer if that iswhat you are meant to be, but be a writer. Set aside an hour a day, preferablyat the same time, and write. Pick a random topic if you don’t have an idea fora novel. Fan fic, a LinkedIn article, an essay about the life of cats or onecritiquing the latest movie/tv show you’ve seen. The effort that goes intowriting isn’t wasted — it all plays a role in honing your craft.

I happen to bea pantser, not a plotter. The result? I have half a dozen abandoned stories onmy laptop that don’t seem to go anywhere. One of them’ s about 30k words,another’s 15k — its tempting to dismiss them as a colossal waste of time, butthey all had a role to play. The habit and discipline of putting words to papermatters a lot more than the craft itself.

Writing Tip #2

This was a gemI found on Reddit and I am copy pasting verbatim

If the readeris invested, you can get away with almost anything. If the reader is notinvested, you can't get away with anything.

In roleplaying, we have something similar. “Nobody minds the railroad, as long as theview is pretty and the destination is Awesometown”. In RPG terms (just in casepeople don’t know) “railroading” is when the game master has their plot thatthey want to force the players to follow, and they’re not really able to decideto alter it in very meaningful ways. Like, if the adventure really hinges onthe players going to the Crypt of Unforeseen Consequences, then the players aregoing to end up there. This is mostly disliked by players.

Unless therailroad is excellent.

(End verbatim)

In otherwords, people don't mind if they are being led by the nose to a destination ina convoluted manner, if the journey is enjoyable. So make it worthwhile. Givethem an emotional hook to the path it's taking. Show what's running through themind of the protagonist as he makes his choices. Don't let him do stupid thingsthat would make the reader think “I would never do something like that” Makehim instead feel “@#$% I didn’t expect that”. Or “@#$% I hope he/she is ok or“#$%% this is an exciting plot twist!! This emotional investment is the mostimportant part of getting the reader onboard.

Good luck andsigning off for now!!