15 years of writing lessons in 144 tips

Number 1, the antagonist isn't the bad guy. So the antagonist is not necessarily the bad guy of your story. The protagonist isn't necessarily the good guy. They are just different forces in your story. There are many scenes in your story where the global protagonist should be the actual antagonist of that particular scene. Whoever is knocking another character's life off balance, they're the one that is acting as the antagonist and the person whose life is getting knocked off balance. They're the protagonist. So think about something like a crime story. In the crime story, there are scenes where your detective is interviewing and interrogating other characters. In those scenes, your global protagonist, the detective, is the antagonist because they are the one knocking somebody's life off balance. They are the one that wants something from somebody else. So in your story, the antagonist and the protagonist are not particular characters. They are forces that often change seats. Number 2, there are 5 commandments that every unit of story from scenes to the global story must abide by. The first is the inciting incident where the protagonist's life is knocked off balance by the antagonist. It's the antagonist making a demand on them. The antagonist doesn't have to be a person. Any force of antagonism can make the demand. Number 2, the turning point where the protagonist refuses to do what the antagonist wants. Number 3, the crisis where the antagonist makes the ultimatum of do what I want or else to the protagonist. This presents the choice to the protagonist. The protagonist either has to do A or do B. And then number 4 is the climax. This is where the protagonist acts on their decision to either do what the antagonist wants them to do or not. And then number 5 is the resolution, when we see how the antagonist responds to the protagonist's choice at The climax. Those are the 5 commandments of storytelling that have to be in every part of your story from the scene all the way up to the global story. Number 3, stop letting your protagonist drive the action. Your protagonist should be responding to attacks from the antagonist. Put them in the responder seat. Something happens to them and they have to react to it. Readers instinctively attach to whoever's life just got disrupted. If your protagonist is the one causing all of the trouble, one of two things happen. Either the reader can't tell who to follow, or the reader attaches to your antagonist instead. Responding doesn't mean that your protagonist is passive. Your protagonist is still chasing what they want through the story. The point is that something keeps hitting them and keeps getting in their way that they have to respond to. If readers tell you they don't care about your protagonist, Check who's driving. 9 times out of 10, it's the protagonist instead of the antagonist. Number 4, cut the social script out of your dialogue. Cut out the dialogue like, how are you? Oh, I'm fine. Great weather today. Start the conversation where it actually matters. If your characters spend half a page being polite and agreeing with each other, cut that half page and get to the part where they start to disagree. Number 5. Bad dialogue is when your characters are talking to the reader instead of talking to each other. Don't put exposition in your dialogue. Most bad dialogue comes from the writer trying to tell the reader something through the dialogue instead of it being what the 2 characters would actually say to each other. Number 6, how subtext actually works. So subtext is the gap between what a character says And what's really going on. Simply put, it's when your characters lie through their words or action. The easiest way to create it is let the reader know something the other character doesn't. Show your character getting laid off. Then when his wife asks how his day was, have him say that it was fine. Once that clicks, you can go further. The character can dodge instead of lie. He can talk about the weather. He can say fine and half believe it. Or you can skip the setup and let the reader piece together what's wrong from the evasions alone. But start with the lie. It's the training wheels for everything else when it comes to subtext. Number 7, make your character's body contradict their mouth. I'm so happy for you, she says as the champagne flute cracks in her grip. When the words and the body disagree, The reader always believes the body. Number 8, choose your genre by the objects of desire, not by what's at stake. Pride and Prejudice has destitution on the line. If Mr. Bennet dies, the girls lose the house. They lose everything. Those are life and death stakes. And yet Pride and Prejudice, still a love story because what everyone in that book is chasing is love. Stakes tell you the pressure. But the objects of desire, the thing your characters are actually trying to get, tells you the genre. So when you're trying to figure out what kind of story you're writing, ask what the characters want, not what they could lose. Number 9, write your theme with a cost attached. Your theme is the one sentence that says what your story is actually about. It's the truth statement. Most writers get as far as something like, justice prevails when you tell the truth. And then they stop. But that's just a fortune cookie. You need to add the cost to it as well. Justice prevails when you tell the truth at the expense of loyalty to those in power. Now it's a claim about the world, and it's a claim someone could actually disagree with. The cost is what turns a slogan into an actual theme of a story. Number 10, give your protagonist and your antagonist the same Buried need. Now underneath the obvious conscious wants of your characters, there's a core need that both the antagonist and the protagonist spend the whole book running from. That shared thing that neither will admit is what makes them a matched pair instead of a hero and an obstacle. Without it, your antagonist is just something in the way, but with it, they're the other half of the same Number 11, separate the want from the need. Your protagonist wants the promotion, but what they need is to see that their kids matter more than their job title. The want is conscious and drives the plot. It's what your protagonist is actually chasing. The need is unconscious and drives the internality of the story. The crisis of your story will be when the protagonist has to choose between what they want and what they need. It's a cautionary story if they choose what they want and prescriptive if they choose what they need. Number 12, let a character say, I'll text you the details. Now you never have to put the details on the page. Your reader jumps straight to what happens next. Anytime you catch yourself writing out the logistics of a plan, ask whether one of your characters could just offer to send it to them later so you don't put your reader through reading logistical things that don't matter to the story. Number 13, your first-person narrator doesn't have to be your protagonist. One detective can narrate a story whose protagonist is the frightened witness sitting across the table from him. The narrator is the voice. The protagonist is the person whose life is on the line and who has to make the choice. Those can be 2 different people, and splitting them gives you a lens you can't get any other way. Number 14, understand the role of order. Chaos and complexity in your writing. Order is when things are predictable and you know what's going to happen next. Chaos is when things are unpredictable and you don't know what's going to happen next. And here's the thing. Too much order is bad. It means nothing ever changes and is stagnant. It is the space of dictators and tyrants. Too much chaos is also bad. You can't plan anything. Everything is off balance. It's the space of monsters. It's the Joker from Batman. Complexity is a healthy mix of the two. Enough order to be able to plan and feel safe, and enough chaos for needed change and growth. Number 15, interesting characters are never complex. Chaos and order. Each of your characters should fall towards one end of the spectrum or the other. In Harry Potter, Hermione is order and Ron is chaos. Snape is order and Hagrid is chaos. The more overly chaotic or overly orderly you make your characters, the more interesting they become. Number 16, 2 characters can use identical chaos for opposite ends. Batman brings chaos to break a city the mob has overly ordered. The Joker brings chaos because he wants everything to burn. Same tactic, opposite goals. If you want 2 characters to feel like mirror images, give them the same tool of chaos or order, but different reasons for picking it up. Number 17, the first-person narrator is always an unreliable narrator. Just like in real life, getting only one perspective means it's going to be slanted towards the view of that person. Lean into this as a writer. Don't try to make the first-person narrator a perfect journalist, just giving the facts. Color it the way they see the world. Number 18, understand why it's so hard to learn how to write. In music, you hear the wrong note instantly when you play it. In writing, when you write something that doesn't work, you don't hear anything. Play a wrong note and you wince. Miscut a joint in woodworking and you see the gap immediately. But if you write a bad scene, there's no way to immediately know. That's why writing every day without feedback Doesn't make you better. It trains your writing ear to your own bad habits, and you get faster at making the same mistakes. Number 19, let the setting show the emotion. So you could have 2 characters that need to talk about what to do with the deceased belongings. One way is to just have it happen on the phone, but that's kind of boring. But put them in the dead daughter's room where her soccer uniform still hangs on the wall, and you've written the grief without a single word about how anyone feels. The setting carries the emotion so the dialogue and action don't have to. Number 20, let the weather track the relationship. If your character's just got devastating news, have it be raining outside. The first big fight happens as the dead leaves swirl in autumn, and the final conversation happens in January when it's cold, gray, and still. Number 21, your protagonist is probably too competent. Too many times writers have their protagonist easily and quickly solve all their problems. This creates flat storytelling where the tension is constantly resolved for the reader, which means they get bored, stop caring about what happens next. Your story is about your protagonist learning a hard lesson and changing. That means most of the problems they run into throughout the story, they shouldn't know how to solve. Number 22, your tense shapes your story. When you choose past tense, it creates distance from the reader. They know the story ends. The narrator survived. When you switch to present tense, it pulls the reader into the story, experiencing it in real time. Hunger Games feels like it's happening to us because it's written in present tense. If you don't know the difference, you don't know which one is right for your story. Number 23, your story should never have 2 characters that want the same thing for the same reasons. When you have 2 characters that have the exact same objects of desire, there is no conflict, which means there is nothing interesting that will actually happen between them. Even characters that want the same thing should have different reasons for wanting it and different ways of going about getting it. 2 cops want the criminal to confess. One wants to obey the law and the other one wants to beat up the criminal to get a confession. Now the story has conflict and it's going to get interesting for the reader. Number 24, the delete test. Take any side character and delete them from your story. If everything unfolds exactly the same way without them, they don't belong in your book anyway. You've got 2 options at that point. Cut them. That's probably what you should do, or Give them a stronger object of desire that is on theme so they actually change what happens. Characters who stand around agreeing with your protagonist are just dead weight on the page. Number 25, give every character a want and something they're afraid to lose. A detective who wants the case solved without breaking the law. A thief who wants one last score without losing his new relationship. That without clause. is where the conflict lives. Every character has to have a clear want, but also something they don't want to have to give up in order to get it. Number 26, it is rude and bad writing to tell your reader how to feel. In life, you can't assign people emotions. You can't walk up to someone and say, be sad now. The page works exactly the same. Stop telling the reader how to feel or how your characters feel. Just show them what happened clearly. And let the emotion arise out of that. If you can't do that, well, that's an area in your writing that you need to improve. Number 27, order your progressive complications by rising cost. Progressive complications are the things that go wrong between the start of a scene and its turning point. Order them by cost. The safest option first, and then each attempt more expensive than the last. This is just like real life. We always try the thing that will cost us the least in order to get what we want or get out of a bad situation. We only try riskier and riskier things when we absolutely have to. It's the same for your protagonist. Number 28, the turning point is the moment your protagonist runs out of options. Your protagonist has tried riskier and riskier things until they run out of ideas, and yet they still don't want to do what the antagonist wants them to do, so They refuse. This is the turning point of your story, which leads to the crisis. The moment when your antagonist gives the ultimatum. If you don't have a turning point, if you don't have a clear refusal of the protagonist to do what the antagonist wants them to do, then the crisis of your story will always fall flat. Number 29, young adult is not a genre. It's more like saying a movie is PG-13. Young adult could be a crime story or an action story or a love story. If that's the case, that means young adult isn't a genre. It doesn't actually tell us what the story is about. All this category does is let you know that there's not too much gratuitous violence or too much gratuitous sex or anything like that. So it's more of a movie rating. It's not a genre. Number 30, science fiction and fantasy, also not genres. All it tells me is the setting. It tells me about the world around them. You can tell a thriller, a crime, a romance, an action, a status story, all inside of a sci-fi world or a fantasy world or realism world. It doesn't tell me what the book is actually about. The genre you are writing in is what human value is at stake in the story. Action is life and death. Crime is justice and injustice. Love is love and hate. Sci-fi and fantasy are just like realism. It's just the setting of the story. Number 31. Only one genre gets to drive your story. Your story can have crime in it and romance in it and war in it, but only one value gets to steer the same way only one person can drive the car. Pick the single genre whose value shifts across your whole story and let everything else ride in the back seat. Writers who won't choose end up writing with a story that's convoluted and confusing for the reader. Number 32, genre maps onto human need. You know Maslow's hierarchy of needs? Genre sits right on top of it. Action stories run on survival, life and death. Love stories run on belonging. Performance stories run on esteem. Worldview stories run on self-actualization. So when you're choosing your genre, you're really answering one question. What does my protagonist need the most? Answer that. And the genre picks itself. Number 33, separate practice from performance. In almost every other creative endeavor, we naturally separate practicing something from performing it. We practice alone in our room on the guitar or the piano until we become good enough that we feel comfortable stepping out on stage and playing. We practice woodworking on simple projects we don't actually care about Before we try to create the rocking chair we want to give to our father. However, for some reason in writing, we decide to learn how to write by writing an epic novel that we hope tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people will read. It doesn't make any sense. First, you practice to become good at something, and then when you're good at it, you step out and perform. First, you need to build the skills of writing before you try to write a novel you want to publish. You can't learn how to write. By writing a novel. Number 34, show versus tell is a fundamental skill of writing. You need to be able to show the reader what is happening, what a camera with a microphone could pick up, so they know exactly what you mean without you telling them what you mean. Don't tell me someone is mad or sad. Just show me someone being mad or sad and let me, the reader, figure it out all by myself. Don't tell me a marriage or friendship is over. Show me 2 people acting in a way where I realize on my own what happened. If you can't do this, you aren't a writer yet. Number 35, know the difference between good and bad adverbs. First, most adverbs can be cut by just picking better verbs. Don't say the dog was brutally killed. Say that it was slaughtered. Second, only add an adverb if you can't pick a better verb. And the reader absolutely needs to know the information that you put in that advert. Number 36, mix up your protagonist's status in different groups. Your protagonist should be part of different groups and their status should be different in each of the groups. A character who's the boss at work and the family joke at the Thanksgiving dinner is a person a reader will care about. The kid that is a star on the baseball team, but can't get a girlfriend. Every character needs to have a mix of statuses based on what groups they are in so the reader can learn who they are based on different social pressures. Number 37, build characters with like X, but Y. To build interesting characters that are believable, start with a real person and then twist just one thing. Your old boss, but a man. Your childhood best friend, but a sociopath. Here's why this works. Left to your own devices, you will write versions of yourself over and over, or you'll write characters that are too thin and aren't 3-dimensional because your own perspective is the only one you have on tap. Stealing a real person's patterns and then just bending one dial is the fastest way to building a truthful character. Number 38, there is no such thing as pantsing a novel that works. Writers that do it successfully are following a structure and pattern that they know intuitively Because they have done it so many times before. It's like saying you are pantsing your drive to work. No, the first couple times you had to follow a map and then you do it intuitively. The reason pantsing isn't working for you is because you have not built the intuitive understanding of story structure yet. Number 39, study your favorite novels to learn the structure and patterns. Take your favorite author, even the ones that say they pants their novels. And read them carefully and keep track of what shows up and when throughout the novel. You'll see the same patterns repeat over and over and you'll learn a ton. Again, this is why they're not pantsing their novels. They're walking a path they've walked before. A good friend of mine wanted to write a children's series of books, so he studied all of the popular ones on the market. He looked at the length of chapters, how many characters, when certain things happened in the book, and so on. And he used that model to write his own series that has now gone on to sell over 1.2 million copies. Deliver your protagonist's vitals through a convention of the setting. Don't just tell the reader what they need to know about your characters. Figure out ways to show it to them in opening scenes in an interesting way. In The Fault in Our Stars, we learn all the facts about Hazel in the first scene when she goes to a support group, because the first thing you do in a support group is introduce yourself. Find the ritual in your setting that would naturally ask for the information and let the ritual do the work so you can show your reader instead of just tell them. Your allies can be antagonists. Trinity and Morpheus are on Neo's side and they spend the entire first act forcing him toward a truth he isn't ready for. Antagonism is any force standing between your protagonist And what they want. It's the force pushing them to change. It's the force in your book that is getting the protagonist to change when they don't want to. Sometimes that force loves them, just like in our own lives. Number 42: A value shift can be tiny. Every single scene has to move the global value of your story from one state towards its opposite. That's the value shift. A dictator declaring war is moving from peace to war. A mother-in-law announcing she's making the turkey this year is also moving from peace to war. If you don't have a value shift in your scene that moves the story significantly forward, then you either need to rewrite that scene or just cut it. Number 43. Here's how to find out if your writing is compelling to readers. Take your first 3 scenes and send it to 6 friends and ask for exactly one thing. Let me know when you want to read the next 3 scenes. Nothing about whether they liked it or what they think of the characters. Nothing about the protagonist or the magic system. Just ask them to let you know when they want to read the next 3 scenes. If you don't hear back from them, your writing isn't good enough yet. No amount of cleaning up the other 90 scenes in your book will fix what the first 3 just told you. Readers don't get to the brilliant third act of your book if the first 3 scenes don't pull them forward and then the next 3 scenes keep them going. Fix those first before you move on. Number 44, before you draft your next scene, write out that your protagonist wants X without having to Y. I want coffee without leaving the house. I want to tell him that I love him without having to say it first. I want the job without moving to Manhattan. That one sentence hands you the rest of the scene. The crisis is when they are forced to choose. They either get X but have to do Y, or they don't get what they want at all. Number 45. Is your global antagonist a monster or a villain? A monster cannot be reasoned with. There's no conversation. It exists only to devour. Take negotiation off the menu and your characters can only run, hide, or fight. And that constraint is what makes horror work. If your monster can be talked to, reasoned with, negotiated with, you've written A villain, and that is a different genre. Number 46, your villain needs a reason they'll never quit. Why won't your antagonist just stop? If you can't answer that in one sentence, you don't have a good antagonist yet. You have just an obstacle. An obstacle can be walked around or walked over. An antagonist keeps coming and keeps attacking. Give them a stated reason they will never quit. ever give up. And suddenly every scene they're in has weight because the reader knows this doesn't end until somebody wins and somebody loses. Number 47, antagonism is anything standing between your protagonist and what they want, which is why an inciting incident, the event that knocks your protagonist's life off balance and starts the story, can be even a good thing like a job offer. Or meeting the love of their life, or your spouse drinking the last of the coffee before you got up. It doesn't have to be the worst thing in the world. It has to wreck the plan and send the protagonist on an unforeseen path. Number 48, show status shifts. Don't name them. The intern is now sitting at the boardroom table instead of in the metal chair by the wall. Johnny gets picked last for the team instead of first. Set up the status shift by having your character at the bottom or the top of a pecking order. And then show them in a new place. Number 49: A-P-A-P-A is the pattern of a scene. The antagonist creates the inciting incident by making a demand on the protagonist. The protagonist refuses at the turning point. The antagonist responds with an ultimatum at the crisis. The protagonist acts on the decision at the climax, and the antagonist decides how to respond to the protagonist's decision. In the resolution. Number 50, don't add adjectives that are unnecessary. If you write the small, cute pug, it's wasting 2 words. A pug is already small and already cute. The reader already knows this, so those 2 adjectives are completely unnecessary. Cut them. However, the mangy pug is new information that can't be carried by the noun, so that adjective earns its place. Pick the concrete noun first, and then only add an adjective if it's new information the reader absolutely needs to know right now. Okay, that's 50 tips. So I'm going to take a quick pause here and just ask, is this helpful? If it is, could you do me a quick favor? Drop a comment and tell me which one is your favorite so far. Just put it down in the comments. I read all the comments and it helps me figure out what to make next. And if you haven't already, like the video, subscribe to the channel because there are almost 100 more of these tips coming, and I'd like more writers to actually see them. All right, let's jump back in. Number 51, your protagonist cannot be the source of the inciting incident. By definition, it's the thing that knocks the protagonist's life off balance. It's an unexpected ball of chaos that knocks the protagonist's life out of balance. So it has to originate somewhere else. If your protagonist wakes up one day and decides to change their life, You don't have an inciting incident and you don't have a working story. Number 52, there are 3 kinds of inciting incidents. Intentional means the inciting incident was directed at the protagonist on purpose. A guy punches your protagonist in the face. Accidental means the inciting incident arose from the environment and unintentionally hit your protagonist. A tornado comes through or somebody trips and spills a drink on your protagonist. Both of those were just an accident. And the third is unknown, meaning the reader is unsure if the inciting incident was intentional or accidental, such as a vaguely rude comment. Number 53, work on what you're worst at. If you're just practicing the things you're already good at, it feels productive, but it's not changing anything. Deliberate practice means you're practicing one specific skill, getting feedback, And then trying it again. And you should be working on the things that you're worst at. This is the only way you improve. The science says if you're having fun while practicing, you probably aren't improving. You're just doing what you're already good at. Number 54: Give 2 characters the same location and opposite realities. 2 characters enter a maternity ward. One remembers the easy, beautiful birth of her firstborn. The other Remembers the horrific moments that led up to her and her partner leaving the hospital empty-handed. Number 55, writing that works is objective, not subjective. Think about music. Playing a wrong note and everyone in the room winces. Nobody has to vote on it. It's the wrong note. Whether you like jazz is subjective. Whether the note is wrong is not. Writing works exactly the same way. There are infinite ways to write a great scene. And there is still a line you can cross where the scene stops working. So before you defend a choice as your artistic style, ask which one you're actually talking about, because there are objectively working stories and objectively not working stories, whether you like them or not. Number 56. If your protagonist can go back to how things were, how they used to be, your antagonism is too weak. Remove the storm from the opening of A Wrinkle in Time and Meg just goes back to sleep. Nothing happens. That's how you know the storm is antagonistic. Every scene has a force of antagonism, and it's not always a person. If your protagonist can easily go back to the way things were at the beginning of the scene, the force of antagonism isn't strong enough yet. Number 57: The stronger the antagonist, the more lovable the protagonist. Readers don't fall in love with characters for being clever or brave. They fall in love Watching someone struggle against odds they can't imagine beating. That's the whole David and Goliath engine. We watch because we cannot picture how David wins. So when readers say they don't care about your protagonist, the fix is often not the protagonist. It's making the antagonist stronger and scarier instead. Number 58, a masterwork is a book a reader makes part of their identity, not one they enjoyed and shelved, one they finish and turn back to page 1 and read again. Those are the books we study because whatever they're doing is working at a level most books never reach. When we say study a masterwork, that's what we mean. Study a book that stays with you long past you finish reading it. Number 59, write your scene so it could survive being lifted out of the book. Hand one scene to a stranger. If they're lost without the previous 200 pages, that's a defect. Not just context. A working scene carries enough of its own setup that a reader could drop in cold and basically follow along with it. If yours can't, fix the scene. Don't just explain the context. Number 60, explain a character's behavior with an anecdote, not a statement. If your reader needs to know something about your protagonist character, please don't just tell them. Put the protagonist in a situation where we see how they react under pressure. In my book, The Shithead, I wanted the reader to know pretty quickly that my character is not the best dad. And so in the opening scene, I put him in a situation where he's choosing between watching soccer, which he cares about, and actually playing with his kids. Just watching him in that situation tells you everything you need to know about him. Number 61, telling creates distance between your reader and the story. When you show the reader what is happening and let them interpret the thoughts and emotions of your characters, you are forcing them to engage engage and be a part of the story. This keeps the reader leaning in and paying attention. When you tell the reader everything, it creates distance from the story and makes it easy for them to put down the book and walk away. It's like putting them in the lobby of a movie theater and just telling them what's happening on the screen instead of just letting them watch it for themselves. Number 62, learn what good telling looks like. Yes, you should be showing almost everything in your story if it's emotionally impactful Show, show, show. Only tell the boring interstitial stuff that your reader absolutely needs to know. Something like, 10 minutes later, she pulled into the driveway. I don't need to see her drive home, so just tell the part and skip to the interesting bits. You know, in fact, if nothing interesting happens in the driveway, you should write, 10 minutes later, she walked in the front door. Number 63, verbs are the most important word choice in every single sentence that you write. Choose verbs that give the reader as much relevant information as possible. Think about the verb killed. She killed the dog. We don't know anything about the killing. Is it good or bad, violent and bloody, or simple and direct? Think about the difference between these 2 sentences: She slaughtered the dog versus she euthanized the dog. The verb choice makes all the difference. Number 64: Specificity creates universality. Don't say he kicked over the empty wine bottles. Not red wine either, or even Merlot. Make it the Two Buck Chuck so the reader knows it's the cheapest wine on the market. And even if you don't know what Two Buck Chuck wine is, it will read more real because it's specific instead of broad. Another example: She's not watching television. She's binging season 3 of The Real Housewives of Orange County. Now you know a lot more about the protagonist based on those specific details. Specificity breeds universality. Number 65: Don't tell your opinion. Show it. In the opening page of A Man Called Ove, this line appears. He stands at the counter of a shop where owners of Japanese cars come to purchase white cables. Now you know what the author and the character thinks about the people that shop at Apple stores. That's so much better than, he looked with contempt at all the young people in the Apple store. Number 66, turn it up to 11. Don't make it kind of a bad day in your character's life. Make it the worst day of their life. Your protagonist didn't meet a good-looking man. Those are a dime a dozen. She met the perfection of a man. Turn the dial up to 11 and your writing will instantly get better and more interesting to the reader. Number 67, your reader and your protagonist don't need the same job, just the same problem. Your reader probably isn't actually a terrified witness trying to decide whether to report the murder she witnessed. However, she is someone that has to decide whether to speak up in a corrupt system or not. Your reader is looking for a problem in your protagonist's life that they can map onto their own experiences. Number 68, structure, plot, and character development is the easy part. Writers spend far too much time planning out their stories instead of learning the basic skills of writing. Can you consistently write a great inciting incident for a scene that hooks the reader? Can you show versus tell? And know the difference? Do you know when to do one over the other? Can you pick great verbs, nouns, and descriptors that keep the narrative moving? The real skill work is at the sentence and scene level, not the global story level. I'm telling you, as somebody who's a writer and an editor, figuring out structure, plot, and character development is not the hard part. It's learning how to write great sentences that build to great scenes that keep Your reader turning pages. Number 69, the protagonist must act reflexively to the inciting incident. What would happen if someone slapped you unexpectedly? You might freeze. You might yelp. You might jerk back. Whatever it is, it would be a reflexive response to something unexpected. What about if someone was extremely rude to you in public, or your spouse started screaming at you as soon as you walked in the front door? Again, you might freeze, you might shrink back, your face may blush. Whatever it is, it would be a reflexive response to something unexpected. This is how your protagonist should act in response to the inciting incident. An inciting incident must be an unexpected event. Therefore, your protagonist shouldn't act thoughtfully or consciously in response. If they do, your inciting incident wasn't bad enough, or you're having your character act Too thoughtfully, too much like complexity. So have your inciting incident knock your protagonist's life off balance, and then have your protagonist act reflexively, not thoughtfully or consciously. Number 70, compress your story's time span and you get tension for free. What if you had to come up with $50,000, but you had a month to do it? Now, what if I told you you only had a week? Now, what if I said you only had one day? Well, actually, what if I told you You only had 1 hour to come up with $50,000. All of a sudden, the tension goes way up. The stress goes way up and your frantic attempts to solve the problem get more and more desperate. The same thing happens in your writing. If you want to add tension to your story, a really simple way to do it is shrink the amount of time your protagonist has to make something happen. Number 71, attach a personal cost to every single decision. I have to miss the meeting is nothing. I have to miss my daughter's final recital after I promised her I wouldn't is a story. Go through your protagonist's decisions and ask what each one personally costs them. If the answer is nothing, the reader has no reason to care which way they choose. Make sure every decision your protagonist makes costs them something meaningful. Number 72, layer an internal stake. Under every single external one. Winning the competition is a plot device. Proving the protagonist is not the failure their father always predicted is why the reader will care. Every external stake, like winning a competition, should have an internal one buried underneath it. Because the reader isn't actually reading to find out if the team wins the big game. She's reading to find out who your protagonist becomes. Whether they win or not. Number 73, you must know your theme. Your theme is the change you want to make in the reader. You want to move the reader from believing X about the world or themselves to believing Y about the world or themselves. My book, The Shithead, was about moving the reader from believing they were a broken piece of shit to believing they are perfect and have everything that they need. Pride and Prejudice is about moving the reader from believing marriage is for money and security To marriage is only for love. The Hobbit is about moving the reader from staying home and safe to going out on adventures, even if they are dangerous. If you can't say your theme in one sentence, your book will become a wandering mess of mixed messages. Number 74, start with a lie you want to expose. George Orwell said he never sat down to produce a work of art. He wrote because there was a lie he wanted to expose. And a fact he wanted people to notice. That's a great place to find your theme. What's the lie the world keeps telling that makes you angry? Start there and you'll never run out of fuel halfway through the draft. Number 75, every character needs to be on theme. The only reason to have a character in your book is to give a different perspective on the theme. The reason Elizabeth Bennet had sisters is so we could see the downfall of throwing off all responsibility for love on one hand to ignoring love and only marrying for status and security on the other. If your character isn't giving a unique perspective on the theme, then they need to be cut or rewritten. Number 76: Build the anti-case for your theme. There should be sympathetic characters who believe the X of your theme, and it's the right decision for them. If this doesn't exist in your story, it will come across as a sermon Not a truth. Number 77: A strong theme buys forgiveness. Readers will overlook plot holes, inconsistencies, and clunky sentences in a book that is clearly saying something meaningful and true. And without a theme, you've written candy. A book people will read, put on the shelf, and immediately forget they ever read. When readers start nitpicking your story's small flaws, the real problem usually isn't the flaws. It's that the book isn't saying anything strong enough to make them look past those flaws. Number 78, write to one person, not a market segment. My book is for fans of young adult fantasy tells you nothing about what belongs in the book. Get down to one specific person. Can you write a book that will change just one person's life? In a story about bullying, is your reader the bully? The victim, or the friend who knows and says nothing. Those are 3 completely different books. And don't write to yourself either. You already learned the lesson. Write to the person who hasn't learned the lesson yet. Number 79, your global antagonist is the mirror image of your global protagonist. In Crazy Rich Asians, Rachel, the protagonist, is facing the choice between holding onto her individuality or conforming to the family and culture. 30 years before the movie started, the antagonist, Rachel's boyfriend's mother, faced the same choice and she made the wrong decision according to your theme. Whatever global crisis your protagonist is facing, your antagonist should have faced it long before the story started and made the opposite decision. Number 80, write Like a ghost. Think about when you're at a restaurant and you're people watching. You can tell which couples are in love and which couples are fighting just by what you can observe by sight. If you want to learn how to show instead of tell, write like a ghost. Imagine you're in your scene, but you're a ghost. You can only write down what you can see, hear, and smell. Nothing else. You can't go into the body or the thoughts of any of the characters. Only write what you can observe. All right. After 80, I had to take a break, which is why it's later in the day. So my background looks different. I'm sorry, but here we go. Let's keep going. We are now on 81. Search your draft for he felt and she was. Do it right now. Every single hit is a spot where you told the reader something instead of showing it. Because he felt anxious becomes drumming fingers and a collar that's suddenly too tight. You don't need to fix every one, but you do need to fix most of them. Actually, you should probably fix them all. If you write he felt or she was, you just wrote something that is telling instead of showing, and you should probably fix it. Number 82, replace the conclusion with the detail that produced it. The amateur writes, I could tell by his handshake that he was up to no good. But the master writes the handshake, a grip that's strong but slithery, coiling around your hand like something That lives under a rock. Don't hand the reader the conclusion. Hand her the evidence and let her reach the conclusion all by herself. She'll trust it way more if she figures out the conclusion by herself based on the details that you gave her. Number 83: Metaphor exists to manufacture something observable. Sometimes the observable world can't actually carry the feeling. That's what figurative language is actually for. So don't tell me she's stressed. Put a semi. Truck on her shoulders and describe the weight of it. That's what figurative language is for in writing. It's to give a picture so that it's still showing instead of telling. If you can't figure out how to show something emotionally meaningful, don't just fall back to telling the reader. Show them a metaphorical picture of it instead. Number 84, give your love story 4 kinds of secrets. Love stories have 4 kinds of secrets. Number 1, what society or the tribe or the culture, what society is hiding from the lovers, what the lovers are hiding from society, what the lovers are hiding from each other, and most importantly, what each lover is hiding from themselves. Number 85, cautionary versus prescriptive stories. There are 2 ways to learn a lesson from somebody else. First, you can watch someone make the wrong decision and see all the terrible consequences of that, and then learn from that. Or you can watch someone make the right decision and see the positive consequences of that. The difference between a cautionary story, learning from someone's mistakes, versus a prescriptive story is at the climax of your story, the big moment of decision. If your protagonist makes the wrong choice, it's cautionary. If they make the right choice, it's prescriptive. Number 86, the skills are the same. The style is different. Pride and Prejudice and Fight Club could not be more different on the surface. However, if you peel the style back, if you peel that voice back, it has the identical skills doing the identical work underneath. The 5 Commandments are there in every scene. There's competing objects of desire, misattuned dialogue. Just like every guitarist has to learn the same chords and notes, whether they play rock or country, you have to learn the same skills no matter what genre you want to write in. Number 87: You already have your voice. My favorite musician of all time is Jack White. I can hear just a few notes of any song he's playing on the guitar, and I know it's him. And yet he's playing the same chords and notes on the same strings as every other guitarist. Too many writers are worried about finding their voice when they should be worrying about learning the fundamental skills of writing. You already have your voice because your voice is the unique way that you see the world. The problem is you don't know how to get that down on paper in the proper way. If you take the time to learn the basic fundamental skills of writing that every writer has to learn, your voice will automatically emerge. Number 88, every character in your book should have more than one social connection to other characters in the book. Every character should be no more than one degree of separation from all of the other characters. I was watching a show last night and the sheriff who was having a run-in with the protagonist ended up being the wife of one of the lawyers for the protagonist. So there's extra social connections. The old college roommate who's also a family friend and now a business competitor. The guy that's in love with his brother's fiancée. The more social connections you give to each character within your story, to other characters within the story, the more conflict and tension will naturally emerge. Number 89, choose the genre from your protagonist's value, not from another character's. The witness fears for his life. The detective is chasing justice, and the detective is who we're following. So every character in the scenes has something at stake But the genre is set by the value of writing on the protagonist's choice. Number 90, stop reading and start studying. Earlier I told you to study your favorite novels for the big patterns. This is the same skill at the scene level. You don't improve your craft of writing just by reading a lot. That doesn't make any sense. There's lots of people reading a lot and they're not getting better at writing. Slow down and analyze what you're reading. Grab a highlighter. Find the inciting incident, the turning point, the crisis, the climax, and the resolution. Identify the antagonist of every scene and name why they are the antagonist. Identify the objects of desire for every single character in every single scene. Count how many words are in each scene. This is how you learn from the great writers, not by passively consuming, but by actively analyzing and studying. Number 91. Stop rewriting and start diagnosing. I heard a pastor say that if you try to fix a problem you don't understand, you'll create a problem you don't know how to fix. This is what you are doing when you're on your 7th draft of something. You keep moving things around, but it's unclear if you're actually fixing anything or just rearranging the furniture in a broken scene to begin with. If you can't clearly identify what is objectively wrong with your writing, you need to build those skills first. Before you try to fix anything. Number 92, ask what your narrator would actually write. If it reads like a police report, you don't get lush setting and flowery language. You get simple verbal structure and the facts. Your narrator is a person with a way of seeing and a way of talking. If you are not extremely clear who is narrating the story and why, your writing will be all over the place and confusing for the reader. Number 93, how to show your protagonist has changed. Whatever the global crisis decision your protagonist must make, have them face a similar crisis early in the story and make the wrong decision. That's how you show that your protagonist has changed. At the beginning, when Obi-Wan Kenobi tells Luke Skywalker he must fight the Empire, Luke says no. And then at the end, he gets in his X-wing and attacks the Death Star. Number 94, every inciting incident has threats hidden to the protagonist. The protagonist always thinks the inciting incident is something they can quickly and easily handle and solve. However, over the course of the story, they realize it's a much bigger problem than they ever imagined. Number 95: Power needs a baseline before it can shift. Last week, Marcus knocked before entering the CEO's office, and then he timidly sat in the chair. Today, He walks in, drops the folder, and takes the chair by the window. Nobody has to say he has leverage now, but that only works because you showed him knocking first. Number 96, power rarely declares itself. It's the pause before someone speaks, the chair they choose, how the conversation changes when they walk in. If you're writing about power just through dialogue, you're using the weakest channel. Show what power looks like based on how people act around the one that is powerful. Number 97, stories are about change. If nothing changes in a unit of story, then nothing has happened and you need to rewrite it or cut it. This works at every level. If I read a scene where the global value doesn't move, then the scene needs to be cut or rewritten. At the same time, if I look at a span of just 5 sentences, That all have global value shifts, but the story goes in a circle and ends up where it started, it still doesn't work. All change should have elements of progressive irreversibility. If the protagonist can easily go back on the change without major consequences, then it wasn't really a change. You have to have stories that have change. Otherwise, it's not a working story. Number 98, progressive complications are a list of riskier moves by the protagonist to get What they want. If you had to come up with $10,000 in the next hour or your child would be murdered, what is the first thing that you would try? If that doesn't work, what's the next thing? If that doesn't work, what's the next thing? Keep asking that question, then look back at your answers. You will naturally pick the least risky thing first, like going to the bank and withdrawing the money, and the next least risky thing next, and so on until the point where you're putting on a mask and robbing a bank In broad daylight. Your protagonist makes decisions the same way. Number 99, give your protagonist a great plan and then destroy it immediately. If you want to see a masterclass in progressive complications, watch any Mission: Impossible movie from Ghost Protocol forward. Every plan is brilliant and every single plan collapses on contact, and Ethan Hunt has to improvise and the excitement climbs. Every single time it happens, a plan that works is boring. A great plan failing leaves a reader desperate to know what happens next. This applies not just to action, but every genre. Number 100: Your setting is a character. It constrains what's possible. It acts as an additional force of antagonism. The culture of the setting, the physical structure of the setting, the way weather and the temperature. The noise, it's all potential forms of antagonism, and you can craft it just like a character. Okay, that's 100. So let me just check in. Are you feeling overwhelmed yet? Is this too much? Because I'll be honest with you, it probably is. This is 100 separate things, and I've got a lot more coming, and it's pulled from decades of work. And there's no version of this where you can take notes on all 100 and then just go apply it to your writing immediately. That's not how skill works. Nobody learns guitar from a list of 100 tips on how to play the guitar. If what you actually want is a path, we put together a free training called 4 Steps to Writing a Publishable Novel. So instead of another list, it gives you the order to do things in and why that order matters. You can go to storygrid.com/workshop or click the link that's down in the description, and I'll see you there. All right. Let's get back into it. Number 101. There is something worse than death for your character. Don't just take your story to death. Take it to damnation. A character whose negligence killed an innocent person lives every subsequent day in a private hell. Death would be a mercy. Number 102. Your protagonist and antagonist can't both win. Conflict arises when 2 people's objects of desire can't both exist. At the same time. If 2 men are in love with the same woman, they both can't end up with her. If she wants to rob the bank and he wants to keep the bank safe, they both can't get what they want. If you realize both your protagonist and antagonist can have what they want at the same time, you have a problem with your story. Number 103, create the emotion in the reader. Don't tell them about it. I told you earlier that it's rude to tell your reader how to feel. Here's what to do instead. Too many writers write something like, she walked into the room and exploded in fury at the mess he left behind. I'm just telling you what the character feels and why. Instead, write something like this. She tripped over his shoes in the doorway and stumbled forward, falling into the open pizza boxes stacked at the foot of the bed. The empty Miller Lites rattled by his pillow as she pushed herself back to her feet, where she slowly peeled the congealed pepperoni slices off her formerly blemish-free blouse. Now the reader has the rage boil up inside of them on behalf of the protagonist. The reader is in the story instead of passively watching it happen. Number 104, one emotion per scene and make it intense. Pick exactly one emotion you want the reader to feel in this particular scene that you're writing, and then turn it all the way up. They don't feel sad. They feel despair. Not happy. Ecstatic. Not mad. Livid. Then choose every verb. Noun in detail to produce that one feeling in the reader. The same woman entering the same ballroom can read as creepy, wondrous, or sensual without changing a single event. Only the word choice changes. One scene, one emotion turned all the way up. Number 105, give your world a problem. Your setting, the world of your story, should be overly ordered with cracks of chaos or overly chaotic begging for some order. Pick one or the other, but do not make it complex. Number 106: Make your reader disagree with your protagonist. There should be times that your reader strongly disagrees with your protagonist at the climax of scenes. If the reader isn't at some point screaming at your characters to do something different than what they're doing, then your protagonist isn't interesting enough yet. Number 107: Break Your protagonist. If the theme is moving your reader from believing X to believing Y, then your protagonist needs to strongly believe X at the beginning of your story. It needs to be a deeply held belief, and the role of every antagonist of that story is to beat on your protagonist until the belief finally breaks. Number 108, catharsis is that break. The eureka is the thing readers actually came for. It's why we reread the same books. We already know what happens. We come back for the moment the belief breaks because it breaks something in us too. Number 109, trust the feedback. There's this great quote by Bill Hader that says, when people tell you what doesn't work, they're usually right. When they tell you how to fix it, they're usually wrong. He's talking about getting notes on scripts, and it's the best feedback advice I've ever heard. When a reader tells you the middle dragged, believe her. When she tells you to add a car chase, smile and say thank you and ignore her. She's an expert on where your story lost her. She's not an expert on how to fix it. That's your job. Number 110, minimum viable exposition. How do you avoid info dumping on your reader? Only tell them what they absolutely need to know to understand what happens in your story. I know. You've spent years creating your world, but that's not why the reader is here. They're here to be sucked into a story. If they're not wondering what happens next, they're going to stop reading. So only tell the reader what they absolutely need to know. Minimum viable exposition. Number 111, just-in-time exposition. Only tell the reader what they need to know in order to understand what is about to happen next in the story. Don't load them down with all the details at the beginning of the book or the chapter. Instead, weave the exposition into the action and only give it to them so they don't get lost in where the story is going. Just-in-time exposition. Number 112: Learn how to open loops your readers have to close. 19 years before she decided to die. You cannot read that sentence and not keep reading to find out What happened? When you write something that opens a question the reader has to wait for, it keeps the reader turning pages. You should always have open loops that need closing all the way through the final page. Number 113. Start with the action, not the exposition. If nothing happens until page 4, then your book starts on page 4 and the first 3 pages are in the way. Start with something interesting happens and then weave the exposition into it. Number 114. The protagonist has to believe the crisis. When your protagonist risks her life at the end of your story to save her child, it's okay if she actually survives, as long as the reader believes that she believes that she was going to die in the process. If the reader thinks that she didn't actually believe that, then the risk doesn't seem real and the climax won't hit your reader. Number 115. Write what you know, part 1. Anne Tyler wrote most of her books about middle-aged women living in Maryland. She won a Pulitzer Prize. She was, let's guess, a middle-aged woman. Where do you think she lived? Stephen King said, if you're a plumber who enjoys science fiction, you might well consider a novel about a plumber aboard a starship or on an alien planet. My first book was about a man in his 30s with 2 kids, a wife, a mortgage, who lived in Nashville and ran his own business. That's basically describing me. If you're just starting out, I recommend writing something based on the elements of your life which you know best. Number 116, write what you know, part 2. Write what you know also means to write what you emotionally know. Think about the hardest, most painful times in your life. Those moments that almost swallowed you whole, almost destroyed you. The ones that left you teetering at the edge of the abyss. The times in your life when you were deeply disappointed to wake up again in the morning. The legendary sportswriter Red Smith said, writing is easy. You just sit down at the typewriter, open your veins, and bleed. If you wanna write something the reader will deeply care about and remember, then write about the parts of your life that you deeply care about and remember. Number 117, write what you know, part 3. I promise this is the last one. Every time I teach about write what you know, I get some snarky comment About how well I guess J.R.R. Tolkien must have known some hobbits and orcs at some point in his life. So many writers want to write about outlandish fantasy lands and revolutionary science fiction and passionate love affairs, but they've never written about something real that happened to them that would actually move a reader. Why don't you start there and build up to the really hard stuff? Here's what I know for a fact: if you can't write what you know, you definitely can't write. What you don't know. Number 118: Externalize your internal change. Here's the problem with writing straight from your life. The most dramatic thing you've ever lived through probably looked kind of boring from the outside. Leaving my religion was one of the biggest upheavals of my life, and yet if you walked around and followed me, it was me journaling, reading books, listening to audiobooks, talking to friends in coffee shops. Nobody changes their entire worldview. While life is going just fine, but the change itself is invisible. So take the internal transformation, you know, and invent an external story big enough to force it on the page. If you want to take something that happened to you that was internal and make it external, then you gotta come up with a story that makes the external big enough. Number 119, writing every day doesn't make you a good writer. All it does is create a daily habit of repeating your same writing mistakes over and over. Start by learning the craft, then you get to do something creative like writing a novel. Number 120: Know your genre's conventions. Conventions are the things a genre needs in order to tell a coherent story. Imagine walking into a doctor's office, but there's no table with paper on it, no tongue depressors, no medical equipment at all. In It feels more like an insurance office than a doctor's office. You would feel confused and lost and probably leave. It's the same in your genre. If a reader picks up a crime story, but there's no crime in the first couple of scenes, and no detective, and no MacGuffin, and no red herrings, well, it's not a crime story anymore. Number 121. The ending of your story must be surprising but inevitable. This means the reader is surprised by what happens at the end, but On further reflection, realizes this is the only way it could have ended. An easy way to do this is to mirror your inciting incident. In The Martian, the inciting incident is when the crew abandons Watney on Mars. Then at the end, they are the ones that go back and save him. Okay. Took another break. Got some sleep. Now let's speedrun the rest of these writing tips. Number 122, your resolution owes 3 things to the reader. Number 1, you have to resolve the want. That the inciting incident kicked off. So whatever the object of desire is that the inciting incident of your story kicked off, you've got to resolve that by the end. Number 2, show that the climactic decision at the climax of your story cost your protagonist something meaningful. And number 3, close every storyline that you opened. Remember, in the 5 Commandments, the resolution is where the antagonist responds to your protagonist's choice, and that response has to answer everything the ultimatum put on the table. If you skip any of those 3, your reader's gonna close the book and feel cheated and may not even know why. Number 123, every ending should cost your protagonist far more than they expected. In Crazy Rich Asians, Rachel never gets Eleanor to actually like her, but she does get her respect. In The Martian, Watney does get rescued, but he suffered far more than he ever thought possible. The best endings split the want and the need. Let your protagonist fail to get what they wanted and still get what they needed. A happy ending that costs nothing isn't a happy ending. It's a bad ending. Number 124, don't describe your characters. Show them through action. Stop telling me what characters look like, or worse, explaining to me their internal character. If they're tall, have them duck through a doorway. If they have long hair, have them run their hand through it when they're nervous. Anytime you can weave exposition into action, you're going to tighten your writing and make it way better. Number 125: What happens next is the only question your reader is ever asking. Worldbuilding, backstory, beautiful sentences, structure— all of it matters only to the degree it keeps that one question alive in your reader. The moment the reader stops wondering what happens next is the moment they're gone. Number 126: Your character's object of desire should be clear. He wants her to fall in love with him is not a good object of desire Because you can't tell if and/or when it actually happened. He wants her to admit she loves him. Now that is a good object of desire. She wants respect at work is bad. She wants her boss to give her the promotion is good. If at the end of the scene you don't know for sure if the protagonist got what they wanted, then the scene doesn't work. Number 127: Can you write one entire scene with nothing but the observable? Only showing. No thoughts, no feelings, no interiority. Action and dialogue only. It's brutally hard, and it improves your writing immediately because you find how much you've been leaning on telling the reader what's happening instead of just showing them. Number 128: How to be surprising in your writing. Your reader has consumed so many stories in their life. All the books, all the movies, all the TV shows. How are you possibly going to surprise them in your writing? How do you keep them on the edge of their seat? Well, thankfully, it doesn't require you to come up with some crazy, never-before-seen twist like the end of Sixth Sense. Instead, you create a crisis so strong that no matter what the protagonist chooses to do, it will surprise the reader. If your reader can't decide what they themselves would do in that situation, then no matter what the protagonist does, it's going to shock them. Number 129. What is deus ex machina and why is it bad? God in the machine is when at the moment of crisis, something swoops in and takes the decision away from your protagonist. Now, this seems straightforward, but I see writers do it all the time. You experience so much personal anguish watching your protagonist suffer that you often will write a backdoor so the protagonist can actually avoid the pain. Never, ever do this. The protagonist must go through the fire just like we all do. Number 130: Create your own story database. Create a spreadsheet that tracks all of the obligatory moments and conventions along with the Global 5 Commandments. Elements. And then every time you watch a movie or read a book, log it in your spreadsheet and track everything. You will build up your own personal database of story ideas. And the bonus here is this will also keep you from writing cliché stories because you will always know what's been done before. Number 131, ask a prospective editor 6 questions before you pay them. Number 1, ask them to define genre. Number 2, 2, ask them to define objects of desire. Number 3, ask them to name the units of story. Number 4, ask them to explain showing versus telling and why one is better than the other in which circumstances. Number 5, name the best masterwork ever written and why. And number 6, describe their step-by-step process of editing. If they can't answer those questions, you need to keep looking until you can find an editor that can. Number 132: Write your characters with their prefrontal cortex missing. My wife Candace taught me this one. In one of my scenes in my book The Shithead, I wrote an argument between the husband and the wife. They were sitting on the couch calmly having this argument. When I showed it to my wife, she said, that's not how it actually was. I pushed back, yes it was, that's how we fight. She shook her head then asked me, what do you think I wanted to do to you in that moment? That's what you should write. And that's when I wrote the scene where the wife barged into the protagonist's shower, started screaming and hitting him, until he slipped, fell, smacked his head on the tile. Stop writing your characters as polite, whole human beings. Instead, remove their inhibitions and see what actually happens. Let me see the protagonist and other characters do what they actually want to do. Number 133: Ask whether your character is safe at the start and safe at the end. If so, nothing happened. You can write 2,000 words of conversation and action and still have written No scene. The value has to shift from one side of the pole towards the other, life to death or vice versa, shame to respect or the opposite. Something has to change or nothing really happened. It's the two-second test for everything I told you about stories being about change. Number 134: Your antagonist needs something that only your protagonist can give them. That's the reliable engine of every scene and every story. The antagonist desperately wants. It, your protagonist desperately doesn't want to give it, and neither of them can walk away clean. If a scene of yours is sagging, name what the antagonist wants from your protagonist. If you can't, you've found the problem. Number 135: Make your scenes potato chip length. Shoot for around 1,500 words, just long enough that it's easy to get through and start the next one. This keeps the reader engaged and turning pages. Number 136: Only give relevant details. Here's why minimum viable exposition matters so much. There's an unspoken contract between the writer, you, and the reader, and it goes like this: every single word I put on the page is relevant to the story. If the reader doesn't absolutely need to know it, don't put it on the page. If you describe something, try to make sure the description accomplishes more than one thing. Don't just passively describe the bar. Describe it in a way that lets the reader know how to feel about the bar. Every time you put a word on the page that the reader doesn't need to know, they start trusting you less and less. Do that enough times and they close the book and move on to a better writer. Number 137: Your first book should not be the start of a 9-part epic. Writing a 9-book saga with 7 interwoven protagonists with a brand new magic system nobody's heard of before in a brand new land nobody's ever heard of before— if this is your first project, You are doomed for failure. That's like announcing you're going to summit Mount Everest when you've never even gone on a hike before. Remember, George R.R. Martin published his first short story in 1971, and then Game of Thrones came in 1996. 25 years of building up to the books everyone thinks he started with. Can you just write one book with one protagonist? That the reader will actually care about and then build your skill up from there. Number 138, your world building is just procrastination. If you've spent a year building the magic system and haven't written a single scene, I've got some tough news for you. The world bible has become the socially acceptable way to avoid writing the book and learning the craft. Research and planning feel productive because they're parts that don't require the actual skill of writing. Number 139, tie your inciting incident to your climax. They're not independent events. The inciting incident raises the object of desire, and the climax is the decision about that exact object of desire. If your climax resolves something the inciting incident never raised, the story is broken in the middle. Number 140, make every scene The best scene of the book. When I was writing The Shithead, I knew deep in my soul that every single scene could be the scene where I lost the reader, where they closed the book and never came back. So I focused on making every single scene the best scene in the book. Number 141, write from your scars, not your open wounds. This is that asterisk on writing what you emotionally know. If you haven't processed it yet, that's what journaling is for. That's what going to therapy is for. That's what a psychologist is for. It's not for public consumption. The material that makes great fiction is the pain you've metabolized because you can shape it instead of bleeding on the page, and you can share the wisdom from it, not just the pain of it. Number 142: Hold both beliefs at once. Belief number 1: Your writing is the most important thing you'll ever do. And belief number 2: Your writing doesn't matter at all. Drop the first belief and decades quietly disappear as you don't work on your writing. You never get up early, never go to those dark places, and end up dying with a all of your music still in you. However, if you drop that second one, you go insane. There's a hugely successful author who cut loose everyone who got too close to his art and died alone in the beautiful house he built on a hill. You have to hold both of those beliefs, that your writing is the most important thing you'll ever do, and it doesn't matter at all. If you fall off either edge, you're gonna be in trouble. Number 143, everything goes on the altar. of becoming a great writer. Your ego, your reputation, your timeline, and your favorite story idea. All of it. That's the deal, and there's no negotiating your way out of it. Number 144. Writing is an act of service for the reader. It's not about you. The whole point of writing is to encode your wisdom into an artifact that you can pass on to other people And help them see the world in a new way. It's not just funny make-em-ups. It's not just entertainment. It's your legacy and it's how you're going to change the world. Okay. That is 144 writing tips back to back. Took me a couple of days to record it, but you got it all at once. And here's the thing I want you to hear before we close out this video. You just listened to all those tips, but it's not going to get you where you want to be. As a writer, I know that because I did that for years. I read every craft book. I watched every video. I collected tips, and my writing didn't get to where I actually wanted it to go. You can know that the turning point should make going back impossible and still write 50 scenes where the protagonist could just walk away, knowing it and doing it live. Having the knowledge of something and the skill to actually do it are two very different things. Just think about learning how to ride a bike. You can know how a bike mechanically works, but still fall off the bike. And yet you can know how to ride a bike without knowing how it mechanically works. It's the same thing with writing. What actually moved me forward on my path to the point of writing a book I was proud to publish was having a path, a specific order to learn things in, a way to practice each one until it dropped into my hands and I could actually do it, a way to get feedback that was expert feedback that would actually tell me what I was doing right, what I was doing wrong and how to make those changes. So this is what I want for you. So I put together a free training. It's called The 4 Steps to Writing a Publishable Novel. And the link is right there in the description and on the screen. It'll take you less than an hour and it'll show you the order of how you actually learn how to write a book that you're proud to publish. So I hope these tips have been helpful for you, but I also want to make sure you don't just stop with learning some tips. You take them even further. So that's why I put together this training for you. So make sure you go watch it. Now, like I said earlier, if you can like this video, subscribe to the channel, and put down in the comment one of your favorite tips, that would be super helpful for me. But either way, thanks for being a writer. Thanks for being a part of our community here at Story Grid, and I'll see you next time.