TOOLS OF BEING A WRITER

Many people ask, “What do I need to know to be a writer?” The honest answer depends on what you are writing and your individual needs. There are formulas to follow for different types of manuscripts, but those are only important if you have the tools you need already. What you need is your process that gets the formula completed. This process is different for every writer. No class or book will teach you how to write a book. The classes and books will give you basics about what should be in a book, but more often than not, they only help you learn basic writing and grammar skills. They don’t tell you how to write a book. Even books on novel writing may give the basic formula of novel writing, but the formula is never a one-size-fits-all. Plus, they never tell you how to get to the end of the supposed formula. In all honesty, writing is more about what you have in your writer’s toolbox than any formula.

What is a writer’s toolbox? The writer’s toolbox includes the skills that a person has learned, honed and created, and discovered through experience that helps them write.

Learn

Let’s start with the “learn” in the writer's toolbox. In school, we learn what a proper sentence is and what a proper paragraph contains, and why outlines are important. However, the sentence and paragraph parts mainly focus on academic writing, which we all know when we read a non-fiction or fiction novel, do not read, look, or feel the same. There are drastic differences. Therefore, from learn, we get the basics of grammar and structure of writing correctly. Outlining does serve a purpose in writing a book, so that moves us to honing and creating.

Hone and Create

“Hone and create” is where we take skills we learned and make them our own. For example, not everyone outlines in the same way. In school or books, we usually only learn one way to outline. Forget that! Some people use levels of numbers; others levels of letters. There are still others that use notecards, outlining software, and on and on. There is no one way to outline. You, as a writer, hone your outlining skills to accommodate your way of writing. This means you could have a one-page basic sketch of an idea or a forty-page detailed formal outline. It depends on what works for you; however, if you are co-authoring or hiring a ghostwriter, the more detailed the outline, the better and the faster you will write. The more you practice writing, the more you will hone your outlining and other writing skills and create new ways to use those skills to improve your writing.

Discover

Then there are the skills you “discover” after you have been writing for a while. Through experience, you may discover that when working on a non-fiction manuscript, writing the introduction first doesn’t work for you. In fact, the introduction feels more complete and more in line with the manuscript when you write it last. Or you may find while writing fiction that you need to see pictures of places or people to be able to give lots of details in the scenes. It doesn’t matter what order you write a manuscript in as long as it is cohesive, connected, and coherent in the end.

These skills and experiences are what is meant by tools in the writer’s toolbox. Each toolbox will be different for each writer. Whether a writer calls it a toolbox or not, it is the best way to describe the assortment of skills a writer assembles. Every writer has a toolbox they pull from while writing their manuscripts.

Take some time and think about what is in your toolbox. Don’t worry if you only have a few tools right now. As you write more, your toolbox will grow. You will learn what makes a manuscript work. You will learn about how to determine your audience. You will learn so much the more you write.

Plus, more tips and tools will be coming throughout our blog and emails. We also offer book coaching that can help you build your toolbox faster.

Writing is a forever learning experience, so keep writing, learning, and enjoying the adventure.

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Content credit: C. Storm

Image credit: Maria Domnina