How Writing It Down Can Be the Secret To Success

by Lewis Robinson

Writing is a secret weapon which is often ignored. Making out time to write about your ideas, goals, experiences, and strategies can help organize your time and bring realism into perspective. Researchers across the world claim that taking notes, whether on paper or a mobile device, can be a good way to fall back on. Some of us are comfortable jotting down on paper; others find it easier to note things using tech.

Writing to reflect on your progress is a good way to measure your accomplishments and highlight areas where you could not give your 100 percent. Whether you are a student or a business professional, keeping track of your performance and setting targets by documenting them can lead to higher goal clarity. It gives you a sense of achievement. With this comes an added advantage of thought clarity, quintessential for personal development.

Writing to think of new ideas and solving problems can lead to quick and more structured resolutions. It is easier to brainstorm on an idea which is written down somewhere rather than having it float in your thoughts. Writing down your problems can help you meditate on a multitude of possible solutions.

Writing down your goals is a more realistic approach to the goal setting process. It helps you associate the resources you will need, the efforts that you need to aggregate and makes it easier to fathom the outcome. You could draw a mind map to specify your goals, organize them in bullet points or use software applications like Trello or Taskworld to get from bigger picture to minute details. A Harvard Business School study claims that students who had their goals written earned ten times more than their peers.

Writing helps you think big because it makes you explore a plethora of possibilities. From businesses to classrooms, encouraging people to write can help them innovate and utilize resources optimally. For example, documenting accounts of your business is vital. It gives you an idea of where the money is going. Depending on your preference, you can maintain a spreadsheet or a ledger sheet for your accounts or manually post them to ledgers and journals. While most big businesses hire accountants and bookkeepers to do this job, mid-sized and small businesses are at a significant disadvantage. They can either keep a record of their revenue and expenditure on their own or outsource this task to virtual bookkeeping services. With the advent of Web 2.0, ease of access to online resources, increased connectivity with others and availability of easier ways of noting things down, has made services like bookkeeping widely available to small businesses across the world. Several online and remote bookkeeping services like QuickBooks provide users with cost effective solutions.

Writing to process your emotions can be immensely useful for regulating feelings. Psychologist Matthew Lieberman at the University of California at Los Angeles, says that keeping a diary, writing poetry or penning down lyrics of a song can help you come to terms with your emotions. Writing helps you sort inner conflicts thus accentuating belief in self and enhancing your self-knowledge.

Researchers have always stated that writing down things improves communication with others and more importantly with the self. Often people have difficulty in articulating their thoughts properly or are too shy to express themselves freely. Penning down your thoughts raises your emotional intelligence quotient and instills self-confidence. Irrespective of your occupation or the business you own, writing can be a fruitful exercise. It is imperative to retreat before you can charge ahead. Organize what you've learned by writing it down in a diary or a journal which can provide you with full retrospect. You can see how you have grown, emotionally and intellectually over time. It is a utilitarian tool which helps you grow in personal as well as professional space. Make sure you get the best of it.

Lewis Robinson is a business consultant specializing in CRM and sales. He's begun multiple corporations and currently freelances as a writer and personal consultant.

The Saturday Slash

Don't be afraid to ask for help with the most critical first step of your writing journey - the query.

I’ve been blogging since 2011 and have critiqued over 200 queries here on the blog using my Hatchet of Death. This is how I edit myself, it is how I edit others. If you think you want to play with me and my hatchet, shoot me an email.

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Spencer is a shape shifter of Clan Kitsune and student of language and history in the Age of the Clans. After being attacked at Kitsune Academy by a fellow student, Spencer searches for a way out of Haniel. Right away you have a problem that can be really common to high fantasy queries - name soup. I don't know what Age of the Clans means, or if it's even relevant. or what Haniel is or means. So, the Praetor sends her to Sachi Prison in secret to find The Red Book, a text that has been lost for centuries and could shift the power in Lantea from Paladin to Praetor. How could a book do this? This drags Spencer into a decades old political battle between three parties: The Paladin, the Praetor, and the Archon, who is a leader of rebels on the Sachi Plateau. Rebelling against what? In her search, she learns the stories of three people who fought for their freedom and the freedom of generations in the Age of the Temples. Kahdea, Braid, and Owin. So do those stories take place in a different time period? The Age of Temples? How long is an age? These other characters aren't contempoaries of Spencer's?

Kahdea defied laws preventing her education in the Age of the Temples. After her twin brother, the Prefect of Fianna, is arrested by The Paladin Council, Again, so many world-building words that are just contributing to confusion. she takes his place in the building Famorian movement. With other shifter leaders who are demonized by the Temples, Kahdea helps set up the defense of their way of life. And this matters why? How is this relevant to Spencer's story?

Braid had little more than her air ship and her crew. Coming across a Famorian shifter on a trade route on the Kruvale, more names! she is able to see the danger of ignorance. She ends up going to The Hall for as an Oblate of Fianna. no idea what this means She's hoping to find more information on The Red Book to help catalyze the Famorian movement. Your tense is in past at the beginning of this para and shifts to present. Again, I don't know if these timeline are concurrent with Spencer's or not.

Owin overheard a friend of his and a strange woman from another territory talking about Famorians. He followed and fell into the Famorian movement after discovering his shifting ability. He was often thrown to a front and soon stepped into a leadership role. He and his small militia take action on Sachi Plateau following Kahdea and the other Prefects after an assault on a refugee camp in Werewood. Again, unsure how these tie together.

Fear is the great motivator. It was fear of extermination that brought shifters together against the Temples. And it was fear of the monstrous Famorian form that banished them to Sachi. What I'm not seeing is any type of continuity of these three storylines. What's the actual point and goal of the story? Right now I have three disparate tales and no idea of how everything relates to Spencer, or even if Spencer is the unifying character. I don't understand what Spencer's goal is, or why it matters or connects to these others. You've got too many names and world building elements in here at the moment, it's coming off as disjointed and reading more like a synopsis than a query. Boil down, eliminate names, and connect these storylines so that we understand what the main goal and story is here.

5 Common Mistakes to Avoid When Writing Characters

by Molly Crockett

Whatever kind of story you are writing, creating good characters is essential. Try to avoid these common mistakes writers make when it comes to character creation:

2-Dimensional Characters

The first mistake writers make is creating cardboard cut-out characters – to avoid this, try to give them life and make them seem like a real person. Humanize them and surround them with evidence of their lives, personality, and past to create believable characters with which readers can identify.

You also need to build strong and meaningful relationships for these characters – the relationships, whether romantic or not, do not have to be a major plot point but they should contribute to the characters. This could be in building a better sense of who they are and how the interact with the world, or by showing their humanity through their connections to other people.

Characters Without Roles

Perhaps a character is very well developed, fully rounded-out, and 3-dimensional – but if they have no role in the story, they really aren’t necessary or worth the time and space they take up.

This also means that each character needs their own arc of development – just as you build a full story arc for your main character, consider each side character as if they are on a journey of their own. When developing their story arcs, treat them like they are the main character of their own story. And don’t forget to include them – even in the background – when the story is focusing on the main character or plot. Don’t make the mistake of not mentioning a side character for a few chapters simply because they aren’t necessary for the plot at that time: you still need to include them in the periphery or at the very least explain or justify their absence.

Overcrowding

Kendra Brandon, a novelist at Revieweal and Bestbritishessays, explains: “Don’t waste prime time/space on minor characters – overcrowding the story will become confusing and distracting for the reader. Instead, focus on making your core group of characters memorable and distinct.”

It can be tempting to create as many fun, interesting, clever characters as your imagination can dream up, but at the end of the day it really is about quality over quantity. This may mean you have to combine a few people into one character, but ultimately this will help you create more in-depth personalities and make it much easier for your readers to follow your writing.

Overwriting

It can be easy to get swept up when you are describing a character’s actions, thoughts, dialogue, or motivations. Good creative writing is not about being overly descriptive and figurative and using as many words and ways to describe things as possible. Good creative writing is about conveying such rich descriptions in as few words as possible – being precise, effective, and clear. Less is more.

Thoughts Over Actions

Try not to spend too much time in your characters’ heads. Get away from describing their every thought and find ways to show these feelings and motivations through action. This is part of humanizing them and making them seem like real people readers can identify with. This doesn’t just mean following through from a character’s thoughts with actions, as this will seem repetitive and suggests you are not confident and competent enough to simply do what needs to be done. Readers will quickly lose interest if you describe what a character is feeling, what they think they should do about it, reviewing this course of action, and then finally doing it, and maybe even thinking about it afterwards. Get straight to the point. If the character is well-written enough, their feelings will show through their actions.

No Setting

Finally, you need to provide context for your characters and your plot. This means big picture settings like general surroundings and locations, which help provide a canvas for your plot, but more importantly when it comes to characters is the small-scale setting details. Put your characters in real life situations, vary their surroundings and circumstances, give them a chance to develop life and individuality through how they act in these situations. Francie Holt, a lifestyle writer at Uktopwriters and Bestaustralianwriters, says: “Use their senses to describe the setting and let their responses/reactions give more dimension to their character.”

Molly Crockett is a successful lifestyle writer for Bigassignments and Eliteassignmenthelp, where shares her inspiration and lifestyle tips with her audience. In her spare time, Molly enjoys teaching arts and writing skills for Stateofwriting.