Hindsight is 20/20

It’s random Wednesday and this week’s topic is… I wish I’d learned this earlier. Now, I’m not sure if this is supposed to be purely associated with writing or just life in general…though if it’s life in general, I might run out of space 🙂

So… if I look at it solely for writing, here’s my list of things I wish I’d known starting out.

Dialogue tags…

I discovered a few novels in that instead of having endless, he said, she said, he yelled, she exclaimed, or she muttered, etc, that tagging with an action eliminated the need for these. I occasionally will use a tag here and there, but using action tags keeps the story flowing and avoids endless repetition of other tags. I remember reading a book where every character ‘bit out’ every sentence. Even ‘said’ eventually feels overused.

Keeping POV for entire chapters.

While I can say I’m not a POV hopper, I did tend to change POVs in the middle of a chapter. But I realized that the story flows better with less chances of having a reader get pulled out if I kept POV changes to entire chapters. This might be a personal choice, but…I do wish I’d started out this way.

Looking more into the future, with respect to publishers.

I’ve been pretty lucky. I have some really good publishers. But I do wish I’d been a bit more hesitant to sign up for long contracts or to get too caught up in some of them. ARe… I’m looking at you. It’s easy to get caught up in the excitement. I really need to ensure I look ahead before making decisions in the future.

Learned how to do marketing.

This is self explanatory. I suck at it. I’m trying to learn, but… I do wish I’d learned how to do that from the beginning.

Lastly, I really wish I’d made the decision to pursue writing sooner.

Okay, that’s it for me. Please jump on over to the other ladies to see their lists.

Bronwyn Green  |  Jessica Jarman  |  Deelylah Mullin  |  Gwendolyn Cease

4 Replies to “Hindsight is 20/20”

  1. I feel kinda dumb now. I just jumped into all the life shit and didn’t even think about writing stuff! I share a lot of these lessons. Looking hard at the last two especially!

    1. Apparently, I was the ONLY FREAKING ONE who thought it was supposed to be geared toward writing. THE. ONLY. ONE.
      Alas… that is life and I shall have to be the one that isn’t like the others this week. I’m the truck amongst the food.

  2. I didn’t think about writing stuff either and I should have. And, yeah, marketing. I so suck at it. Of course, I need to release a book to worry about it, but I suppose that’s a different post for another day.

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