A Writing Tip That Surprised Me.

 

Some of the best writing tips are the simplest. This one may be too simple with the potential to have a considerable impact on your writing. It would be nice to say that I crafted this tip, but that would be a lie. I came across another YouTube vlogger, Ben Hatfield, who posted about, “How to write a better first draft faster with one simple writing hack.” Most likely he did not come up with this writing tip either, but I am glad he shared it. YouTube algorithms must be getting better. There are aggregating better recommendations that I am interested in. I will share his video below, so you want to watch his full explanation and to put it into practice in your own work.

The essence of the video is to help you with the tougher sections of your writing projects. For example, you are writing a scene, and the descriptions are bogging down your progress of writing. He suggests writing TK where the areas need work that are slowing you down, then move on to what you want to write next. So, if you are having trouble describing the location of the scene, you should type descriptiontk.  When you are ready to go back and fill in the spots that you need to tackle. You simply search for TK and all the areas that you need to work on are easily found. I would like to make a small change to his tip. I would add a dash before the TK. This will make the section you need to work on easily seen.

What makes this powerful is that you can use it in so many ways. Let’s say that you have subplots, and you want to track them within your novel. You could use subplot1-tk wherever you sprinkle your subplot clues. As you write, it may be best to be proactive to create a list of all your TK place markers to remember them all. Like protagonist-tk, chapter2warscene-tk, betterdialog-tk and so on.

Now how simple is that. I would highly recommend watching Ben’s video. It is less than seven minutes long. Let me know if you think this will be helpful. As always, happy writing.