Writing Hacks that will Take Your Stories to the Next Level

I started writing stories a lot later than my writer friends. It feels like they all have these memories of writing stories when they were tiny children, and I just…don’t have those memories. I wrote my first story in middle school, but I didn’t really start considering writing as a career until I graduated high school.

I do, however, have a lot of experience with books. I’ve been an avid book dragon since I was old enough to read, and I’ve always loved consuming books. I’ve also taken a lot of writing courses, both in high school and in college, that taught me a lot about how to craft stories well. Over the years, I’ve learned what works and doesn’t work for me, and I wanted to share a few of these tips with you today.

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#1. Create word banks.

Word banks are something that my old writing mentor taught me. Essentially, a word bank a list of synonyms for the main words that evoke the meaning or feel of a piece. When I was a beginner writer, my writing mentor had our class do this. Here’s one of my old mood banks, for example. I wrote this for a piece that focused on a memory of my ensemble singing Breath of Heaven.

Mood Paper Theme: Surrender

Surrender: Resignation, Give up, Cede, Relinquish, Commit, Entrust, Submission, Succumbing, Yielding, Compliance, Submit, Fall on one’s knees, Humble, Renounce
Realization: Understanding, Discernment, Recognition, Revelation, Detect, Conviction, Comprehend, Discern, Perceive, Inspiration, Redemption, Redeem
Fear: Fearful, Concern, Worry, Sympathy, Anxiety, Tremble, Tremor, Shaking, Panic, Shudder, Quiver, Haunt, Apprehensive, Restless, Shocking, Dread, Angst, Timid, Disturbed
Sacrifice: Forfeit, Loss, Offer, Give, Dedicate, Devote, Yield, Devastation, Revolution, Bestow, Free Gift, Act of Grace, Contribution, Offering, Deliver, Redemption, Humiliation
Peace: Order, Harmony, Peacefulness, Composed, Collected, Constant, Steady, Gentle, Peaceable, Silence, Stillness, Solemn, Calm, Quiet, Concord, Friendly, Tranquility, Amity, The storm blown over
Humble: Humility, Low, Modest, Humbleness, Small, Cast Down, Meek, Unassuming, Simple, Subdued, Compliant, Quiet, Submissive, Down on one’s knees, On all fours
Passion: Passionate, Love, Aspiring, Zeal, Enthusiasm, Dedication, Eagerness, Stimulated, Affection, Spirit, Thrill, Lively, Zealous
Prayer: Worship, Sacred Text, Entreaty, Appeal, Plea, Begging, Pleading, Adoration, Imploring, Request, Cry to, Grace
Offer: Offering, Propose, Volunteer, Present, Give, Charity, Contribution, Aid, Assistance, Help, Relief, Endowment, Bestow, Devote, Give Away, Provide, Supply, Lend, Dispense, Deliver
Stillness: Silence, Still, Hush, Quiet, Motionless, Calm, Peaceful, Noiseless, Soundless, Serene, Lull, Mute, Suppress, Speechless, Solemn

The purpose of creating a word bank is two-fold. First, it gives you an opportunity to pinpoint some of the feelings, moods, images, and vibes of your piece. But secondly, it allows you to narrow down those feelings, moods, images, and vibes by going beyond just a broad word. As you can see, on the left of the chart is the broad word that I wanted to capture in the piece. But on the right are all the synonyms for those words that better capture the specific feelings or emotions I wanted to evoke with my writing. So, this method of brainstorming can be really helpful if you’re trying to nail down specific emotions, moods, and even sensory/imagery parts.

Another version of a word bank that I use more frequently with my WIPs is a collection of words and phrases that captures my story’s aesthetic. For this one, think of the phrases and dialogue bits that you might save to your story’s Pinterest board. In fact, since my word banks are just for me, I usually steal the words from Pinterest and arrange them into a list or a collage of aesthetic inspiration. Here’s an example that I just made for the fantasy novel I started earlier this year.

Rising from the ashes » We do terrible things for the people we love » Traitor » This means war » Daddy issues » You were my best friend » Can we go back to the way things were before? » Up in flames » I trusted you » Born with tragedy in my blood » Executions » He’s my brother » Class divide » An unlikely friendship » I would have sacrificed the world to keep you safe » Together? » We can still fix this » Crimson swords » You did this

#2. If you choose to use swear words, make them matter.

I’ve found that a lot of writers typically swing to one of two extremes: Either they don’t use any swear words because they want the story to be clean, or they go overboard with curse words because “it’s realistic.” Now, you have to decide for yourself where you stand on swear words in your writing. It’s a personal conviction for a lot of writers, so if you choose not to swear in your novels, that’s totally okay. No story really needs swear words, but for those of us who do include some, it’s important to find a balance between zero and a million.

My general rule when it comes to cursing is that my characters will never swear more than they do in the first draft (or any sort of new, on-the-page writing). This is because I tend to let my characters run wild in that early draft. When I go back and revise my story, that’s when I figure out if the swearing is necessary. If it is, then I make sure that each swear word is truly placed intentionally and purposefully.

Typically, I let my characters swear when doing so either matters to the story or expresses a part of their character that I can’t show otherwise. My favorite example of a time when I intentionally let my character curse is from my YA light-academia short story:

“Do you even realize how lucky you are to have a father who loves you?” I asked.

His eyes narrowed. “How can you say that?”

“Because my parents hated me so much that they shipped me halfway across the country. But you?” I laughed darkly. “You could f*** up every single part of your life, and your parents would still love you.”

*I’ve censored this quote for this blog, but in my actual draft, this character does swear.

I want to preface this part of my explanation by saying that I went back and forth a lot about whether my character should curse in this scene. This dialogue exchange actually didn’t exist in the first draft of the story. As I was rewriting this scene, I realized that the internal conflict of my protagonist wasn’t what I thought it was: She wasn’t upset because her friend could one day forget her…she was upset because, in her mind, he was abandoning her.

Once I realized this, I knew that their fight had to not only trigger this conflict, but expose it’s root. This character’s fear of abandonment came from her parents. Whether or not they actually love her is irrelevant because, in her eyes, they don’t. To be perfectly honest, I have no idea what actually happened when she was sent away—that wasn’t something I ever wrote or explored. But, for this scene, I needed her to express that fear to her best friend in a way showed the reader just how upset and terrified she is about losing him.

Enter swear word.

Now, usually, I’ll try one of two things to figure out if the swear word is necessary, intentional, and/or purposeful: I’ll cut the swear word entirely or swap it out with a cleaner alternative. If I cut the word and it makes absolutely no difference (on a story or character level), then it probably shouldn’t have been there in the first place. Additionally, if I swap out a strong swear word (like s***) for a less intense word (like stupid), and it feels consistent with the character’s voice and emotions, then I’ll probably keep the alternative.

However, sometimes these two options don’t work. For example, while editing this part of my protagonist’s dialogue, I remember rewriting the line as “You could mess up every single part of your life, and your parents would still love you.” This is a fine line. It still gets the point across that she is frustrated and angry and scared. But, by switching out the curse word for a cleaner word, the line loses some of it’s power.

Her words suddenly lose their bite. What was once a line of agony and hurt is now a mild sense of frustration.

For me, this is a situation where the original swear word is okay. It emphasizes just how emotional and broken my protagonist truly is.

Before moving on to how you can write these emotions without swear words, I want to make a few final comments about swear words:

First, it’s important to consider audience when using swear words. This short story is meant for YA readers. If this story was meant for middle-grade readers, there would be absolutely no swear words. However, since this story is meant for teenagers (specifically mid-to-late teens), I’m okay with including a swear word.

Second, this is the only time in this story where any of my characters swear. Like I said before, swear words should be used intentionally and purposefully. If there isn’t a specific reason for a character to swear, I don’t think they should. So, for me, it always comes down to whether the swear word really matters, both to the story and the character who says it. If using a swear word will further show the depth of their emotions or internal conflict, then I’ll consider keeping it.

#3. Show, don’t tell (feelings edition).

Okay, so let’s say you just read the last writing hack and you’re a writer who is firmly against using swear words. Well, then this tip is for you, my voyager.

Sometimes, curse words are a sign of weak and lazy writing. For me, this is when I need to take a step back and figure out a better way to show my reader what my character is feeling. The first draft of my short story about grief had a fair share of curse words in the first draft. But, as I revised it, I realized that a lot of them were just unecessary. In fact, a lot of them were actually hurting my story because they kept me from expanding on powerful ideas.

There’s a moment in the story where Riley, the protagonist, is thinking about how badly she wishes everything was just a bad dream. In the first draft, this is how I wrote her grief spiral:

I want to turn off my brain because seeing her smiling face is like a constant punch to my gut. I want to get up and run away somewhere, anywhere, where I can be alone without my thoughts to plow through my grief. I want to go to sleep and wake up and find out that Hayden is fine, and this has just been one hell of a nightmare.

For a first draft, this was fine. It laid down some good bones and gave me a place to start. But, in this form, it’s not very powerful. I wanted this story to portray grief in a way that people who had never experiences severe loss would feel its sting, and this description just doesn’t do that.

Four drafts later, Riley’s thoughts turned into this:

I want to turn off my brain or run away somewhere where I can simply be and not think. I want to fall asleep and wake up and realize that she’s fine because this is just the most vivid nightmare my subconscious could create. But I can’t turn off my brain and I want my nails to become claws so I can rip it out because having no brain would be easier than this. I can’t run away because running won’t fix it, not this time. I can’t go to sleep because sleep is the enemy of grief. But worst of all is that even if I do fall asleep, Hayden will still be gone when I wake up.

By taking out a single curse word, I forced myself to go deeper and fully explore Riley’s grief in more thoughtful ways. I hope this demonstrates how, sometimes, our writing can actually become stronger when we don’t include swear words. I don’t want you to feel constrained by your conviction to write stories with clean language. You have the entire alphabet at your disposal, and that is enough to craft vulnerable, honest, life-changing stories, my friend.

Another strategy for showing feelings is to have your character perform an action. This was something I learned from my old writing mentor (the same one who taught me about word banks). About four years ago, I showed her the first draft of my short story about grief. When we met up to discuss it, she told me that the curse words were unecessary. She was right, of course, and I will never forget what she taught me with her next words. I can’t remember exactly how she said it, but she went on to say something like, “If the character is upset, show me. Have her stomp her foot or punch the wall.”

If I’m being perfectly honest, this is probably the best writing advice I’ve ever received. It’s the classic “show, don’t tell,” but in a way that’s applicable and practical. Furthermore, it’s the perfect explanation for what “show, don’t tell” means. Why have your character say a curse word (tell), when you can have them do something (show)? This approach requires more forethought on your part, too. Instead of slapping a curse word in some dialogue, it forces you to understand what the character is feeling, as well as how that character would realistically show that emotion.

For some characters, this is fairly easy. Take a toddler, for example. If you have an angry toddler, it’s realistic that they would throw a tantrum. What about an angry man? He could punch the wall. A depressed teenager? Have em stay in their room and only come out for food or the bathroom. An angsty, brooding vampire man who just found out his beloved is dead? Have him crumble the phone he’s holding with one hand. (Did you really expect me to refrain from making a Twilight reference?).

For other characters, it can be more complicated. In these cases, I highly recommend checking out the Emotions section of the Thesaurus Description Database (if you want access to all of the emotions and extra content, you can buy the kindle edition of The Emotion Thesaurus for $6.99 right here.). My mom bought me the paperback edition of The Emotion Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Character Expression, and I cannot emphasize how many times I’ve leafed through it while writing. With my current WIP, there have been so many scenes where I have no idea what action, gesture, or facial expression my characters would make. This book has helped me figure out what actions are associated with specific emotions, as well as what internal, mental, and physical reactions are normal for those emotions.

This also extends beyond just alternatives to curse words. For me, this database (and book) has helped me write characters that feel more realistic. Since a lot of my examples above focus on expressing anger, here are a few more examples of anger from The Emotion Thesaurus:

Physical signals:

• Handling objects or people roughly
• Cutting people off when they speak
• Entering another’s personal space to intimidate
• A reddening of the face
• Nails biting into one’s own palms

Internal sensations:

• Grinding one’s teeth
• Body tensing
• Heat flushing through the body

Mental responses:

• Poor listening skills
• Jumping to conclusions
• Irrational reactions to inconsequential things

These are just a few examples of how you can portray your character’s anger. The important thing is to figure out which reaction makes the most sense for your character. Giving them the wrong action, gesture, or even facial expression could make your character feel like they are acting out of character, so be careful.

Additionally, make sure you remember to show the character’s reaction to your reader—not tell it. Don’t say:

“She stared at him incredulously. An angry heat raced through her body, and she tensed.”

While this incorporates the ideas from The Emotion Thesaurus, it’s still just telling your reader how your character felt. Try to avoid words like “feels/felt,” words that are the emotion (like “angry), and words that imply passive voice, like “was/were/is.” These words lead you to tell what the character is experiencing instead of showing it. Instead, try something like:

“Her eyes narrowed. Her heart pounded. Adrenaline coursed through her veins, and every muscle in her body clenched when she saw him.”

This is nowhere near a perfect sentence. However, I would say it’s better than the first example. Not only does this one provide more detail about what the character is feeling, it helps us get into her body. It shows us what she is feeling by putting more immediacy and emphasis on her reaction. So, instead of being vague and saying she “tensed,” the reader is able to actually feel the way she clenched her body with the character. In a nutshell, the second description puts the reader into the shoes of the character through more visceral reactions. 

#4. Give your sentence structure some variation.

I did not like my first creative writing professor in college. I’ll spare you the details, but suffice it to say, we didn’t get along very well for a multitude of reasons. That being said, that professor was the first person to show me the importance of varying your sentence structure. 

To do this, he pointed out the sentence structure that I repeated way too much in my short story:

Tears prick at my eyes, blurring the dim light of the clock on my dresser.

I roll onto my back, turning away from the pulsating light of my bedroom clock.

The cat jumps on my bed, grounding me back out of my head. 

By now, you probably get the point. All of these sentences follow the same structure: [Independent clause] [comma] [dependent clause]. There’s nothing grammatically wrong with these sentences (although I can’t say the same about their content because “grounding me back out of my head” still haunts me to this day). The problem is that this kind of sentence occurs far too frequently without enough variation in-between.

To keep your prose from becoming boring or repetitive, you have to vary the length and structure of your sentences. (This will also keep readers like me from having an aneurysm while reading your book because this is now one of my biggest reading pet peeves.)

Personally, I’m partial to writing really long sentences that are borderline run-on sentences. I also continue to struggle with varying the same sentence structure I just showed you. So, for my writing style, I have to intentionally insert shorter sentences (preferably ones without any commas). These sentences help to break up my prose and add some variety to my writing (without trying to pry lengthy sentences from my cold, alive hands). 

An example of how I use shorter sentence to break up my repetitive sentence structure is this paragraph from the same short story:

It’s 12:04 now. The doctor called the time of death around 8:00. My parents insisted on driving me home. They kept looking at each other like they wanted to say something, but they didn’t, not until dad pulled into the garage. Then everything fell apart. Mom burst into tears, dad put his hand on her shoulder, and I sat alone in the backseat, sinking deeper and deeper and deeper into the leather because I couldn’t remember how to do anything—how to breathe, how to relax my trembling hands, how to feel anything besides the numbness that washed over me.*

*I’m well aware that this paragraph concludes with a sentence so long it should be illegal. But, this story went through five drafts. It’s also been so long since I wrote this story that, to revise it now, would drastically affect the voice and tone and overall structure of the story because I would end up writing the way I do now, not the way I did then. So, I’ve decided that this story is done. It’s not perfect, but it’s the best story I knew how to write at the time. To mess with it now would be to mess with the very core and heart of this story, and I’m not willing to do that.

This paragraph might be my favorite in the entire story. It’s still a little messy, but that’s what this story is meant to portray. The paragraph starts with short sentences that slowly get longer and longer before descending into a spiral that, hopefully, captures the emotions of what grief does to a person. To a teenager. Grief is a messy thing, and it doesn’t follow the rules. That’s why I love ending it with that monster of a sentence. There were other reasons for not revising that final sentence (see above), but that is definitely a big one.

Another way to vary sentence structure is to use one-word sentences. This doesn’t always work, but sometimes it does. Sometimes, you get lucky and those tiny sentences pack a punch that makes you, the author, get emotional:

I knew his parents were waiting for him, but as we stared at the myriad of colors playing in the sky, all I wanted was to stay like that. Untouchable. Unafraid. Unburdened by the past, and unconcerned about the uncertainty of the future. I wanted to stay suspended in that dream where I could keep him with me. But there was only so much magic in a single moment.

Writing this particular short story (it’s a different one than the last example) was a journey. It challenged me in new ways and compelled me to capture feelings of loss, love, and, in a way, growing up. When I was writing this scene, these were the elements and themes I wanted to leave on the page. I wanted to emphasize those little moments where you look up at the sky and yearn for time to simply freeze so you can stay there forever. And the way I tried to do that was through one-word sentences that highlight how eternal those moments feel.

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There you have it, voyagers. Those are my four writing hacks for how to level up your stories. This was a little different from my usual writing posts, so let me know if this was helpful and if you want to see more posts like this!

Let’s Talk!

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever heard? Are you going to try any of these tips? If so, which one? How do you feel about curse words in novels? Let’s talk all things writing down in the comments!