Tips & Tricks For Beginning Writers.

Here are a few tips and tricks for beginners:

1. Do some short exercises to stretch your writing muscles – if you’re short of ideas, read the Daily Writing Tips article on “Writing Bursts”. Many new creative writers find that doing the washing up or weeding the garden suddenly looks appealing, compared to the effort of sitting down and putting words onto the page. Force yourself to get through these early doubts, and it really will get easier. Try to get into the habit of writing every day, even if it’s just for ten minutes.

2. If you’re stuck for ideas, carry a notebook everywhere and write down your observations. You’ll get some great lines of dialogue by keeping your ears open on the bus or in cafes, and an unusual phrase may be prompted by something you see or smell.

3. Work out the time of day when you’re at your most creative. For many writers, this is first thing in the morning – before all the demands of the day jostle for attention. Others write well late at night, after the rest of the family have gone to bed. Don’t be afraid to experiment!

4. Don’t agonize over getting it right. All writers have to revise and edit their work – it’s rare that a story, scene or even a sentence comes out perfectly the first time. Once you’ve completed the initial draft, leave the piece for a few days – then come back to it fresh, with a red pen in hand. If you know there are problems with your story but can’t pinpoint them, ask a fellow writer to read through it and give feedback.

5. Enjoy yourself and don't forget to have fun. Sometimes, we writers can end up feeling that our writing is a chore, something that “must” be done, or something to procrastinate over for as long as possible. If your plot seems wildly far-fetched, your characters bore you to tears and you’re convinced that a five-year old with a crayon could write better prose … take a break. Start a completely new project, something which is purely for fun. Write a poem or a 60-word “mini saga”. Just completing a small finished piece can help if you’re bogged down in a longer story.

Daily Devices: Faulty Parallelism.

Sometimes a sentence that is not technically incorrect but could still be improved by making coordinate elements more precisely parallel.  Sentences may not be wrong, but sound clumsy, and can be made tighter and more effective.

In literature, the term ‘parallelism’ is used to refer to the practice placing together similarly structure related phrases, words or clauses. Parallelism involves placing sentence items in a parallel grammatical format wherein nouns are listed together, specific verb forms are listed together and the like. When one fails to follow this parallel structure, it results in faulty parallelism. The failure to maintain a balance in grammatical forms is known as faulty parallelism wherein similar grammatical forms receive dissimilar or unequal weight. 

 Example:

FAULTY:
He liked to play basketball and riding horses.

CORRECT:
He liked playing basketball and riding horses.
He liked to play basketball and to ride horses.
He liked to play basketball and ride horses.

Elmore Leonard: 10 Rules of Writing.

1. Never open a book with weather.
2. Avoid prologues.
3. Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue.
4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said”…he admonished gravely.
5. Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per  100,000 words of prose.

6. Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke loose."
7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
9. Don't go into great detail describing places and things.
10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

Daily Devices: Periphrasis.

The term ‘periphrasis’ refers to a writer's intentional use of excessive language and surplus words to convey a meaning that could otherwise be constructed with fewer words and more direct. The use of this device can be to exaggerate a sentence, to create a grander effect, to beat around the bush and to draw attention away from the core of the sentence's purpose

I'm eating an elongated yellow fruit for lunch today.

In the above example; "I'm eating an elongated yellow fruit for lunch today", becomes "I'm eating a banana for lunch" in its simplest form.

Instead of simply saying “I am displeased with your behavior”, a furious teacher might say, “the manner in which you have conducted yourself in my presence of late has caused me to feel uncomfortable and has resulted in my feeling disgruntled and disappointed with you”. I'm sure we've all had one of those teachers who spoke using periphrasis twenty four hours a day.