General Writing Advice/Insights/Tips and Tricks
Another tip:
Listen to your writing.
One of the most effective ways to improve your writing is to listen to it being read aloud. This is tremendously helpful for identifying skipped words, clumsy sentence structure, unnatural speech patterns, and issues with the overall flow of your story. You pick up on all sorts of things you might not have noticed with a typical read through, which makes a huge difference in the editing process.
I started doing this about 10 years ago. I'd email documents to my Kindle and enable the text-to-speech feature. These days, pretty much all devices have some sort of text-to-speech option. There are programs, extensions, and apps you can download, and in some cases, speech-to-text is built into the device.
What I personally use:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/readme-text-to-speech-tts/npdkkcjlmhcnnaoobfdjndibfkkhhdfn
This is a free extension for Google Chrome that works pretty well. The voices are average (I'd say 6 out of 10). I generally use this as a quick and dirty solution when I need something read aloud… it's also great for listening to fanfiction on various sites.
https://www.naturalreaders.com/software.html
This is a free program for Windows/Mac with an option to upgrade for more voices. The free voices aren't that great (4 out of 10), but it's a decent solution.
This is what I currently use for editing my chapters. It's a browser-based solution, and the voices are impressive (8 out of 10). Unfortunately, it does cost money, so I'd recommend a free alternative for casual use. That said, if you ever decide to turn your stories into audiobooks, something like this is definitely the way to go!
I'm a Windows/Google Chrome user, so I really can't comment on other solutions. If you know of one for your own platform/device though, feel free to comment and I'll add it to the list!
Yeah, I stole this tip from Heather. I use the Any Text to Voice app from the Microsoft Store. It's not bad, though I only use Microsoft Susan English United Kingdom feature. I'd say it's not bad. As mentioned, it helps me catch a LOT of clunkiness and hilarious misspellings!
It's also worth noting that prior to the Internet age, many famous writers used to read their works aloud as part of their composition process. So these text-to-voice programs are really an automated version of that process.
Ha, that's way better than the one I use! (The Ra-venclaw, rather than Ray-venclaw, was hilarious though!)
I was using one that pronounces "Severus" as "SEVERE us". That shit drove me crazy!
Listening to the writing is really good tip that I hadn't considered. Mostly because I think reading myself saves a lot of time, so I mostly read myself than listening to audiobooks. I tried Stephan Fry's audiobook of Harry Potter and though I enjoyed it, I felt better reading myself for the time efficiency. Hearing your own writing is a really good suggestion and I will try it out.
Here's a book that may help novice writer's out. A colleague had noticed how much I like reading and started gifting me books and this is one of them. I don't know what made him think that I liked creative writing but don't look a gifted horse in the mouth, I guess.
