Happy New Year, everyone! I hope you have an absolutely brilliant 2024.

Before I launch into this post, I have a brief annoucement to make: I have a new short story collection coming out later this year! It’s called “Pick Your Potion” and it will be jam-packed with 26 stories (22 that have been published before in magazines, journals, and anthologies, and 4 brand new stories original to the collection). I think it’s going to be my best book yet, and I’m looking forward to sharing more details with you soon!

But in the meantime…

I published my final YouTube video of 2023 yesterday, called “What I might say if I was your writing coach (but you can do this by yourself!)“. You can watch it below, and there’s also a text version further down this page.

Sometimes people ask me for help with their prose writing or editing, and I briefly think about becoming a writing coach.

That isn’t going to happen anytime soon because I barely have time for my existing projects, but I can share with you what I would do if I was your writing coach, and a lot of it you’ll be able to apply right away by yourself if you think it would be useful, without any further input from me. Basically, grab anything you think would be helpful and leave the rest.

I’ll talk about the structure of this first, and then I’ll go into detail. If you signed up for writing coaching with me, we’d work in a timeframe of 6-12 months, because I don’t think it would be nearly as effective in a shorter time period. Every month I would ask you to write one short story.

For those of you who are usually novelists, I understand this isn’t your preferred length, but I still think this is the best way to go. This is because most people can’t write a full novel in a month, but it’s much more reasonable to write a short story in 30 days. We want finished pieces of writing, so that you can improve and iterate on your work in a quick and tangible way.

My day job is in software development, and in software development a team often works in sprints of 2-4 weeks, then you reflect on what you did and how you can do better, and then you put those learnings into practice next sprint. The same sort of continuous improvement principle applies here.

Once you’d finished your monthly story I would read it, and based on that I would suggest one thing for you to focus on in your writing next month. I’ll expand on this shortly.

I would also ask you to read at least 10 short stories each month and log the names and authors of those stories. Ideally these stories would be mostly in the genre that you’re writing in, but if you’re also reading outside of that, that would be fine.

That’s the structure of how the writing coaching would work. Now we’ll discuss what I might ask you to focus on when writing your stories.

If you’re relatively new to writing fiction or you haven’t had more than a couple of stories published yet, we would mainly be working on getting your stories solidly publication-ready. That means looking at things like:

• Are there grammar rules we need to look at? Happens to most of us; I only learnt how to properly use a semi-colon a few years ago.
• Are you using paragraphs where you should be using paragraphs? This is one of the most consistent things that I see early writers doing wrong – big chunks of text that hasn’t been appropriately broken up.
• Are you formatting your dialogue correctly? A lot of early writers might think they know how to do this, but it’s not quite right.
• Are you staying in a consistent tense, like past tense or present tense? It’s easy to accidentally switch between the two.
• Do you vary the length of your sentences? Having lots of sentences of similar length tends to sound repetitive and monotone.
• Do you have a full story rather than a chapter or the start of a scene? These are not the same thing.
• Are you starting your story in a good place? Early writers often take too long to get into the meat of the story.
• Do you have an appropriate ending? Early writers often want to write “To be continued…” at the end of their stories, which I would strongly not recommend.
• Similarly, if you’re writing in scenes, are you starting those scenes in the right place? You can sometimes cut the top of a scene.
• If you’re writing in scenes, are you finishing in the right place? You can sometimes cut the bottom of a scene, too.
• Are you cutting out unnecessary words? For example, instead of saying, “He crossed his arms across his chest and yelled nosily,” you can usually just say, “He crossed his arms and yelled” without losing any meaning, because we assume that crossed arms are across the chest, and that yelling is noisy.
• Description: Do you have ‘white room syndrome’ where the reader can’t picture where the characters are or what’s happening because you’re not describing anything? Are you also describing some sensory details for us, like what something smells or feels like? Or alternately, are you describing everything in such great detail that it’s really slowing the story down?

This is not an all-inclusive list, of course, but you get the idea.

Once we’d gotten all of that into a good place, or if you were already an experienced and published writer, then we’d usually focus on other things. I’d make sure you had the knowledge you needed to submit your short stories for publication (which I have other videos on) and we’d focus more on expanding your writing tools and challenging you. That could look like:

• Writing a flash fiction piece under 1000 words.
• Writing a story in the format of a list.
• Writing a story in the format of some instructions.
• Writing a story in first, second, or third person, if you don’t usually write from that point of view.
• Writing a story with multiple point of view characters (e.g. Alice and Bob and Carol).
• Writing a story from the perspective of character with a more unusual voice or style, like a small child or a computer.
• Writing a story where the narrator notices a very specific set of details because of who they are, or sees everything through a certain lens, like: they describe the teeth of everyone they meet because they’re a dental hygienist.
• Writing a story with multiple timelines, where it shifts from the past to the present and back again.

Etc. Etc.

To give you an example, say I was working with Joe and he brings me his first story. I read the story, and I say, “Joe, for next month I would like you to focus on your paragraphs.” And then for his next story he can write about whatever he likes, but he makes sure he’s being very mindful about his paragraphs, and hopefully when I read it I see an improvement in the paragraphing.

And then I say, “This is great, Joe; your paragraphs are definitely better. For next month I would like you to focus on bringing in some more sensory description, so we get more of an idea of what things smell and taste like.” And again, Joe goes and writes about whatever he likes, but this time he’s very deliberate about adding in that kind of description.

So if this sounds helpful to you, this kind of writing practice is something you can do on your own without me or a writing coach. You do have to be conscious of where your writing could use improvement, which can be difficult when we all have our blind spots, and a big part of why you might want a separate human as a writing coach. But if you’re a new-ish writer, I’d suggest starting with the list I discussed earlier in this video and trying your best to make an honest assessment of whether you could use some more focus in a particular area or not. Regular reading, like the 10 short stories a month I suggested, also really helps you to become more aware of where you can improve.

The method I’ve discussed in this video would’ve been one of the most helpful things I could’ve done as an early writer to help me level up, and I hope it helps some of you watching, too.