8 Creative Writing Hacks to Leapfrog Your Next Hurdle

Writing is an act of love.

You wake up early. 

You stay up late. 

You rack your tired brain for ingenious plot ideas and beautiful sentences while you’re at bus stops, at work, in the shower.

You bang your head against your writing desk when the sentences don’t come easy.

Writing good books is supposed to be hard.

But what if you could make it just a little bit easier?

Here are eight writing hacks that can relieve the tension
—or amplify it—to help you get past whichever hurdle is standing in your way.

#1. Sign an accountability contract.

Let’s tackle the author’s most common problem first.

Finishing the damn book.

It can take years to finish something you’re proud of. You have to juggle your creative writing time with work obligations, family obligations, sleep obligations, and beyond. When you’re not getting paid for it (yet), it can be hard to justify giving yourself over to a project.

But if you haven’t tried the accountability hack yet, you might be just this one step away from actually getting it done.

The trick is: sign a contract. (Maybe this one, from Aimee Bender.) That way, you put into writing what your specific goals are and you hand it over to someone who will keep you accountable. 

You can make your own rules—like write for one hour everyday; write four days out of seven; finish by June 25th—and, just by giving it to someone else, you’ll be putting on the pressure to actually get it done. 

Annie Hartnett (author of a couple of my favorite novels of the last few years, Rabbit Cake and The Road to Tender Hearts) pushed me onto this idea years ago, and I’ve loved it ever since. 

She runs an accountability workshop that works from a similar premise. I heard on a podcast once—who knows which one!?—that she was part of an accountability group where she had to email other members in the group at the end of every day to say, “Done!” or “Didn’t do it,” so that she either got that burst of elation in doing the work or the shame she didn’t want to repeat the next day. Keep yourself accountable, and keep someone else in the loop to make you feel guilty. 

#2. Unplug the wifi and throw your phone in the trash.

Okay, so maybe I’m taking it a little far—or am I? —but when it’s drafting time, it’s not research time. You set aside time to write, so do the thing you set out to do.

But just telling yourself you won’t slip over to Instagram for a quick update on that influencer who posts 15 stories a day isn’t going to cut it. You’re tempted to take brain breaks, so stop yourself before it starts.

Don’t just log out of the wifi. Fully take the plug out of the outlet. Make it so you have to stand up and travel in order to take that brain break you needed so badly. 

I might have told you to put your phone in the trash, but you could also just put it in a different room. Or on the other side of the room. Or, if you’re dedicated to getting your time back, try Brick. It’s this square tool that you use to lock your phone out of your most-used apps, set a timer, and put the square brick out of reach. You can’t just hit “Ignore limit” on your phone like usual. You have to get out of your seat and commit to the shame. Or write.

#3. Print out your pages or use a Kindle to read your draft instead of on your laptop.

You’ve finally finished a draft! I don’t care how messy that thing is—have yourself a beer and pat yourself on the back. You deserve it.

But before you go jumping into that draft to revise, read it like a reader. 

Some people like to print out their manuscripts so they can hold them in their hands, flip pages, and make notes in the margins. That’s fine if you have a printer or want to hand over your quarters at the library.

I love having a Kindle for this reason. There’s this feature on Kindles where you can send pdfs, epubs or Word docs to it, and I’ve used it so many times to put a barrier between me and my desire to self-edit. I read it in bed, no night light necessary. You’d be amazed at how helpful it is to sit in the reader’s comfy shoes for a while. (I have the cheapest Kindle, and it works just as well as the fancy, more expensive ones.)

Another benefit to having a Kindle is that you can use it when you’re beta reading/critiquing other writers’ books. I use mine daily while reviewing books for IBR.

Speechify also works well in helping you read like a reader. It’s this app where you can send a manuscript and have an automated voice read it aloud to you. I’ve done this while doing dishes countless times. The paid version is better with better voices, but the free version gets the job done too if you can ignore the robotic voice.

#4. For second drafts, re-type, don’t revise.

I learned this tactic from Matt Bell in his super helpful, super practical Refuse to Be Done.

Your second draft won’t be your last one. In the first draft, you were telling yourself the story. You probably put scenes out of order. You probably wrote scenes that didn’t need to be there. You probably characterized people who ended up being totally different by the end of the book.

So instead of trying to move pieces around and change entire paragraphs in your second draft, open up a completely separate document, keep the first draft on the right side of your screen, and re-type the book from start to finish on your left. Your sentences will be tighter, and you won’t feel tempted to keep anything that shouldn’t be there. 

Sure, it might take a little longer this way, but writing a book is a marathon, not a sprint. The extra-time helps the quality and might save you time in editing the third draft.

And remember:  don’t copy and paste. Fully rewrite/retype. The voice of your second draft is different from your first draft. Keep the flow and voice consistent and don’t cut corners.

#5. Mismatch weather & character traits.

Let’s take a quick departure from the act of writing and move toward the scenes themselves. 

You already know about cliches in sentences—”hungry as a horse,” “slept like a baby,” “better safe than sorry”—but cliches exist in scenes and characters too. 

I’m sure you’ve seen the storm hit when a character is feeling down, sitting by the window, watching the rain slide down like tears. It’s a way of showing sadness without saying, “He was sad.” 

But in your next draft, play around with that a little. The weather is the weather, regardless of how a character is feeling. Listen to the birds singing and the sun shining down as your character is experiencing the hardest day of their life. Or let the darkness hit when your character makes his biggest, most positive revelation.

And the same goes for characters. Surprise us. Make that hard-nosed linebacker be afraid of spiders. Make that soft-spoken barista commit petty thefts around the shop. They don’t have to be big plot points. Contradictions make characters feel real.

#6. Handwrite in small notebooks for small scenes.

Welcome to my #1 reason for writing this blog post.

I’ve been writing my novel for a long time. Too long, some (and I) would say. I’ve handwritten scenes and typed new ones and restructured and tried just about every trick to get it done.

A few years ago, I bought a ten-pack of very small pocket notebooks. I wanted something I could put in my pocket and pull out whenever I had an idea, instead of doing it in the notes app on my iPhone back when I had one.

I have this character in my novel who writes notes. They’re placed in between bigger chapters, and my protagonist finds them after he’s dead, so the protagonist gets to hear his voice—no matter if he’s saying nothing or everything—once he discovers them.

Since I had those notebooks, I started writing his tiny notes in there. Since the pages were so small, I kept the notes really small too—just like they would be for my character. It was like putting myself in a box. If I wrote a full-length scene, it would take enough pages to fill up the whole book. So I went bite-sized just because of the constraints of the notebook. I’m not saying the notes are awesome, but I am saying that if you need small scenes, giving yourself small pages will help. 

The same goes with characters who write letters. The pages might want to be a little bigger than these tiny noteboooks but not as big as multiple Microsoft Word pages. Maybe something like this.

#7. Proofread with extra large font.

Proofreading can get tedious. Your eyes can gloss over if you’ve read the book enough times, and you can get in the habit of telling yourself the grammar is right simply from knowing where the rest of the sentence is going.

So change up the reading experience.

Make the font extra large so there’s only two paragraphs on a single page. You’d be amazed at how many many double words there are and how many times you missed a word altogether. (See what I did there?)

You can also try changing the page color to black and the text color to white, or changing the font itself. Trick your eyes; catch the errors.

#8. Leave.

It’s the end of the night. Your kids (or mine) have been hollering at you to play Wolfwalkers all day. You’re tired, but you want to write. 

Instead of starting and stopping way sooner than you wanted to because maybe you deserve a snack or two, get out of the house. 

Go to the cool bookish coffee shop if they’re open, or head over to the not-so-romantic gas station convenience store that has chairs, tables, and outlets. If you get out of the house, you’re telling yourself that you came here to do the thing, so you won’t give up sooner than you really wanted to. 

What’s your favorite writing hack?

About the Author

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