Practical Writing Tips

Writing tools: what’s essential for a writer?

Lately in the Guardian Saturday review section they’ve run a series of pictures of writers’ rooms with explanations from the writer about the room and what’s in it. Every week it fascinates me to see how varied the rooms are; as varied as the writers featured.

Part of writing is creating the atmosphere in which we write. For foreign reporters their ambience has to be created on the hoof, literally, and at speed. For most of us it can be done in a more leisurely way. But I believe it’s a tool that can enhance your writing.

Often tools are thought of as things like dictionaries, thesauruses and the like. Books that help us search for that word or phrase that makes a difference. And depending on what you’re writing there may be research sources for your current project.

I think one of the most important tools isn’t talked about very often but is vital to success.

That’s your writing mindset.

What often distinguishes the professional from would be writer is mindset. That attitude that you can write or carry out some part of the writing process as you choose. I work with a lot of businesses and their work is usually specific to deadlines and often word length.

What I had to teach myself when I started working with business clients was how to force the inspiration you need to complete projects quickly. Such as a recent project for a client who wanted the job turning round in 24 hours.

Waiting for inspiration wasn’t an option and the mindset kicked in that I could do it.

Like anything else in a writer’s armoury of tools it’s something that becomes stronger the more you use it. So work out what fires you up to write at your most powerful and use it as a conscious tool. Find a way to create that mindset whenever you have a deadline or the inspiration seems to have disappeared.

Writing tools: do they work?

I love the story, maybe apocryphal about NASA spending a lot of money to research and create a pen that works in space while the Russians took pencils.

They’re both writing tools at their most basic but a step up from the quill pen. When I was at school we were still using pens with nibs and inks. Because of that I swear the skin on my middle right finger still has a dent and in a certain light looks Quink ink colour light blue.

To perform the physical act of writing on paper we still need those tools, otherwise it’s a keyboard and some form of word processing package. That moves us on to producing text but how do we get the ideas for the text and improve our efficiency rate at writing and our results rate with what we write.

Whatever the style of writing you want to do, there are hundreds of courses and workshops out there to help you. Depending upon the type of writing, there are actual templates you can fill in the blanks to get you started. Particularly if you are writing for the web these can certainly help you.

Business letters, website text, sales letters, reports; they’re all available at various costs.

If what you want is to concentrate on something other than the writing they’re probably enough to satisfy you. If you want to understand the nuts and bolts of writing then you need to delve deeper.

It’s like going on holiday where you don’t speak the language. You can learn enough to get by or you can study in depth. I was once living for a short period in Germany and for most of my time it sounded like linguistic chaos every time I was with a group. Then towards the end of my stay I began to realise that I understood without having to concentrate on every word.

When that happens in writing you know that the tools have become less important and that you’re now free to allow nuances, idiosyncrasies and your individual style to flourish.