writing advice – Tanya Lisle https://tanyalisle.com Creative on a health break Wed, 12 Feb 2025 23:26:09 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.1 https://tanyalisle.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Untitled-1-150x150.png writing advice – Tanya Lisle https://tanyalisle.com 32 32 48352171 25 hobbies to humanize your characters https://tanyalisle.com/2021/08/25-hobbies-to-humanize-your-characters/ Mon, 09 Aug 2021 18:04:00 +0000 https://tanyalisle.com/?p=5951 People are complex creatures, even when they are in the midst of trying to save the world or going through personal traumas. An easy way to help humanize a character and make them a more well-rounded person that feels real is to give them hobbies that don’t necessarily have anything to do with the plot.

  1. Folding paper stars
  2. Knitting or crochet
  3. Writing fanfiction
  4. Candle or soap making
  5. Bullet journalling
  6. Dungeons and Dragons
  7. Tarot
  8. Palmistry
  9. Astrology
  10. Baking
  11. Gardening
  12. Woodworking
  13. Painting
  14. Figures
  15. Jewelry making
  16. Comics
  17. Gaming
  18. Photography
  19. Photoshopping memes
  20. Chainmaille weaving
  21. Collecting something obscure (Water from every ocean they’ve visited, stones from different parks, etc.)
  22. Nail art or make up
  23. Zine making
  24. Resin casting
  25. Cosplay

Let me know what kind of hobbies that you have!

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This Workbook Contains:

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  • Writing session tracker
]]> 5951 Try Everything https://tanyalisle.com/2019/05/try-everything/ Wed, 29 May 2019 19:48:46 +0000 https://tanyalisle.com/?p=2439 Earlier this month at LitFest, there were quite a few people who wanted to know if there was any advice I could give to new authors. It came up during an interview I did with CSFJ as well. And while there’s always a lot of advice, I tend to go right back to what my old standby is.

Try everything. Keep trying things until you find what works for you.

There’s reams of writing advice out there, and that advice will run from writing a thousand words a day to finish the novel in a month to revise as you go. You should plot everything, plot nothing, plot only a couple things and leave the rest up in the air. You should know everything about your characters before you start or you should get to know them as you write. The advice is wildly contradictory between sources, and not even every author can agree on what the best way is to do things.

That’s because the best way doesn’t exist. There’s only the best way for you. And figuring out what that best way for you is to try out a bunch of methods and not getting too upset if something isn’t right. Write every day and see if that’s working for you. Try powering through a first draft and see if the need to go back and revise while you write is too great. Try NaNoWriMo once to see if your brain likes it.

It’s important to understand that there is no one right way to get your story out in the world. That’s going to mean trying a bunch of things until you get your weird routine for writing down and figure out what works for you, your life, your brain. It doesn’t matter how other people do it. You have to figure out how you do it and know that your way is the right way for you.

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