Writer Tools

Video Transcript

"The tools that a writer uses. Today, the tools available to a writer, the basic tools are great. You've got a good laptop, a good word processor, something that spell checks and does some grammar checking is an essential tool. It almost goes without saying. The next tool that I use, and I recommend this to anybody who's an author, is to get yourself a journal and a good pen that feels good in your hand. And never travel anywhere, never do anything, without that journal being there with you. Because you never know when an idea's going to come to mind. You'll never know when you see something in a coffee shop, walking down the street, you see something in the night sky, whatever it is and you can pick up that journal and you can write it down. And I have a journal that's traveled the world with me. It goes wherever I go. And it's one of the most useful tools that I can imagine for any creative persons to have that. Artists have sketchbooks. Authors need to have a journal that goes with them. The other tool -- it's really hard to call it a tool, but I think the other tool that an author needs is they need someone who will give them honest critical feedback. If you hand your story to your mother, she's going to go, "Oh, this was lovely." Or, "That's nice." Doesn't tell you a darn thing that you need to know as far as an author goes. The old, "you can't see the forest for the trees". By the time you're through putting a hundred and ten, a hundred and fifty, two thousand words down on a piece of paper and carrying these characters through their lives, you're going to miss something. There are things that you're not going to get right and you need someone who can honestly, for the first time, sit down with a red pen and look at your work and tell you this made sense here. The character did something fifty pages later that is completely out of character for them. They change clothes. I call it a continuity flaw. Something went wrong. You need someone who can give you honest feedback. And those people, be it one, two or ten people, are going to be your most valuable sources of feedback and most valuable "tools" as it were and honing that story to be the absolute best that it can be."