emmanuel-seta:emotionalmorphine:thewinterotter:brendaonao3:sifaseven:yamisnuffles:ouyangdan:asianwas
emmanuel-seta:emotionalmorphine:thewinterotter:brendaonao3:sifaseven:yamisnuffles:ouyangdan:asianwashington:creativeprompts:Using Brackets to Write Faster In her book, Writing Faster FTW, author L.A. Witt shares several techniques that have helped her write several books a year at impeccable speed. I’m a huge fan of fast drafting and picked this book up hoping to learn some useful tips and tricks to improve my writing speed. One of Witt’s favorite techniques involves the use of brackets. If, while writing, you get to a point where you don’t know what to put for a character’s name, eye color, or dialogue, toss in some brackets! Then, once you’re finished with the draft, you can search for the brackets and beef up the manuscript as needed.While working on the first draft of my novel Reflections, I’ve been using a lot of brackets. Most of the time, at the end of the day’s writing session, I’ll go back and replace the brackets with relevant information. But when it seems that more in-depth revision will be needed, I leave the brackets until it’s time to do my second draft. For a glimpse of what this technique looks like in action, see the excerpt below:With her father out of the room, the restaurant felt [adjective], cold, and unsettling. The television, which had gone to a commercial break and was blaring [description of ads], was far too loud for human ears. Rama’s hands trembled as she picked up the remote again and turned the whole thing off. She [phrase about safety even though it meant she had to face her [adjective] thoughts without any distractions.Read the full article by Briana Mae Morgani do this and it really helps!This is something I know I need to do and yet always forget to do when actually writing.I actually do this, and it helps when you have a deadline. Like Nano.I use parentheses but same principle. It helps SO much, you have no idea.This technique has made a HUGE difference for my ability to keep on writing, instead of getting side-tracked on things like research. If you need to look something up, you can do it later. It also helps to have just a notebook or digital sticky or something and keep an ongoing list of everything you’ve bracketed that you need to research so you can do it in between drafts, instead of interrupting your flow on the second draft again by stopping to research stuff.If you find you get distracted by researching or checking facts, using brackets is the easiest way to combat that. Any time you want to stop to check a fact, how to spell that character’s name, how that machine actually works, just pop it in the brackets and do it LATER.Don’t interrupt your writing streak. Once you stop it’s so hard to get back into the rhythm. Even if you have to spend an hour later checking facts, it’s better than losing your motivation and never picking back up that day because you’re spent so long checking facts and, hell, usually ended back on Tumblr.This is a really useful tool that I’ve been using for a long time and it really, REALLY works. I would’t recommend it if I didn’t believe in it.Do whatever you can to keep that flow going!Okay so I’m working on my bachelor’s thesis.Today I was starting to outline my first draft by jotting down some thoughts and points that I should mention, and I remembered this post. So I decided, hey, what the heck, let’s try that out, and I wrote a small intro paragraph which I filled with brackets to cover for the actual facts that I was still missing. And it was so much more valuable than my usual bullet points! I got a nice base in full sentences for the stuff I want to say with the brackets showing me what kind of info I need to find and from what kinds of sources.Basically, this method could really help with academic writing too! I’ll definitely try this on essays and other stuff to see if it improves my efficiency. -- source link