With this post I’m starting a three-part series called The Writer’s Toolbox, designed to give authors some practical advice for their writing. While best taken as a whole, I believe these ideas will still serve the purpose divided up, so each section will be of reasonable length for a Blog. I hope you enjoy them!

The Writer’s Toolbox

For a writer to be successful at her profession, she must employ a number of tools. It is not wise to be scatter-brained about this, for order and organization are the keys to using those tools effectively. That is, once she has educated herself on how to use each one and understands its purpose thoroughly, her writing will clearly show the benefit.
My husband is a homebuilder and while he generally employs those with the proper tools to do a specific contracting job on his houses, from time to time he takes hammer in hand and corrects or completes a task himself. Several years ago I bought him a small soft-sided toolbox to carry in his car so he could have those tools he uses the most often handy and ready when they are needed. I truly didn’t think he would use it much and if his first reaction was any indication of his own attitude about the gift, he didn’t either! However, to the surprise of both of us, it has become one of his most essential items for work.
As mentioned earlier, organization and order are key to using tools effectively. Therefore, gather the items below and keep them handy whenever you begin to write. Learning about these tools and how to use them, as well as practicing with them often, will increase your confidence and ability in writing and speaking circumstances alike and take you one step closer to your hope of being published someday.

Measuring Tape

Use it to figure out the parameters of your writing project. Study each publisher’s guidelines, learn the requirements for your genre, and read constantly to see them in action within the pages of a book which has already been published. Don’t worry excessively about meeting another author’s standards, however; they won’t be precisely the same for your project. Learn the rules so when you break them, you will fully understand that you are doing so and exactly why. And don’t forget to review your WIP (work in progress) from time to time during the writing/revision process to ensure it is fitting well within those original parameters—still measuring up!

Electric Drill

Use it on your computer with the cut and paste feature, to move sentences, paragraphs, even entire sections at a time without having to retype. Those of us who grew up before computers find ourselves wishing we’d had the ability to do this while typing endless papers in high school and college on regular typewriters. It is amazing how many writers don’t understand how to use cut and paste even though they do all their composing on a computer. If you don’t know how to effectively use this tool, learn today. It can save you endless hours of needless frustration. You can drill the marked passage into any portion of your manuscript, consider its new placement, and then cut it out again if need be. A drill works both forward and in reverse, remember!

Pliers

Use this tool to jerk out extraneous words and phrases as needed. Write freely on your first draft but then get down to business after that, using these abundantly. I often will pull out sentences and save them to a new document until I’m confident they are not needed elsewhere, then simply delete the new document without keeping it once I’m satisfied with the original passage. This tool is one of the most needed by all writers so don’t feel discouraged if you find yourself using it constantly as that is what it is there for!

Saw

Use this tool along with the ones above to cut out material which is not needed and which drags your manuscript down. Wordiness is the kiss of death for a writer, yet we all tend to indulge in it from time to time. Best advice for this? Less is always better. Seek out the scenes which do not move the plot forward, which have no real relevance to the action (no matter how beautiful the prose!), and use this tool on them. If a word, a gesture, a paragraph, a scene, a chapter, even a plot twist do not serve the primary plot they need to be eliminated. And this tool is just the one to do the job!

Next week we will look at several more tools you might never have considered necessary for writing!