Everything in life has the basic set of Do's and Don'ts. DO wash your hands after going to the bathroom; DON'T put your mother's car keys in an electrical socket. DO sneeze into a Kleenex or your elbow; DON'T hit the little kindergarten kid who stole your sandbox shovel way back when, even if her button nose is very punchable and those pigtails are just the right length for pulling--

Sorry; I'm getting off track. My point is, EVERYTHING has some form of Do's and Don'ts; what to do, and especially what NOT to do. That "everything" just happens to include writing. Here is a basic list of my Do's and Don'ts, before we get into the nitty-gritty of details and stuff like that. 

- Note -
Some of you guys reading this book might find/already know that you have done some of the Don'ts on this list. That's a-okay! This book is here to HELP PEOPLE GET BETTER AT WRITING, not to poke fun at others for making mistakes. I might make a few jokes throughout this book, but that is all they are, I promise.

I know that we ALL have made at least one of the following, if not all, these mistakes at some point or another in your stories; I'll be the first to own up to it. I don't want any hate on people who admit to making these mistakes, or just hate in general against inexperienced writers. Just because somebody hasn't been writing for as long as you, or doesn't have as many reads on their books as you, DOES NOT MEAN WE SHAME ON THEM. I feel like this is basic, kindergarten-level respect here, but I just want to get the point across.

I'd also like to point out the Do's on this list are merely suggestions. Please don't take them too seriously, as I am not a professional author (yet), and these are personal tips I'm giving based on my experience with writing and the books that I've encountered in the wild. 

Alright, NOW we can get onto the Do's and Don'ts!

1. DO have a basic idea for your story. 

This is how all stories begin; with an idea. I know it sounds really lame and cheesy, but inspiration can come from ANYWHERE. Personally, I find listening to music gets my mind active and in a creative mood to write; Little Mix and Fall Out Boy are my go-to writing tunes. Anything fast-paced and upbeat, and I can work with it; even slower songs are good for somber scenes. While I actually need no outside distractions and complete silence to be in a good work mindset (or a song that I've listened to a bajillion times and can shove into the background for white noise), listening to music beforehand is what wakes up my mind and gets it ready for putting thoughts in my head so I can put them on paper. 

There are LOADS of ways to get ideas to come to you. I won't list absolutely everything here because it's different for everybody, but here are some basic ideas to get you started:

- Going outside in nature. Hiking, going to the beach, even just a walk around your neighborhood is good. Fresh air can just clear your mind and make it easier to focus.

- Baking. Getting crafty in the kitchen is one way to make those creative juices flow. Plus, you have some snacks for when you write so that's, like, double the win.

- Listening to music! I already said this one before, but music is a GREAT way to get myself pumped up and ready for writing. Usually it's poppy Alternative (like AJR), or Pop in general, but if I'm really on a time crunch or I want to write REALLY fast, I listen to -- wait for it -- Nightcore music. I think the increased tempo makes me move faster, but that's just a me thing. I'd say listen to whatever music inspires you to get up and move, and then go from there.

- Anything that gets you pumped up or excited! If you're super pumped and excited about something, that energy can pass over to what you write as well. If you just made the winning goal at your team's soccer game, or finally beat that last boss in Donkey Kong, or scored a date with the person you're crushing on, that adrenaline can come in handy when writing. It's sort of like an instant refuel of brain gas; the brain gas station, if you will. 

- Meditation. Sometimes people need to take a breather before sitting down for hours at a time to write. I personally find meditation really great when I need to take a second, especially if I've been having a very high-strung day. The energy works well when I can take hours to write, but stressful energy really hinders me. A few minutes of mindful breathing does WONDERS. I'm not even spiritual, but just taking a moment to focus on yourself is a great way to reset your mind and clear the way for a new focus point; your writing!

Hopefully, these kick-starters are helpful and will get your mind ready to write.

2. DON'T make your story too complicated. 

Look; I get that you're excited. You've just had a wonderful idea, you have your characters, and you've got an endless expanse of white paper (or Google Docs) to bring this world to life. But if this world is just dragging on and on and on and on and ON, then there's really not a lot of interest going on. 

Yes, I know there are big books out there. Yes, I know they've got lots of chapters. YES, I KNOW THEY HAVE A LOT OF READS. But consider this golden rule that has been with writers since time began; Quality. Over. Quantity. If you're just throwing extra stuff in there so you get more reads, you'll probably end up with a lot less popularity because you'll have gained the reputation of an author who likes to pull sudden action out of nowhere and shove it up the reader's wazoo. I've seen too many people do this. It doesn't end well. 

The main difference between a long BOOK and a long PLOT is the pacing of it. Just because the book has a lot of chapters doesn't mean the plot is extra long; it just means it takes time to get to the big events. Extra long plots are the kind of plot that feel dragged out and weighed down; the pacing is slow, or just completely off. You'll know them if you see them. They're the ones where the adventures keep happening, where more problems start before others are resolved and the whole thing dissolves into chaos.

I had this experience with Stage I Queen of The Ventils, and ended up tossing scenes that didn't make much sense into the outline to make more chapters happen. But, as the story progressed, I ended up writing so much that when I really looked back at my old outline, I just kept the essentials and scrapped the rest, considering by the time the events in my outline's Chapter 5 rolled around, we were on Chapter 11 in the published story. 

A dragged-out plot makes it seem like the story isn't going anywhere, and makes the readers think the author really wasn't thinking through what to put in their story. If you have ideas, wonderful! You just need to find a way to make them fit without making it seem out of place. For example, I was going through a bit of a Cats phase when I started planning QOTV, and tossed in a scene for a school play that eventually evolved into a whole other thing that would have made absolutely no sense had it been included in the story. 

My point is, if you have a random idea, absolutely write it down; things tend to look more different on paper than they do inside your head, so once everything's emptied out of that skull cavity, take another gander at it and then decide if it's worth including.

3. DO give your characters a proper backstory. 

Look, nobody wants to see the same old bad-boy-meets-cute-but-bullied-nerd fanfiction. NOBODY. I'll tackle stereotypical plots and characters at a later date, but here's the gist of it.

If you're going to make a character, be sure to make them memorable; that way they stick out in a reader's mind more, and they give more emotion to the book. Plus, you get tears from the audience if you decide to kill them off. Nobody wants to read a story with the same gender/hair-color description of characters; put some meat on those fictional bones of theirs! 

Look at these two examples of characters; one is my summary of one of my OCs, and another is a basic summary of them you might find on Google if it were, like, a dictionary word. Guess which one is which. 

1. "Ravena is a girl. She has black hair. She goes to school, has friends, and her parents are evil."

2. "Ravena is a teenage girl who runs a cohort of other teens, who are like the dictators of her high school; they're called the Venators. She has wavy black hair with indigo tips, sheared on one side, and piercings all along that exposed ear, along with a nose stud. Her parents are an evil overlord and his general, and she's the youngest of five siblings. She's secretly a lesbian, but nobody except her oldest brother knows."

You know the really negative saying, 'Beauty is only skin-deep?' Well, NEWS FLASH! IT ISN'T, WHEN IT COMES TO CHARACTERS OR OTHERWISE!!! Even if you're a fanfiction writer and you're working with characters that already exist, give them some background we don't know about.

Maybe they're originally from Jamaica and moved to where they are now because of a strange illness inflicted upon the local youth. Or maybe they have famous relatives with lots of money they don't like speaking about because they're worried their friends will want them only for fame. 

All characters can be improved upon, even ones that are already out there. Treat your characters like real human beings, and they can go a long way. 

4. DON'T model your characters after stereotypes. 

We all know that there are stereotypes out there in the world. Bad boys wear black and smoke. Brats wear pink. Blondes are stupid airheads. Nerds wear glasses. Black people are good at sports. Feminine boys are gay and masculine women are lesbian. The handsome, popular boy gets the girl, and the smart boy gets friend-zoned because the girl is too ignorant to notice more than one option in the boyfriend department. And, of course, she's perfect in every feasible manner possible and holds the powers to save the world and all that jazz. 

This, my friends, is what I call a SERIOUS PROBLEM. EVERYBODY KNOWS HOW THIS IS GOING TO PLAY OUT!!  It's like some lazy, 2 minute Gachaverse mini movie on YouTube, and even that description isn't doing much to explain how bad it is.

Using stereotypes is the quick and cheap way out of places; plus, some of the stereotypes can be hurtful and even really rude, especially concerning race or sexual orientation. It's best to avoid them altogether, or purposefully take a stereotype and create a character that completely foils that stereotype. Though I'd still recommend staying away from sensitive stereotypes you haven't done research on, just to be respectful.

Ex: A B+ grade girl, high schooler, half Caribbean, wears glasses and loves to go shopping with her friends. She's actually pretty mean when she's in a bad mood, and her boyfriend is studying to be an electrical engineer at a city college. 

See what I mean? Stereotypes are an old stigma that are so black and white there's no grey area anywhere. Mix it up a bit! Plus, you'll get more memorable moments out of characters not borne of stereotypes. 

5. DO take your time with the planning.

Nobody got anywhere by rushing headfirst into something with no plan (except maybe prison), and writing is no different. Even if it's loose and a bit scatterbrained, any form of organization is good for a story. This makes it easier to follow the storyline you have planned, and to actually remember everything you want to include. 

Personally, I take it chapter by chapter by writing a quick summary of what I want to happen in the chapter, and maybe a piece of dialogue or a scene I want to include in that chapter as well. Since writer's block occurs often for me when I don't know what to do, having that basic plan in place is like a pre-made set of instructions to follow, and it makes my life that much simpler. Do whatever works for you.

6. DON'T use overused beginnings in your story. 

Okay, let me break this down for you in the best way I know how;

It was a dark and stormy night;  overused and cliche. 

She awoke, tendrils of the nightmarish dream still clinging to her subconscious in the waking world; seen it hundreds of times in twenty different fonts. 

I just moved to a new school and my life turned upside down; I could find this plot in fifty other novels if I took five seconds on Google.

I was doing just fine until the Alpha walked into the room; no. Just...just no. 

Much like the overused characters of fanfiction and Hallmark movies, overused beginnings can be an accident that more often than not can prove fatal to a story. If you have the same old opening sentence, like, "'____!!!! You're late to school!" my mother called from the kitchen", or "Once upon a time (in ___), ____ happened", or even just cliche scene openers. For example, waking up from a nightmare, or getting up for school. Addressing the reader (when inappropriate), backstory-stuffed prologues, and a crazy hook that makes ABSOLUTELY NO SENSE are also big turn-offs. 

If you're going to write anything, then at least put the effort in to make it somewhat original; and if you're going to do a prologue, then PLEASE don't shove your OC's entire backstory down our throats. As much as we would like to see it, be sure to break that backstory down and sprinkle it all around the story.

7. DO try and stick to ONE genre in your story. 

Look, I get that picking just one genre to write in is difficult. Almost every story in existence can actually fit into more than one category of genres, and yet they're classified as singular. Why? Because the main idea of the plot REVOLVES AROUND THAT GENRE. You can throw in funny bits to your Thriller/Horror story, or scary parts in your lovely Romance soap-opera of a novel, but make sure it doesn't clash with the main idea.

In fact, sometimes, extra elements are needed to make a story feel authentic. No romance is always so fluffy and perfect, no horror story is infinitely scary, and no mystery novel will always be solved with a dust for finger prints and a magnifying glass. If you add certain elements of different stories that can propel the plot further and elevate the story, then sure! Add it in! 

8. DO. NOT. HAVE. HUGE. BLOCKS. OF. TEXT. SITTING. IN. YOUR. WRITING. PIECE.

This right here is the Number One turn-off for readers everywhere. If I don't see a paragraph break within the first five sentences of a fanfiction, I'm out of there. Same goes for an actual book, if you care to write it. It's super painful to process all those words crammed so close together, and it's generally a very ugly look and highly unsatisfactory to the reader. Let's list an example of a paragraph with good breaks, and one without.

(WARNING: Spoilers for an upcoming one-shot ahead!!!)

Bad:
"Yer still warblin' on that high note, doll." You screamed, jumping and flailing, eyes squeezed shut as you struck out hard with the mop handle. Unfortunately, being caught off-guard the way you were, and wearing some very fuzzy (and extremely comfortable, might I add) oversized socks on linoleum floors that had just been freshly mopped, you twisted and went down like a sack of bricks, dropping said mop in the process. You groaned, pain in your back spiking and head throbbing; that collision would definitely be leaving a bruise. A familiar dark chuckle pulled you out of the painful haze, and you opened your eyes to an upside-down version of a very familiar face. "Piers!" In a split-second, you were up once again (any mention of a second or third slip would be vehemently denied in the future), and had launched yourself at your long-gone lover. "Hey there, songbird," he smiled, that familiar smirk holding so much more joy than one person could ever imagine, and you grinned, pushing your face into his throat. He laughed again, gently putting a hand on the back of your neck to keep you in close. He held you there for a while, gently swaying back and forth to the new Christmas song playing on the radio, but you didn't care. You just now registered the wetness pooling in the corners of your eyes and beading on your lashes, but you didn't care. "You're really here," you whispered, almost in disbelief if not for the steady rise and fall of Piers' chest, the familiar scent of guitar grease and just a hint of cigarette smoke that clung to his clothes like a lifeline, and the steady pulsing of his heart underneath three layers of leather and cotton. "I'm here, darlin'."

Good:
"Yer still warblin' on that high note, doll."

You screamed, jumping and flailing, eyes squeezed shut as you struck out hard with the mop handle. Unfortunately, being caught off-guard the way you were, and wearing some very fuzzy (and extremely comfortable, might I add) oversized socks on linoleum floors that had just been freshly mopped, you twisted and went down like a sack of bricks, dropping said mop in the process. You groaned, pain in your back spiking and head throbbing; that collision would definitely be leaving a bruise. A familiar dark chuckle pulled you out of the painful haze, and you opened your eyes to an upside-down version of a very familiar face. "Piers!"

In a split-second, you were up once again (any mention of a second or third slip would be vehemently denied in the future), and had launched yourself at your long-gone lover. "Hey there, songbird," he smiled, that familiar smirk holding so much more joy than one person could ever imagine, and you grinned, pushing your face into his throat. He laughed again, gently putting a hand on the back of your neck to keep you in close.

He held you there for a while, gently swaying back and forth to the new Christmas song playing on the radio, but you didn't care. You just now registered the wetness pooling in the corners of your eyes and beading on your lashes, but you didn't care. "You're really here," you whispered, almost in disbelief if not for the steady rise and fall of Piers' chest, the familiar scent of guitar grease and just a hint of cigarette smoke that clung to his clothes like a lifeline, and the steady pulsing of his heart underneath three layers of leather and cotton. "I'm here, darlin'."

See? It's not that easy to read, right? You don't even want to continue reading the first paragraph, because it hits you in the face like a brick wall. If you want my advice (which is why you're here, right? So why am I asking this? I need sleep), then I'd add a bit more line breaks then what you'd usually deem strictly necessary to the story if you're doubting yourself. It makes it easy for the readers to see it, and that's the whole point! 

However, there is a point where it gets to be too much, and I have seen it a few times. You can be generous with the line breaks, HOWEVER. Don't use it with every individual sentence; that just makes the formatting seem weird. You can use the single-sentence line with breaks to give emphasis to a certain phrase, but making every single sentence separated makes it seem disconnected. 

Basically, don't be afraid of line breaks, but don't overuse them. Okay?