My name's Katie and welcome back to my channel. Today I'm gonna cover the topic of writing advice. I'm gonna talk about the best writing craft tips I've gotten from these books as well as pitch wars and author mentor match mentors. That's yeah. And going along with that I asked my friend Kat to write a blog post that may I want to be out by now but I will definitely let y'all know when it is and it's asking about how to think like a mentor and all the advice they could give us to better perfect our craft when we look at our own projects and when we look at other projects that we're critiquing for. So when I got feedback from my pitch wars mentor and my author mentor match mentor a blog I learned so much this year and it's only been like five months. So what's really great is I got to learn those things and then revise two books so I wasn't like wasting a bunch of years which was nice. I'm very thankful that I got almost picked for pitch wars and picked for author mentor match on two separate books so I got to learn different things to work on and some of this is talked about in these other books that basically all your subplots need to relate back to the main plot. They need to be woven in and not just like spread out like a tree which is what I did with romancing fate which is now project Emma. I was told that all my stuff was not centralized it was like everywhere and she was like you need to centralize it all and why are for story or story genius one of those also talks about that and how everything needs to relate back to your protagonists inner struggle their misbelief whatever and I was all over the place and it helped me in project Emma to center it on school and a few branches within that same plot line of school and so everything was right there instead of like five different places. That ended up not being totally true for hashtag goals but the subplot made it its way into the plot still because of what comes up and happens and secondary characters and all of that and I think it still works. Another thing I read in one of these books and it totally hits for both my stories because I wrote things about my story and it was super out of order plot wise for hashtag goals and the original draft and I knew that but I was like this is what happened to me so it's fine it's it's something that could happen and like romancing fate I wrote stuff that happened to me and I so wanted to leave it in there because it was outrageous but it didn't have anything to do with the main plot line so I know that like you think you need this thing but you really need to kill your darlings when it comes to stuff that is not important to your story and then with hashtag goals I put like the timeline of the whole school year and so it got really crazy like we were just jumping months ahead and it felt really like pacing was probably a little bit off and so one thing I learned from a mentor as well as these books was to have a time clock for the end of your novel be it a day a week a month let that be known so that the tension can be there that they have to have this deciding decision by a certain day with project Emma I had a six week yes six week deadline and then with hashtag goals it was about six to seven weeks as well in hashtag goals I had a lot of characters and I thought I'd differentiated them enough but as you saw with my coffee chat talk a lot of stuff that's up here doesn't land on the page just so and I also like I write and don't fully flesh out secondary third day return sheer characters and my mentor said make fewer characters and give them one big description one defining thing that readers are going to remember also my friend got this for teak upload not to overly explain something don't have your character say something and then go internalize about it that's double whammy and cause for readers to skin while I did read all these and learn from a lot of these oh not this one so I actually haven't read these two yet I really really tried to get into this one and it was not my preferred style of writing to read and so I gave up on it I do know people who love it so I plan to try a little harder but also the emotion disorder a lot of people like as well so these five books and this one is the romancing the beatbook but you can't tell by the spine they're all gonna have notes on my members page or outlines or writing exercises that go along with them so if any of this stuff is helpful for you that I'm saying a lot of it's gonna be in those notes and I'll probably be writing a blog post for my mentor feedback and making like a big like writing advice whatever type of blog post so if y'all have any writing craft questions or anything that you need tips on let me know because I'd love to kind of add it into that post or go off on specific posts reading so many books about craft gives you a lot of different viewpoints and a lot of people who are going against what other people are saying and so read these books with a grain of salt don't take everything as fact if that's not something that jives with you if it's not gonna work for you don't force it and then the tips that I got that hopefully cats blog will expand upon is like how to see it how to see your story and other people's story on that next level and that is to find the central story of that book figure out what to target what's important and what's unnecessary so from my romantic fate my volleyball subplot was unnecessary it was a way to get her to her love interest and had secondary characters that didn't show up anywhere else in the book it was unnecessary and I know one of the mentors like went into hers having her mentee think about the theme and really what she wanted to tell the story about and so when you're reading your own book or someone else's book think about the theme they're trying to tell and what subplots and plots and characters are gonna help them get there for my hashtag goals revision my main character had two younger brothers but they weren't really relevant to the plot to her inner struggle at all so I created an older sister who cast a shadow over my main character and gave her her misbelief so that was like something I changed so that my theme my misbelief my story was tighter and better so you're gonna want to look at all those things in your story or someone else's story to really help them create a better story and a tighter story and as a mentor you can think about it or as a partner critique partner you can think about it like what are the strengths of the book what do you like most about the book and how can you enhance that how can you buff it until it shines I've also been learning a little bit more about not so much like physical telling but how to internalize a little bit better to show the why that your protag is going through a lot of mine was based on like my heart racing chills along you know whatever um so it was like a lot of physical telling and I like a lot of suggestions I've gotten recently about connecting something that's happening with something in your characters past how that made them feel back then and just relating emotions that way versus always going for like a physical reaction and again I'm trying to try to put a lot of this in a blog post but I hope that this video was helpful for you guys let me know if there's anything that you all struggle with or that you have learned this year I would love to learn that as well be sure to check out all my other videos for this month covering craft books and be sure to check out my members page where I give you all the notes and resources that I learned along the way with what I just said about physical emotional telling I will be coming out with a coffee chat for that happy writing and I will see you all next time