Sacrifice in Your Works: The Basics for Creative Writing | Shorts
Creative Writing Tip #3
Life is full of sacrifices but your writing can also be rife with them.
Making sacrifices calls for strength, as they can be difficult to carry out but usually result in beneficial outcomes and be worth it. The hardest thing is bringing yourself to do it but after that hurdle, it gets easier.
There are two main elements to this:
- Coming to a conclusion to make the sacrifice.
- Making the sacrifice, while also ensuring your work still stands.
Let’s look at the former component first. It can take some time to come to the realization that something in your writing needs to be omitted or altered; you may deny it or try and find another way out of it. I speak from my own experiences and shall use mine to offer examples. I was finding that my characters were not all connected to the story and did not all fit. I knew something had to be done but didn’t want to wipe out characters completely, due to all the work going into them. Thus, I scoured for other solutions but always came up blank. I did not want to get rid of some characters from the story and that was the problem. Once you uncover the problem at hand, you are better equipped at sorting it out and can make more informed decisions. Of course, it can be hard to see them but if you get a nagging sensation something is not right- listen to it, let it be heard and you may find something. Trust your gut.
Once I had uncovered this, I knew I had to do something about it. I knew not all my characters were not fully immersed into the world as they ought to have been, so I made the decision to not include them in the story. This was my sacrifice but once I did it, it made things easier and clearer for me to continue with my writing.
But how did I manage this? I made a separate story for the characters I had removed so that all my work was not done for nothing. I simply reused and recycled things a little. I made a decision about how some scenes would stay in the original and others in the new story. I tried to make this less of a sacrifice and more of a step in the right direction.
If you are going to change up your work, make sure there are foundations, so you can work from them or you may choose to make new foundations and move the storeys of the building elsewhere to a new story or piece of work.
Sometimes sacrifices are grander, more difficult to carry out but nothing is set in stone and so you can always experiment with different possibilities and keep what you like- dismiss what you don’t. Above all, enjoy the process and remember it will all be worth it.
If you have any more questions, please feel free to ask away. Happy reading and writing as always xx
Thank you to all my fellow writers, here are a few among many:
Dovey ♡
Jaedon
Osh
Beau
