I tested out how useful AuthorTube writing advice is to a Wannabe Writer by trying to create an outline based on their advice.
Does AuthorTube Make You A Better Writer?
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Writing Advice from AuthorTube can be helpful as a starting point. It can give you some suggestions on where to start writing your story. There is however a huge range in terms of the quality of that writing advice as well as the qualifications the person giving it has. There are some very helpful advice videos on AuthorTube that give you both a good explanation of what the advice is about as well as a technique for how to apply it. But mixed in with those videos are also a huge number of videos that give only the most basic writing advice and give little context as to what the advice is based on or concrete examples to illustrate it. Often a fairly lengthy video will have one or two good starting points mixed in with otherwise jumbled-up storytelling theory. Often it also seems to be actually editing tips and techniques that are presented as writing tips and techniques. Meaning that the viewer is told what the writing needs to achieve (ex. Make the scene mysterious) but not how to do this.
So, how can you apply AuthorTube advice so that it is most useful to you?
How to use AuthorTube Advice?
As someone who has been watching AuthorTube writing advice videos for years and wants to get good at storytelling, I asked myself the same thing. Because most likely even if you yourself are very much a beginner writer, you will have some understanding of how stories are told. I doubt that with the amounts of stories and storified content all of us consume all the time, there are many people who don’t at least have an instinct for what works in a story and what doesn’t. So while maybe you haven’t known about Character Arcs before, one video is probably enough to make you notice them in the next story you read. But just knowing about something doesn’t mean, very much doesn’t mean, that you can do it. And that was my biggest frustration. Over time I really lost the initial enthusiasm I had for Authortube videos because the tips given seemed obvious, they started to repeat and the examples where either obvious too or sometimes didn’t seem to make much sense. And after more than five years of watching Authortube videos maybe I knew more, hard to say, but I definitely wasn’t any better at actually doing it myself. That is why I decided that it was time to only focus on how going forward.
To do this I decided to set up a bit of an experiment. Taking 10 writing advice videos from fairly prominent Authortubers that have been around for a long time and try to follow their exact advice, while aiming to arrive at a useable outline. The point of this experiment was less to find out how useful Authortube advice actually is (that was mostly a side effect) but rather what applying writing advice actually looks like when I’m forced to do it.
How to find out what works for you?
Most advice giving Authortubers will at some point, or maybe even in every video, tell you themselves that their advice is just that. Advice, not set rules. You don’t have to follow it, if it doesn’t work for you. And while that is obvious, I think the problem I had with this is that I didn’t really know how to figure out if it worked for me or not. My writing wasn’t, and still isn’t, that structurized in a process or in a routine that I can test out new techniques and approaches and incorporate what works. So figuring out how to get started with creating my own process, is my main problem. And I think it is a problem that for the last five years I was probably seeking an answer for in writing advice, not just from Authortube, but in general.
But doing this experiment I realized pretty quickly that if I have to actually apply the advice, my own preferences and opinions are much easier to get clear on. For example, in the video about original ideas, I would hear tips on how to have original ideas which to me seemed to be much more generic tips about first starting point for writing ideas. And while normally I would probably just click away from that kind of video and still not really know how to come up with original ideas, being forced to apply it here made define for myself what I consider to be original ideas and how to arrive at them.
So in actually being forced to try out the writing advice and wanting to arrive at an outline, I realized that with just the barest of structure, some topic input, and a few solid tools, a lot of the writing knowledge I intuitively have or have accumulated over the past years comes out. When confronted with say a plot problem the solutions would either come from having to be forced to make do with the tools given (Creative Limitations) or I’d naturally look to my own favorite stories for input on how they did it and try to copy that.
So my conclusion based on this experiment and my advice is to use AuthorTube videos as a guiding point for the writing problem you are currently dealing with and to apply the advice in your actual writing, but to do so while being critical of it. In other words, when trying out the advice, do so as if you too were reviewing the usefulness of the advice to an audience like I did in this series. Because doing that makes you both look for ways to actually be able to apply it, as well as naturally critical of what you are being told. As a result your focus on what works for you and what doesn’t and what alternatives might for you instead will be much stronger. Or at least it was for me. I was surprised to realize how much I can actually learn about my own preferences as well as knowledge of how stories are told, just from reviewing someone else’s advice.
How to try the challenge yourself?
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If you want to follow along with the Does AuthorTube Make You a Better Writer?-Series you can do so here. The playlist is set up so that you can tackle one writing problem each day and the goal is to have a somewhat useful outline at the end of it. If you do try it out, definitely let me know how it went.
This is however just level one and I have some suggestions for how you can customize the challenge for yourself and add some more flavor:
Level 1:
- Follow along with this playlist
- Find an Authortuber who has a playlist of their own and apply their whole series
Level 2:
- Find the best Authortube writing advice videos there are and put together the most useful playlist there is
Level 3:
- Create a playlist of different Authortube writing advice videos that is genre specific (ex. when writing a thriller etc.)
- Create a playlist of different Authortube writing advice videos that is level specific (ex. writing advice playlist for professional writers to follow)
If you decide to follow along and create your own playlist let us know the playlist you created so that others can try them out.
Playlist
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Do we need to do all the different levels ?
Hi, no, the idea is to pick the one that suits you most in terms of what is most interesting or difficulty level.
Level 1 is supposed to be beginner and levels 2 and 3 are more difficult. But of course, if you’re feeling ambitious
you can also start to level up and do all three 😉
Thank you for clarifying 🙂