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Writing Lessons from Gary Provost and How to Improve your Writing with Book Writing Apps

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Every writer in the world has dealt with issues of discipline and focus, rendering them immobile for a long stretch of time. Sometimes they are unable to find the right flow of words and the right turn of phrase that would make the character and the background come alive. Every writer has a different coping mechanism to deal with the writer’s block. Some search for the best app for writing a book while others go completely off-grid! In this article, we’ll expand more on this topic and absorb the wisdom of a stalwart writer. It’ll help you speed up your writing and maintain your focus until your book is complete!

A classic lesson on writing from Gary Provost

Gary Provost was a prolific American writer and public speaker. Considered an authority on the art of writing, Gary has written various books and conducted several seminars on the topic. His bestsellers like ‘100 Ways to Improve Your Writing’ and ‘Make Every Word Count’ are mandatory reads for every aspiring writer. Gary would get annoyed when someone asked him “Can writing be taught?” He would usually respond with a question of his own, as to whether a similar question be asked to a musician. Gary firmly believed that just like any other trade, writing can be taught as well. He laid out his life lessons in his books which can be summarised in the following points:

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  • Cut out complicated words: Good writing does not mean spreading the text with complicated words. In one of his unpublished novels, Gary used the phrase ‘nugatory conjectures’ and realised later that he himself didn’t understand its meaning! The reader shouldn’t have to use a thesaurus every time they read your book. Even if you do use heavy words, it should be relevant to the text and readers should be able to understand it based on the context. Book writing apps help you weed out unnecessarily complicated words.
  • Precision matters, not length: Apart from his classic advice of eschewing verbosity, Gary advised aspiring writers to aim for precision instead of length. You should always look for words that are redundant and eliminate them from your final draft. For example, to describe something as green in colour is redundant. Similarly, just like Hemingway, he was against the use of adverbs. Words ending in -ly are unnecessary and suggest that the verb used is weak. Similarly, clauses like “owing to the fact that” or “in the event of” can be summarised in just one word – ‘because’ and ‘if’ respectively.
  • The ‘most of the time’ rule: While it’s important to follow certain rules while writing, you should bend them every once in a while. You should ‘be specific’ most of the time; ‘appeal to the visual senses’ of the reader most of the time; and you should certainly use active voice most of the time. But, if it makes the writing look more appealing, you can toss these rules out of the window. Every once in a while though! The point is, writing is a creative art form and whenever an opportunity presents itself, you should tear down the shackles of established norms.

How a book writing app can help you speed up your writing

Book writing apps can help speed up your writing in the following ways:

  • Outlining an organisation: Many writing apps allow you to create an overall outline and structure for your book. This helps you to organise chapters and sections easily. It gives you a solid foundation to start from that makes the actual writing go faster.
  • Drafting and dictating: Writing apps with text dictation features, like Google Docs, help in getting a draft down quickly. Rather than typing out every word, you can speak in your natural flow and get much more content in a shorter time. If you see an inbuilt auto-correct as you go feature, you may have found your best app for writing a book.
  • Synchronisation and cloud storage: Writing your book across multiple devices is common, so apps with cloud sync allow you to not skip a beat when switching devices. Write a few paragraphs on your laptop, then pull them up seamlessly on your tablet and keep writing without any manual transferring.
  • Distraction-free writing modes: Features that minimise clutter and distractions, like full screen editing in Ulysses and Focus mode in Word, help you stay in flow and efficiently power through your content generation. Less anxiety combatting distractions means more words.
  • Automated backups and version control: Losing work due to a crash or accidental overwrite can devastate your momentum. Book writing apps prevent this issue by providing easy and frequent auto-save as well as snapshot version history in the case you need to roll back.

Key Takeaway

If you want to finish your book in your desired time frame, you would need to maintain focus. You would do well to engage book writing apps, as they assist you in keeping track of your progress, in forming the right structures and in keeping all the important words at your disposal.

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