In this collection of writing tips, you will find rare gems for both fiction and non-fiction writing from the finest writers, who have over the years mastered, refined, and taught the art of writing.
I have presented the tips as it is, without paraphrasing, without subjectivising them.
The tips cover many aspects related to the art of writing: creative writing, copywriting, digital writing, form & substance, creativity, style, storytelling, grammar, methods of writing, etc.
I have used 21 writing manuals to compile the list. Check out the list, if you wish to explore more in detail. The list of manuals is given below:
- Sense of Style by Steven Pinker
- The Elements of Style by William Strunk
- The Portable MFA in Creative Writing
- Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande
- The Gotham Writer’s Workshop
- Steering the Craft by Ursula K. Le Guin
- The Writer’s Workbook by Newman, Cusick & La Tourette
- The New Oxford Guide to Writing by Thomas S. Kane
- Stein on Writing
- The Cambridge Companion to Creative Writing
- The Creative Writing Course Book by Julia Bell and Paul Magrs
- On writing — by Stephen King
- Ernest Hemingway on Writing
- On writing well — by William Zinsser
- Bird by Bird — by Anne Lamott
- Nobody wants to read your shit by Steven Pressfield
- Perennial Seller by Ryan Holiday
- This book will teach you how to write better by Neville Medhora
- Writing Tools — by Roy Peter Clark
- The boron letters by Gary Halbert
- Dreyer’s English by Benjamin Dreyer
Let’s start!
201. If I write rapidly, putting down my story exactly as it comes into my mind, only looking back to check the names of my characters and the relevant parts of their back stories, I find that I can keep up with my original enthusiasm and at the same time outrun the self-doubt that’s always waiting to settle in.
202. Good fiction always begins with story and progresses to theme; it almost never begins with theme and progresses to story.
203. The biggest aid to regular production is working in a serene atmosphere.
204. The space can be humble (probably should be, as I think I have already suggested), and it really needs only one thing: a door which you are willing to shut. The closed door is your way of telling the world and yourself that you mean business; you have made a serious commitment to write and intend to walk the walk as well as talk the talk. By the time you step into your new writing space and close the door, you should have settled on a daily writing goal.
205. Like your bedroom, your writing room should be private, a place where you go to dream.
206. Writing motivates you to look closely at life.
207. Good writing is about telling the truth.
208. Anyone who survived childhood has enough material to write for life.
209. Sit down at approximately the same time every day. This is how you train your unconscious to kick in for you creatively.
210. Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
211. Write one word at a time. “Whether it’s a vignette of a single page or an epic trilogy like ‘The Lord of the Rings,’ the work is always accomplished one word at a time.”
212. The research shouldn’t overshadow the story. “Remember that word back. That’s where the research belongs: as far in the background and the backstory as you can get it.”
213. As even his harshest critics admitted, V.S. Naipaul knew how to write. “It took a lot of work to do it,” Naipaul once told an interviewer. “In the beginning I had to forget everything I had written by the age of 22. I abandoned everything and began to write like a child at school. Almost writing ‘the cat sat on the mat.’’
214. Story is what truly grabs readers.
215. Establish a reading habit that matches what you hope to write and publish.
216. Always be learning. Write a lot and get critiqued occasionally.
217. Writing is more about the journey than the destination.
218. Publish your work online (even if it’s not perfect).
219. Take your time. The best writing serves the reader — not the writer.
220. Schedule time to write. Get into the habit of writing every day.
221. Dream big, execute small.
222. Dive in and be scared later.
223. Be humble. Take advice. Be teachable.
224. Slow down and work on your craft. Be patient. It takes time to develop your craft.
225. Pay more attention to details.
226. There’s no such thing as an instant book.
227. No great art was ever created without a great heart.
228. Establish a relationship with potential readers.
229. Don’t assume you must follow a predetermined writer’s path. Story always trumps structure.
230. Write for the love of writing itself, not what writing might afford you.
231. Discipline is key. Write daily.
232. Write what you’re personally passionate about.
233. Become a ferocious self-editor.
234. Get an imagination. If it’s been done before, find a different way to do it. If it’s been said before, find a different way to say it.
235. Do not start stories with the time, season, or weather conditions.
236. Do not start with “It was” or “It’s” or “When.”
237. See like a movie camera — make your writing cinematic. Zoom in. Pan the surroundings. Use your words to make pictures.
238. Build your images in linear fashion. Employ digression to explain.
239. Use all five senses — writing is the only medium that is able.
240. Go through your copy and eliminate as many recurrences of “that” you can find.
241. Employ the elements of the novel: scene, setting, characters, dialogue, and drama. (And point of view only where appropriate.)
242. Don’t begin your narrative stories with the climax. Begin a couple scenes before the climax, then backtrack, then move forward. Give the reader a reason to keep reading until the end.
243. What you don’t describe is just as important as what you do describe–omission invites the reader to fill in some of the details themselves. In reality, reading was the first interactive game. Take note: Your reader is making their own pictures from your words. And take advantage of that! It gives the reader an unconscious stake.
244. Ask yourself: Why am I using this detail?
245. When in doubt, cut it out.
246. When using dialogue, stick with using “said” or “says.” Avoid fancy attributions — recalls, retorts, replies, unless it is done sparingly for effect.
247. Be careful of too much effect. It becomes affect.
248. Rely on nouns and verbs more than adjectives and adverbs.
249. Show, don’t tell.
250. Pick out a good voice and read out loud to yourself as you write. And also as you edit. Hear the rhythm of the syllables, the words. Good prose is like a song.
251. Read writing by great writers.
252. Reading and writing is a transaction, the reader donates their time, and as the writer, you must supply value to them during the time that they’re donating. They mustn’t feel like they wasted their time on you.
253. “Ask not, “What is the solution?” Ask, “What is the problem?” The problem in fiction, from the thrashing writer’s point of view, is almost always, “What is this damn thing about?” In other words, what’s the theme?”
254. “A real writer (or artist or entrepreneur) has something to give. She has lived enough and suffered enough and thought deeply enough about her experience to be able to process it into something that is of value to others, even if only as entertainment.”
255. Three-Act Structure + Hero’s Journey = Story.
256. THE HERO’S JOURNEY:
1) Hero starts in Ordinary World.
2) Hero receives a Call to Adventure.
3) Hero rejects Call.
4) Hero meets Mentor. Mentor gives the hero courage to accept Call.
5) Hero crosses Threshold, enters the Special World.
6) Hero encounters enemies and allies, and undergoes an ordeal that will serve as his Initiation.
7) Hero confronts Villain, acquires Treasure.
8) The Road Back. Hero escapes Special World, trying to “get home.”
9) Villains pursue Hero. Hero must fight/escape again.
10) Hero returns home with Treasure, reintegrates into Ordinary World, but now as a changed person, thanks to his ordeal and experiences on his journey.
257. By hooking them (Act One), building the tension and complications (Act Two), and paying it all off (Act Three).”
258. Start at the end. Begin with the climax, then work backward to the beginning.
259. How high should the stakes be in your story? As high as possible. High stakes = high emotional involvement by the audience.
260. Get your characters in danger as quickly as possible and keep ratcheting up that jeopardy throughout the story.
261. “Write your nonfiction book as if it were a novel. I don’t mean make stuff up. That’s a no-no. I mean give it an Act One, an Act Two, an Act Three. Make it cohere around a theme. Give it a hero, and make that hero embody the theme. Give it a villain, and make that villain stand for the counter-theme.”
262. “A novel will take you two years to write. Or three or four or five. Can you do that? Can you sustain yourself financially? Emotionally? Can your spouse and children handle it? Can you maintain your motivation over that length of time? Your self-belief? Your sanity? If necessary, can you scrap your first eighteen months’ work and start over from scratch?”
263. Can you do a first draft in three months? Too daunting? How about a rough sketch in three weeks? Still too scary? Maybe a rough-rough in seven days? Remember, the enemy in an endurance enterprise is not time. The enemy is Resistance.
264. Thinking in multiple drafts is a corollary of thinking in blocks of time. If we know we’re going to do fifteen drafts before we’re done, we don’t panic when Draft #6 is still a mess.
265. Universal principles of storytelling:
Every story must have a concept. It must put a unique and original spin, twist or framing device upon the material. Every story must be about something. It must have a theme. Every story must have a beginning, middle, and an end. Act One, Act Two, Act Three. Every story must have a hero. Every story must have a villain. Every story must start with an Inciting Incident, embedded within which is the story’s climax. Every story must escalate through Act Two in terms of energy, stakes, complication and significance/meaning as it progresses. Every story must build to a climax centered on a clash between the hero and the villain that pays off everything that came before and that pays it off on-theme.
266. What are the universal structural elements of all stories? Hook. Build. Payoff. This is the shape any story must take. A beginning that grabs the listener. A middle that escalates in tension, suspense, stakes, and excitement. And an ending that brings it all home with a bang.
267. It isn’t enough to catch the reader’s eye. You can do that with cute kittens or a wet T-shirt. You also have to sell the product. There must be a message, and that message must stick. It must have meaning in terms of the product. It must make the reader/ viewers think, “Hmm, that makes sense,” or, “Hmm, I like that.”
268. Every work of art is founded on a concept. A diet should have a concept. An invasion of a foreign country should have a concept.
269. A high-concept movie is a film:
1) Whose narrative idea can be communicated in ten seconds or less and
2) As soon as you hear the idea, you can imagine all the cool scenes that are certain to be in the movie.
270. Start at the end. Begin with the climax, then work backward to the beginning. This back-to-front method. It works for anything — novels, plays, new-business pitches, music albums, choreography. First figure out where you want to finish. Then work backward to set up everything you need to get you there.
271. Which idea, of all those swimming inside your brain, are you compelled to pursue? Here’s how you know — you’re scared to death of it. Its accomplishment will seem beyond your resources. Your pursuit of it will bear you into waters where no one before you has sailed. To hunt this beast will require everything you’ve got.
272. “It starts by wanting to create a classic.”
273. “Lots of people,” as the poet and artist Austin Kleon puts it, “want to be the noun without doing the verb.” To make something great, what’s required is need. As in, I need to do this. I have to. I can’t not.
274. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, reminds his employees: “Focus on the things that don’t change.”
275. You don’t have to be a genius to make genius — you just have to have small moments of brilliance and edit out the boring stuff.
276. John Steinbeck once wrote in a letter to an actor turned writer, “Forget your generalized audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death, and in the second place, unlike the theater, it doesn’t exist. In writing, your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person — a real person you know, or an imagined person — and write to that one.”
277. Key to success in nonfiction was that the work should be either “very entertaining” or “extremely practical.”
278. The more important and perennial a problem (or, in the case of art, the more clearly it expresses some essential part of the human experience), the better chance the products that address it will be important and perennial as well.
279. So the creator of any project should try to answer some variant of these questions: What does this teach? What does this solve? How am I entertaining? What am I giving? What are we offering? What are we sharing? In short: What are these people going to be paying for? If you don’t know — if the answer isn’t overwhelming — then keep thinking.
280. A famous scientist once warned his students not to worry about people stealing their ideas: “If it’s original, you will have to ram it down their throats.”
281. “Spend three times longer revising your manuscript than you think you need.”
282. “One Sentence, One Paragraph, One Page.” It goes like this: Put the website or the beta version of your app or your manuscript aside and grab a piece of paper or open a blank Word document. Then, with fresh eyes, attempt to write out exactly what your project is supposed to be and to do in . . . One sentence. One paragraph. One page. This is a ______ that does ______. This helps people ______.
283. A smart business friend once described the art of marketing to me as a matter of “finding your addicts.”
284. The author Paulo Coelho didn’t freak out about piracy — he actively pirated his own books on torrent sites in countries like Russia.
285. To figure out what people want to buy? Just look at what they do buy.
286. Work on subjects you love — the enthusiasm will make it easy.
287. Keep two lists — one of tough tasks and another of tasks you can do regardless of mood. That way you can be productive regardless of your state.
288. Use simple, common, everyday words.
289. Write short sentences and short paragraphs.
290. Use transition words and phrases to make your writing flow smoothly.
291. Ask questions once in a while, and then answer them yourself.
292. What is a good writer? One who makes things perfectly clear.
293. Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut is a great example of clear writing.
294. The best writing goes unnoticed.
295. Never make a decision when you are HALT: hungry, angry, lonely or tired.
296. Read your writing out loud to improve it.
297. Write down your goals, and go over them every day, not just once a year.
298. Rely on your own strength, not someone else’s compassion.
299. Now, if I were to continue writing this letter, I would use words that would make my reader “picture with pleasure” that beach in his mind. Before I was finished, he would be able to feel the sand in his toes, smell the fresh tang of the salt air, drink in the stars with his eyes and feel the warm friendly sun on his back.
300. Here’s a little something: You can make your copy easier to read by the judicious use of parentheses. For example, if you want to tell people that your offer is good anywhere in the U.S. (except Alaska) the proper use of parentheses, as I just did, makes the copy easier-to-read, easier to understand and provides a little “eye relief” for your reader.
Shivam Pandey is a professional content & copywriter with 6+ years of experience. He specializes in writing on technology, business, digital marketing, lifestyle, travel, etc. He works closely with B2C and B2B businesses providing web content & copywriting services.