100 More Best Writing Tips [Compilation from 21 Top Writing Manuals]

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!

301. What is that mistake? The mistake is finding or developing a product FIRST and then looking for a market to sell it to. This is backasswards. You Must Always Find A Market First… And Then Concentrate On A Product!

302. And now, we’re going to talk about believability. Believability is one of the top most important ingredients of good MO & DM promotions. One way to increase believability is to give exact details. Instead of “most car owners” write “77.6% of all car owners”.

303. Begin sentences with subjects and verbs. Make meaning early. Place emphatic words in a sentence at the end.

304. The 2–3–1 tool of emphasis: the most emphatic words or images go at the end, the next most emphatic at the beginning, and the least emphatic in the middle.

305. The difference between a good adverb and a bad adverb? Compare “She smiled happily” and “She smiled sadly.” “Sadly” is good because it changes the meaning.

306. It took several years and hundreds of readings before I noticed I had written “create” and “creating” in the same sentence. It was easy enough to cut “creating,” giving the stronger verb form its own space.

307. Word territory:

The power of the written word is to make you hear, to make you feel, to make you see.

308. In his book 100 Ways to Improve Your Writing, Gary Provost created this tour de force to demonstrate what happens when the writer experiments with sentences of different lengths:

This sentence has five words.

Here are five more words.

Five-word sentences are fine.

But several together become monotonous.

Listen to what is happening.

The writing is getting boring.

The sound of it drones.

It’s like a stuck record.

The ear demands some variety.

Now listen.

I vary the sentence length, and I create music.

Music.

The writing sings.

It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, and harmony.

I use short sentences.

And I use sentences of medium length.

309. And sometimes, when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals — sounds that say listen to this, it is important.

310. The purpose of paragraphing is to give the reader a rest. The writer is saying: ‘Have you got that? If so, I’ll go on to the next point.’

311. When the topic is most serious, understate; when least serious, exaggerate.

· Understatement = “Pay no attention to the writer behind the curtain. Look only at the world.”

· Hyperbole = “Watch me dance. Aren’t I a clever fellow?”

312. Elmore Leonard: “If it sounds like writing, rewrite it.”

313. Readers read for two reasons: information and experience. There’s the difference. Reports convey information. Stories create experience. Reports transfer knowledge. Stories transport the reader, crossing boundaries of time, space, and imagination. The report points us there. The story puts us there.

314. The famous “Five Ws and H”: Watch what happens when we unfreeze them, when information is transformed into narrative:

· Who becomes Character?

· What becomes Action? (What happened?)

· Where becomes Setting.

· When becomes Chronology.

· Why becomes Cause or Motive.

· How becomes Process. (How it happened.)

315. Elmore Leonard: “Leave out the part that readers tend to skip.” But which part is that? “Thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them. The writer has gone into the character’s head. BUT: I’ll bet you don’t skip dialogue.”

316. Human speech, captured as dialogue on the page, attracts the eyes of the reader and, if done well, advances the story.

317. Foreshadow conclusions. Plant important clues early.

318. Learn how to craft the cliffhanger. “And there stood one of the oddest human beings I’d ever laid eyes on.” The simple need to learn what he looks like drove me to the next chapter.

319. Build your work around a key question.

320. Here’s your first challenge: Go a week without writing

· Very

· Rather

· Really

· Quite

· In fact

321. And you can toss in — or, that is, toss out — “just” (not in the sense of “righteous” but in the sense of “merely”) and “so” (in the “extremely” sense, though as conjunctions go it’s pretty disposable too).

· Oh yes: “pretty.”

· And “of course.”

· And “surely.” And “that said.”

· And “actually”?”

322. Why are they non rules? So far as I’m concerned, because they’re largely unhelpful, pointlessly constricting, feckless, and useless.

323. The Big Three:

1. Never Begin a Sentence with “And” or “But.”

No, do begin a sentence with “And” or “But,” if it strikes your fancy to do so. Great writers do it all the time.

2. Never Split an Infinitive.

3. Never End a Sentence with a Preposition.

324. A Person Must Be a “Who.”

325. “None” Is Singular and, Dammit, Only Singular.”

326. Modern style is to merge prefixes and main words (nouns, verbs, adjectives) seamlessly and hyphenlessly, as in:

· Antiwar

· Autocorrect

327. Fiction may be fictional, but a work of fiction won’t work if it isn’t logical and consistent.

Characters must age in accordance with the calendar.

328. Keep track of the passage of time, particularly in narratives whose plots play themselves out, crucially, in a matter of days or weeks.

329. Height; weight; eye and hair color; nose, ear, and chin size; right- or left-handedness; etc., mandate consistency.

330. If you’re going to set your story on, say, Sunday, September 24, 1865, make sure that September 24, 1865, was indeed a Sunday.

331. If you’re going to set your story in, say, New York City, you’d better keep track of which avenues guide vehicles south to north and which north to south, and which streets aim east and which west.

332. You’ve likely noticed that the sun rises and sets at different times over the course of a year. Make sure you remember to notice that when you’re writing.

333. You writers are all far too keen on “And then,” which can usually be trimmed to “Then” or done away with entirely.

334. You’re also overfond of “suddenly.”

335. “He began to cry” = “He cried.” Dispose of all “began to”s.

336. My nightmare sentence is “And then suddenly he began to cry.”

337. Clichés should be avoided like the plague.

338. Don’t start out writing novels. They take too long. Begin your writing life instead by cranking out “a hell of a lot of short stories,” as many as one per week. Take a year to do it; he claims that it simply isn’t possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row. He waited until the age of 30 to write his first novel, Fahrenheit 451. “Worth waiting for, huh?”

339. You may love ’em, but you can’t be ’em. Bear that in mind when you inevitably attempt, consciously or unconsciously, to imitate your favorite writers, just as he imitated H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, Arthur Conan Doyle, and L. Frank Baum.

340. Examine “quality” short stories. He suggests Roald Dahl, Guy de Maupassant, and the lesser-known Nigel Kneale and John Collier. Anything in the New Yorker today doesn’t make his cut, since he finds that their stories have “no metaphor.”

341. Stuff your head. To accumulate the intellectual building blocks of these metaphors, he suggests a course of bedtime reading: one short story, one poem (but Pope, Shakespeare, and Frost, not modern “crap”), and one essay. These essays should come from a diversity of fields, including archaeology, zoology, biology, philosophy, politics, and literature. “At the end of a thousand nights,” so he sums it up, “Jesus God, you’ll be full of stuff!”

342. Get rid of friends who don’t believe in you. Do they make fun of your writerly ambitions? He suggests calling them up to “fire them” without delay. Live in the library. Don’t live in your “goddamn computers.” He may not have gone to college, but his insatiable reading habits allowed him to “graduate from the library” at age 28. Fall in love with movies. Preferably old ones.

343. Write with joy. In his mind, “writing is not a serious business.” If a story starts to feel like work, scrap it and start one that doesn’t. “I want you to envy me my joy,” he tells his audience.

344. Don’t plan on making money. He and his wife, who “took a vow of poverty” to marry him, hit 37 before they could afford a car (and he still never got around to picking up a license).

345. List ten things you love, and ten things you hate. Then write about the former, and “kill” the later — also by writing about them. Do the same with your fears.

346. Just type any old thing that comes into your head. He recommends “word association” to break down any creative blockages, since “you don’t know what’s in you until you test it.”

347. Remember, with writing, what you’re looking for is just one person to come up and tell you, “I love you for what you do.” Or, failing that, you’re looking for someone to come up and tell you, “You’re not nuts like people say.”

348. Good writing is like sculpting. To practice your sculpting skills, don’t work on a long piece of text. Instead, work on a headline, an opening or closing paragraph. Consider writing each sentence on a new line, so focusing your attention on each sentence becomes easier.

349. Instead of trying to spot weak words, focus on meaningful words first.

350. Cut the extra words:

Longer version:

When I started my own business, it has given me a whole new perspective to see the bigger picture when it comes to finding a work / life balance.

Clear and concise version:

Starting my own business has given me a new perspective on work / life balance.

351. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

352. Never use a long word where a short one will do.

353. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

354. Never use the passive where you can use the active.

355. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

356. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

357. Never open a book with the weather.

358. Avoid prologues.

359. Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.

360. Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said.”

361. Keep your exclamation points under control!

362. Never use the words “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose.”

363. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.

364. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.

365. Same for places and things.

366. Leave out the parts readers tend to skip.

367. Of prime necessity is life: a style should live.

368. The style should be suited to the specific person with whom you wish to communicate. (The law of mutual relation.)

369. First, one must determine precisely “what-and-what do I wish to say and present,” before you may write. Writing must be mimicry.

370. Since the writer lacks many of the speaker’s means, he must, in general, have for his model a very expressive kind of presentation of necessity, the written copy will appear much paler.

371. The richness of life reveals itself through a richness of gestures. One must learn to feel everything — the length and retarding of sentences, interpunctuations, and the choice of words, the pausing, and the sequence of arguments — like gestures.

372. Be careful with periods! Only those people who also have a long duration of breath while speaking are entitled to periods. With most people, the period is a matter of affectation.

373. Style ought to prove that one believes in an idea; not only that one thinks it but also feels it.

374. The more abstract a truth which one wishes to teach, the more one must first entice the senses.

375. Strategy on the part of the good writer of prose consists of choosing his means for stepping close to poetry but never stepping into it.

376. It is not good manners or clever to deprive one’s reader of the most obvious objections. It is very good manners and very clever to leave it to one’s reader alone to pronounce the ultimate quintessence of our wisdom.

377. Write. Put one word after another. Find the right word, put it down.

378. Finish what you’re writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it.

379. Put it aside. Read it pretending you’ve never read it before. Show it to friends whose opinion you respect and who like the kind of thing that this is.

380. Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.

381. Fix it. Remember that, sooner or later, before it ever reaches perfection, you will have to let it go and move on and start to write the next thing. Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving.

382. Laugh at your own jokes.

383. The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it’s definitely true for writing.)

384. So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it ­honestly, and tell it as best you can. I’m not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.

385. Something that you feel will find its own form. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye.

386. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself.

387. No fear or shame in the dignity of your experience, language & knowledge.

388. The first sentence can be written only after the last sentence has been written. First drafts are hell. Final drafts, paradise.

389. You are writing for your contemporaries — not for Posterity. If you are lucky, your contemporaries will become Posterity.

390. Keep in mind Oscar Wilde: “A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.”

391. When in doubt how to end a chapter, bring in a man with a gun. (This is Raymond Chandler’s advice, not mine. I would not try this.)

392. Unless you are experimenting with form — gnarled, snarled & obscure — be alert for possibilities of paragraphing.

393. Be your own editor/critic. Sympathetic but merciless!

394. Don’t try to anticipate an ideal reader — or any reader. He/she might exist — but is reading someone else.

395. Read, observe, and listen intensely! — As if your life depended upon it.

396. Write your heart out.

397. Never worry about the commercial possibilities of a project. That stuff is for agents and editors to fret over — or not. Conversation with my American publisher. Me: “I’m writing a book so boring, of such

398. Limited commercial appeal, that if you publish it, it will probably cost you your job.” Publisher: “That’s exactly what makes me want to stay in my job.”

399. Don’t write in public places. In the early 1990s I went to live in Paris. The usual writerly reasons: back then, if you were caught writing in a pub in England, you could get your head kicked in, whereas in Paris,dans les cafés?…?Since then I’ve developed an aversion to writing in public. I now think it should be done only in private, like any other lavatorial activity.

400. If you use a computer, constantly refine and expand your autocorrect settings. The only reason I stay loyal to my piece-of-shit computer is that I have invested so much ingenuity into building one of the great auto-correct files in literary history. Perfectly formed and spelt words emerge from a few brief keystrokes: “Niet” becomes “Nietzsche,” “phoy” becomes “photography” and so on. Genius!