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!
401. Keep a diary. The biggest regret of my writing life is that I have never kept a journal or a diary.
402. Have regrets. They are fuel. On the page they flare into desire.
403. Have more than one idea on the go at any one time. If it’s a choice between writing a book and doing nothing I will always choose the latter. It’s only if I have an idea for two books that I choose one rather than the other. I always have to feel that I’m bunking off from something.
404. Beware of clichés. Not just the clichés that Martin Amis is at war with. There are clichés of response as well as expression. There are clichés of observation and of thought — even of conception. Many novels, even quite a few adequately written ones, are clichés of form which conform to clichés of expectation.
405. Do it every day. Make a habit of putting your observations into words and gradually this will become instinct. This is the most important rule of all and, naturally, I don’t follow it.
406. Never ride a bike with the brakes on. If something is proving too difficult, give up and do something else. Try to live without resort to perseverance. But writing is all about perseverance. You’ve got to stick at it. In my 30s I used to go to the gym even though I hated it. The purpose of going to the gym was to postpone the day when I would stop going. That’s what writing is to me: a way of postponing the day when I won’t do it anymore, the day when I will sink into a depression so profound it will be indistinguishable from perfect bliss.
407. Turn up for work. Discipline allows creative freedom. No discipline equals no freedom.
408. Never stop when you are stuck. You may not be able to solve the problem, but turn aside and write something else. Do not stop altogether.
409. Love what you do.
Be honest with yourself. If you are no good, accept it. If the work you are doing is no good, accept it.
410. Don’t hold on to poor work. If it was bad when it went in the drawer it will be just as bad when it comes out.
411. Take no notice of anyone you don’t respect.
412. Take no notice of anyone with a gender agenda. A lot of men still think that women lack imagination of the fiery kind.
413. Be ambitious for the work and not for the reward.
414. Trust your creativity.
415. Enjoy this work!
416. Work on one thing at a time until finished.
417. Start no more new books; add no more new material to “Black Spring.”
418. Don’t be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.
419. Work according to Program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time!
420. When you can’t create you can work.
421. Cement a little every day, rather than add new fertilizers.
422. Keep human! See people, go places, and drink if you feel like it.
423. Don’t be a draught-horse! Work with pleasure only.
424. Discard the Program when you feel like it — but go back to it next day. Concentrate. Narrow down. Exclude.
425. Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing.
426. Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all these come afterwards.
427. Hold the reader’s attention. (This is likely to work better if you can hold your own.) But you don’t know who the reader is, so it’s like shooting fish with a slingshot in the dark. What fascinates A will bore the pants off B.
428. You most likely need a thesaurus, a rudimentary grammar book, and a grip on reality. This latter means: there’s no free lunch. Writing is work. It’s also gambling. You don’t get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but essentially you’re on your own. Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don’t whine.
429. Ask a reading friend or two to look at your book before you give it to anyone in the publishing business. You can never read your own book with the innocent anticipation that comes with that first delicious page of a new book, because you wrote the thing. You’ve been backstage. You’ve seen how the rabbits were smuggled into the hat. . This friend should not be someone with whom you have a romantic relationship, unless you want to break up.
430. Don’t sit down in the middle of the woods. If you’re lost in the plot or blocked, retrace your steps to where you went wrong. Then take the other road. And/or change the person. Change the tense. Change the opening page.
431. Prayer might work. Or reading something else. Or a constant visualization of the Holy Grail that is the finished, published version of your resplendent book.
432. Do not place a photograph of your favourite author on your desk, especially if the author is one of the famous ones who committed suicide.
433. Do be kind to yourself. Fill pages as quickly as possible; double space, or write on every second line. Regard every new page as a small triumph –
434. Until you get to Page 50. Then calm down, and start worrying about the quality. Do feel anxiety — it’s the job.
435. Do give the work a name as quickly as possible. Own it, and see it. Dickens knew Bleak House was going to be called Bleak House before he started writing it. The rest must have been easy.
436. Sign up for Bookmarks: discover new books in our weekly email.
437. Do restrict your browsing to a few websites a day. Don’t go near the online bookies — unless it’s research.
438. Do keep a thesaurus, but in the shed at the back of the garden or behind the fridge, somewhere that demands travel or effort. Chances are the words that come into your head will do fine, eg “horse”, “ran”, “said”.
439. Do, occasionally, give in to temptation. Wash the kitchen floor, hang out the washing. It’s research.
440. Do change your mind. Good ideas are often murdered by better ones. I was working on a novel about a band called the Partitions. Then I decided to call them the Commitments.
441. Do not search amazon.co.uk for the book you haven’t written yet.
442. Do spend a few minutes a day working on the cover biog — “He divides his time between Kabul and Tierra del Fuego.” But then get back to work.
443. Finish the day’s writing when you still want to continue.
444. Listen to what you have written.
A dud rhythm in a passage of dialogue may show that you don’t yet understand the characters well enough to write in their voices.
445. Read Keats’s letters.
446. Reread, rewrite, reread, rewrite.
If it still doesn’t work, throw it away. It’s a nice feeling, and you don’t want to be cluttered with the corpses of poems and stories which have everything in them except the life they need.
447. Learn poems by heart.
448. Join professional organisations which advance the collective rights of authors.
449. A problem with a piece of writing often clarifies itself if you go for a long walk.
450. If you fear that taking care of your children and household will damage your writing, think of JG Ballard.
451. Don’t worry about posterity — as Larkin (no sentimentalist) observed: “what will survive of us is love.”
452. For a writer, the first 12 years are the worst.
453. The way to write a book is to actually write a book. A pen is useful, typing is also good. Keep putting words on the page.
454. Only bad writers think that their work is really good.
455. Description is hard. Remember that all description is an opinion about the world. Find a place to stand.
456. Write whatever way you like. Fiction is made of words on a page; reality is made of something else. It doesn’t matter how “real” your story is, or how “made up”: what matters is its necessity.
457. Try to be accurate about stuff.
458. Imagine that you are dying. If you had a terminal disease would you finish this book? Why not? The thing that annoys this 10-weeks-to-live self is the thing that is wrong with the book. So change it. Stop arguing with yourself. Change it. See? Easy. And no one had to die.
459. You can also do all that with whiskey.
460. Remember, if you sit at your desk for 15 or 20 years, every day, not counting weekends, it changes you. It just does. It may not improve your temper, but it fixes something else. It makes you more free.
461. The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.
462. Fiction that isn’t an author’s personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn’t worth writing for anything but money.
463. Never use the word “then” as a conjunction — we have “and” for this purpose. Substituting “then” is the lazy or tone-deaf writer’s non-solution to the problem of too many “ands” on the page.
464. Write in the third person unless a really distinctive first-person voice offers itself irresistibly.
465. When information becomes free and universally accessible, voluminous research for a novel is devalued along with it.
466. The most purely autobiographical fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more autobiographical story than “The Metamorphosis”.
467. You see more sitting still than chasing after.
468. It’s doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.
469. Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.
470. You have to love before you can be relentless.
471. Write only when you have something to say.
472. Never take advice from anyone with no investment in the outcome.
473. Style is the art of getting yourself out of the way, not putting yourself in it.
474. If nobody will put your play on, put it on yourself.
475. Jokes are like hands and feet for a painter. They may not be what you want to end up doing but you have to master them in the meanwhile.
476. Theatre primarily belongs to the young.
477. No one has ever achieved consistency as a screenwriter.
478. Never complain of being misunderstood. You can choose to be understood, or you can choose not to.
479. The two most depressing words in the English language are “literary fiction”.
480. Increase your word power. Words are the raw material of our craft. The greater your vocabulary the more effective your writing. We who write in English are fortunate to have the richest and most versatile language in the world. Respect it.
481. Read widely and with discrimination. Bad writing is contagious.
482. Don’t just plan to write — write. It is only by writing, not dreaming about it, that we develop our own style.
483. Write what you need to write, not what is currently popular or what you think will sell.
484. Open your mind to new experiences, particularly to the study of other people. Nothing that happens to a writer — however happy, however tragic — is ever wasted.
485. If you see a problem in your narrative, go there fast. Head for the point of danger. It’s where the energy is.
486. Free up your creativity: Liberate it from your expectations and experience. When you have an idea, don’t assume it’s a novel or story, just because that’s your usual medium. It might be a play, poem, song, or movie. Who knows, it might be best expressed as garden design. Or maybe you should knit it?
487. If the rhythm of your prose is broken, read poetry.
488. Cut every page of dialogue by one-third.
489. If a phrase troubles you, strike it out, and if there seems no alternative, try simple omission. If you are dubious about it in your manuscript, you’ll shrink from it in the printed book.
490. If you don’t know how your story ends, don’t worry. Press on, in faith and hope.
491. If you see a habit forming, break it.
492. Control where the story starts. In a novel, don’t put anything important — like a clue — before “Chapter One.” Prefaces, epigraphs: 90% of readers ignore them.
493. When you break through, not everyone close to you will enjoy your success. Accept this.
494. Writing for the theater is the most fun.
495. Are you serious about this? Then get an accountant.
496. Read Becoming a Writer, by Dorothea Brande. Then do what it says, including the tasks you think are impossible. You will particularly hate the advice to write first thing in the morning, but if you can manage it, it might well be the best thing you ever do for yourself. This book is about becoming a writer from the inside out. Many later advice manuals derive from it. You don’t really need any others, though if you want to boost your confidence, “how to” books seldom do any harm. You can kick-start a whole book with some little writing exercise.
497. Write a book you’d like to read. If you wouldn’t read it, why would anybody else? Don’t write for a perceived audience or market. It may well have vanished by the time your book’s ready.
498. If you have a good story idea, don’t assume it must form a prose narrative. It may work better as a play, a screenplay or a poem. Be flexible.
499. Be aware that anything that appears before “Chapter One” may be skipped. Don’t put your vital clue there.
500. First paragraphs can often be struck out. Are you performing a haka, or just shuffling your feet?
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.