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!
601. Every day, for six months at least, practice writing in this way. Small words; clear, concrete sentences. It may be awkward, but it’s training you in the use of language. It may even be getting rid of the bad language habits you picked up at the university. You may go beyond these rules after you have thoroughly understood and mastered them.
602. Write every day. This is a cliché, of course, but you will write more when you tell yourself that no day must pass without writing. At the back of a notebook I use in my writing class, I write down the date and then make a mark next to it after the day’s work is done. I show the page to my students often, partly to motivate them, and partly to remind myself that I can’t let my students down.
603. Have a modest goal. Aim to write 150 words each day. It is very difficult for me to find time on some days, and it is only this low demand that really makes it even possible to sit down and write. On better days, this goal is just a start; often, I end up writing more.
604. Try to write at the same time each day. I recently read a Toni Morrison interview in which she said: “I tell my students one of the most important things they need to know is when they are at their best, creatively.”[i] It works best for me if I write at the same time each day — in my case, that hour or two that I get between the time I drop off my kids at school and go in to teach. I have my breakfast and walk up to my study with my coffee. In a wonderful little piece published on the New Yorker blog Page Turner, the writer Roxana Robinson writes how she drinks coffee quickly and sits down to write — no fooling around reading the paper, or checking the news, or making calls to friends or trying to find out if the plumber is coming: “One call and I’m done for. Entering into the daily world, where everything is complicated and requires decisions and conversation, means the end of everything. It means not getting to write.” I read Robinson’s piece in January 2013, and alas, I have thought of it nearly every day since.
605. Turn off the Internet. The Web is a great resource and entirely unavoidable, but it will help you focus when you buy the Freedom app. Using a device like this not only rescues me from easy distraction, it also works as a timer. When you click on the icon, it asks you to choose the duration for which you want the computer to not have access to the Net. I choose sixty minutes, and this also helps me keep count of how long I have sat at my computer.
606. Walk for ten minutes. Or better yet, go running. If you do not exercise regularly, you will not write regularly. Or not for long. I haven’t been good at doing this, and have paid the price with trouble in my back. I have encouraged my students to go walking, too, and have sometimes thought that when I have to hold lengthy consultations with my writing class, I should go for walks with them on our beautiful campus.
607. A bookshelf of your own. Choose one book, or five, but no more than ten, to guide you, not with research necessarily, but with the critical matter of method or style. Another way to think about this is to ask yourself who are the writers, or scholars, or artists that you are in conversation with. I use this question to help arrive at my own subject matter, but it also helps with voice.
608. Get rid of it if it sounds like grant talk. I don’t know about you, but I routinely produce dead prose when I’m applying for a grant. The language used in applications must be abhorred. Stilted language, jargon, etc. I’m sure there is a psychological or sociological paper to be written about the syntax and tone common in such things — the appeal to power, lack of freedom — but in my case it might just be because, with the arrival of an application deadline, millions of my brain cells get busy committing mass suicide.
609. Learn to say no. The friendly editor who asks for a review or an essay. Even the friend who is editing an anthology. Say no if it takes you away from the writing you want to do. My children are small and don’t take no for an answer, but everyone who is older is pretty understanding. And if they’re understanding, they’ll know that for you occasional drinks or dinner together are more acceptable distractions.
610. Finish one thing before taking up another. Keep a notebook handy to jot down ideas for any future book, but complete the one you are working on first. This rule has been useful to me. I followed it after seeing it on top of the list of Henry Miller’s “Commandments.” It has been more difficult to follow another of Miller’s rules: “Don’t be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.”
611. The above rule needs to be repeated. I have done shocking little work when I have tried to write two books at once. Half-finished projects seek company of their own and are bad for morale. Shut off the inner editor and complete the task at hand.
612. Marry somebody you love and who thinks you being a writer’s a good idea.
613. Don’t read your reviews.
614. Don’t write reviews. (Your judgment’s always tainted.)
615. Don’t have arguments with your wife in the morning, or late at night.
616. Don’t drink and write at the same time.
617. Don’t write letters to the editor. (No one cares.)
618. Don’t wish ill on your colleagues.
619. Try to think of others’ good luck as encouragement to yourself.
620. Don’t take any shit if you can possibly help it.
621. Have humility.
Older/more experienced/more convincing writers may offer rules and varieties of advice. Consider what they say. However, don’t automatically give them charge of your brain, or anything else — they might be bitter, twisted, burned-out, manipulative, or just not very like you.
622. Have more humility.
Remember you don’t know the limits of your own abilities. Successful or not, if you keep pushing beyond yourself, you will enrich your own life — and maybe even please a few strangers.
623. Defend others.
You can, of course, steal stories and attributes from family and friends, fill in file cards after lovemaking and so forth. It might be better to celebrate those you love — and love itself — by writing in such a way that everyone keeps their privacy and dignity intact.
624. Defend your work:
Organisations, institutions and individuals will often think they know best about your work — especially if they are paying you. When you genuinely believe their decisions would damage your work — walk away. Run away. The money doesn’t matter that much.
625. Defend yourself:
Find out what keeps you happy, motivated and creative.
626. Write:
No amount of self-inflicted misery, altered states, black pullovers or being publicly obnoxious will ever add up to your being a writer. Writers write. On you go.
627. Read:
As much as you can. As deeply and widely and nourishingly and irritatingly as you can. And the good things will make you remember them, so you won’t need to take notes.
628. Be without fear:
This is impossible, but let the small fears drive your rewriting and set aside the large ones until they behave — then use them, maybe even write them. Too much fear and all you’ll get is silence.
629. Remember you love writing:
It wouldn’t be worth it if you didn’t. If the love fades, do what you need to and get it back.
630. Remember writing doesn’t love you:
It doesn’t care. Nevertheless, it can behave with remarkable generosity. Speak well of it, encourage others, pass it on.
631. Always try to use the language so as to make quite clear what you mean and make sure your sentence couldn’t mean anything else.
632. Always prefer the plain direct word to the long, vague one. Don’t implement promises, but keep them.
633. Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean “More people died” don’t say “Mortality rose.”
634. In writing. Don’t use adjectives which merely tell us how you want us to feel about the thing you are describing. I mean, instead of telling us a thing was “terrible,” describe it so that we’ll be terrified.
635. Don’t say it was “delightful”; make us say “delightful” when we’ve read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers, “Please will you do my job for me.”
636. Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say “infinitely” when you mean “very”; otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.
637. Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.
638. Use the right word, not its second cousin.
639. As to the Adjective: when in doubt, strike it out.
640. You need not expect to get your book right the first time. Go to work and revamp or rewrite it. God only exhibits his thunder and lightning at intervals, and so they always command attention. These are God’s adjectives. You thunder and lightning too much; the reader ceases to get under the bed, by and by.
641. Substitute damn every time you’re inclined to write very; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.
642. Use good grammar.
643. Damnation (if you will allow the expression), get up & take a turn around the block & let the sentiment blow off you. Sentiment is for girls. . . . There is one thing I can’t stand and won’t stand, from many people. That is, sham sentimentality.
644. Use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English — it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don’t let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in.
645. The time to begin writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction. By that time you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is that you really want to say.
646. Write without pay until somebody offers pay. If nobody offers within three years, the candidate may look upon this circumstance with the most implicit confidence as the sign that sawing wood is what he was intended for.
647. Cut out the metaphors and similes. In my first book I promised myself I wouldn’t use any and I slipped up during a sunset in chapter 11. I still blush when I come across it.
648. A story needs rhythm. Read it aloud to yourself. If it doesn’t spin a bit of magic, it’s missing something.
649. Editing is everything. Cut until you can cut no more. What is left often springs into life.
650. Find your best time of the day for writing and write. Don’t let anything else interfere. Afterwards it won’t matter to you that the kitchen is a mess.
651. Don’t wait for inspiration. Discipline is the key.
652. Trust your reader. Not everything needs to be explained. If you really know something, and breathe life into it, they’ll know it too.
653. Never forget, even your own rules are there to be broken.
654. Absence of lengthy verbiage of a political-social-economic nature.
655. Total objectivity:
Truthful descriptions of persons and objects
656. Audacity and originality: flee the stereotype.
Don’t worry even a little bit whether your book is on trend. All the trends will be trending differently by the time you get published, so it’s pointless to over think it while you’re writing.
657. Finish your book before you try to make it perfect. You can paralyze yourself if you worry about getting everything just right. You’ll never finish.
658. Read outside your genre. Find inspiration in someone who’s doing something totally different from you. (This might not work for everyone, but it’s essential for me.)
659. Don’t cut jokes that make you laugh.
660. Remember that you’re not writing for everyone. You’re writing for the reader who connects with your style and perspective. Lots of people won’t want or like your book; that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t write it.
661. “Every good story has mystery — not the puzzle kind, but the mystery of allurement.”
662. “The great stories of the world are the ones that seem new to their readers on and on, always new because they keep their power of revealing something.”
663. “Beware of tidiness.”
664. “Beauty comes from form, from development of ideas, from after-effect. It often comes from carefulness, lack of confusion, elimination of waste — and yes, those are the rules.”
665. Rely heavily on concrete nouns and action verbs. Nothing conveys immediacy and excitement like the concrete noun and the action verb.
666. Rely heavily on short sentences and even fragments. Long complex sentences, especially when filled with abstract nouns slow the reader and even confuse him or her. Break up these sentences. Or balance them with short ones.
667. Don’t hesitate to write one sentence paragraphs and short paragraphs in general. Never, never bury a key revelation or surprise or important physical gesture by a character at the end of an existing paragraph. Move this to a new paragraph.
668. Go easy on conjunctions such as “but,” “and,” “yet,” and “however.” The prose may feel fluid to you when you use these; but if you go back and simply remove them the prose may be even more fluid.
669. Repeat a character’s name often in dialogue and in straight narrative. Don’t slip into “he” or “she” for long stretches because if you do many fast readers will find themselves having to go back to determine who is speaking or feeling or viewing the action. Punch the proper names.
670. Be generous and loving with adjectives and adverbs. These words give specificity to the narrative; they make it vibrant.
671. When you repeat yourself in a novel, acknowledge it, as in “Again, he found himself thinking, as he had so often before . . .”
672. If the plot takes a highly improbable turn, acknowledge that through having the characters acknowledge it.
673. In writing intense action scenes, avoid slipping into “ing” words. It may feel “immediate” to use these words, say in a sword fight, a physical brawl, or an intense confrontation, but if you stick with simple past tense, you will actually heighten the action.
674. Remember that in writing a novel, you are crafting something that must be fully understood and experienced in one reading, yet stand up to innumerable readings in the future.
675. Never underestimate the power of the two line break. You may not want a new chapter but you want to cut away from the scene. Make the two line break.
676. Never get trapped into thinking that if you have a character open a door, he necessarily has to close it later on. You are creating a visual impression of a scene, and you don’t need to spotlight every gesture. And you can cut away from a scene in progress.
677. Paragraphs again: they are the way you engineer the page for the reader. That does why I say never hesitate to make one line paragraphs and short paragraphs. You’re punching action or an emotional moment when you set it off in a paragraph. And you want to make things easy for the reader. Long paragraphs always impose something of a burden. The eye longs for a break.
678. Multiple points of view can be very energizing for a reader. The switch in point of view can be exciting. And multiple points of view gives you a chance to reveal the world in a way that a single point of view cannot. Favorite multiple point of view novels for me are War and Peace and The Godfather.
679. A single point of view throughout is the best opportunity a writer has to get a reader to fall in love with a hero or heroine. The limitations are obvious; you can’t go to “another part of the forest” to find out what’s happening. But you have immense power in a single point of view to get into the thoughts and feelings of your champion. First Person single point of view can take the reader not only into deep love but deep antipathy. Great Expectations, David Copperfield and Lolita are shining examples.
680. If you find yourself becoming bored, then do what you must do to make the novel exciting again for you. Never keep building a scene because you feel you must. Think of some other way to solve the problem that is goading you to write what you don’t enjoy. When you feel yourself getting tired, stop and read something that is energizing. The opening pages of Stephen King’s Firestarter always refresh me and send me back to the keyboard. So does reading any part of Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song. So does reading The Godfather. So does reading a Hemingway short story. Keep going. Remember that you must finish the novel for it to have a chance in this world. You absolutely must complete it. And of course, as soon as I do I think of new things. I go back, refining, adding a little. And when I stop feeling the urge to do that, well, I know it’s really finished. If these “rules” or suggestions don’t work for you, by all means disregard them completely! You’re the boss when it comes to your writing.
681. On “being a writer”: “Don’t be ‘a writer’ but instead be writing. Being ‘a writer’ means being stagnant. The act of writing shows movement, activity, life. When you stop moving, you’re dead. It’s never too soon to start writing, as soon as you learn to read.”
682. On how to approach writing: “Keep it amateur. You’re not writing for money but for pleasure. It should be fun. And it should be exciting. Maybe not as you write, but after it’s done you should feel an excitement, a passion. That doesn’t mean feeling proud, sitting there gloating over what you’ve done. It means you know you’ve done your best. Next time it’s going to be better.”
683. On technique: “Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him.”
684. On the best way to start a novel: “I would say to get the character in your mind. Once he is in your mind, and he is right, and he’s true, then he does the work himself. All you need to do then is to trot along behind him and put down what he does and what he says. It’s the ingestion and then the gestation. You’ve got to know the character. You’ve got to believe in him. You’ve got to feel that he is alive, and then, of course, you will have to do a certain amount of picking and choosing among the possibilities of his action, so that his actions fit the character which you believe in. After that, the business of putting him down on paper is mechanical. Most of the writing has got to take place up here before you ever put the pencil to the paper. But the character’s got to be true by your conception and by your experience, and that would include, as we’ve just said, what you’ve read, what you’ve imagined, what you’ve heard, all that going to giving you the gauge to measure this imaginary character by, and once he comes alive and true to you, and he’s important and moving, then it’s not too much trouble to put him down.”
685. On what makes a good novelist: “Ninety-nine percent talent . . . ninety-nine percent discipline . . . ninety-nine percent work. [A good novelist] must never be satisfied with what he does. It never is as good as it can be done. Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don’t bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself. An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn’t know why they choose him and he’s usually too busy to wonder why. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done. . . . The writer’s only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It anguishes him so much he must get rid of it. He has no peace until then. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is worth any number of old ladies.”
686. On when to stop work for the day: “The only rule I have is to quit while it’s still hot. Never write yourself out. Always quit when it’s going good. Then it’s easier to take it up again. If you exhaust yourself, then you’ll get into a dead spell, and you have trouble with it. It’s — what’s the saying — leave them while you’re looking good.”
687. On writing dialect: “I think it’s best to use as little dialect as possible because it confuses people who are not familiar with it. That nobody should let the character speak completely in his own vernacular. It’s best indicated by a few simple, sparse but recognizable touches.”
688. On character: “The real truths come from human hearts. Don’t try to present your ideas to the reader. Instead, try to describe your characters as you see them. Take something from one person you know, something from another, and you yourself create a third person that people can look at and see something they understand.
689. On the best age for writing: “For fiction the best age is from thirty-five to forty-five. Your fire is not all used up and you know more. Fiction is slower. For poetry the best age is from seventeen to twenty-six. Poetry writing is more like a skyrocket with all your fire condensed into one rocket.”
690. On style: “I did not develop [my style]. I think style is one of the tools of the craft, and I think anyone that spends too much of his time about his style, developing a style, or following a style, probably hasn’t got much to say and knows it and is afraid of it, and so he writes a style, a marvelous trove. He becomes Walter Pater, which is beautiful, but there ain’t too much in it. I think style is simply one of the tools of the craft. That the story you’re telling commands its style, that one style is good for now and another style will be good for tomorrow. And like a good carpenter, one should be able to — well, you might say, almost imitate . . . but the style is incidental, I think.”
691. On writing towards truth: “Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat. He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed — love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.”
692. On titles: “I doubt if there can be any rule about [long titles]. I think that anything, the shorter it’s said the better. I think that — that stories title themselves quite often. Yes, in that anything, the shorter it’s said the better it is.”
693. On failure: “All of us failed to match our dream of perfection. So I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible. In my opinion, if I could write all my work again, I am convinced that I would do it better, which is the healthiest condition for an artist. That’s why he keeps on working, trying again; he believes each time that this time he will do it, bring it off. Of course he won’t, which is why this condition is healthy. Once he did it, once he matched the work to the image, the dream, nothing would remain but to cut his throat, jump off the other side of that pinnacle of perfection into suicide. I’m a failed poet. Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can’t, and then tries the short story, which is the most demanding form after poetry. And, failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing.”
694. On getting it down in the moment of inspiration: “You can always find time to write. Anybody who says he can’t is living under false pretenses. To that extent, it depends on inspiration. Don’t wait. When you have an inspiration put it down. Don’t wait until later and when you have more time and then try to recapture the mood and add flourishes. You can never recapture the mood with the vividness of its first impression.”
695. On what a writer needs: “[T]he only environment the artist needs is whatever peace, whatever solitude, and whatever pleasure he can get at not too high a cost. All the wrong environment will do is run his blood pressure up; he will spend more time being frustrated or outraged. My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey. . . . The writer doesn’t need economic freedom. All he needs is a pencil and some paper. I’ve never known anything good in writing to come from having accepted any free gift of money. The good writer never applies to a foundation. He’s too busy writing something. If he isn’t first rate he fools himself by saying he hasn’t got time or economic freedom. Good art can come out of thieves, bootleggers, or horse swipes. People really are afraid to find out just how much hardship and poverty they can stand. They are afraid to find out how tough they are. Nothing can destroy the good writer. The only thing that can alter the good writer is death.”
696. On writing outside one’s experience: “There should be no limits to what the writer tries to write about. He has got to tell it in terms that he does know. That is, he can write about what is beyond his experience, but the only terms he does know are within his experience, his observation. But there should be no limits to what he attempts. The higher the aim, the better. If [he wants] to be a failure, let him be a fine bust, not just a petty little one.”
697. On revision: “In the heat of putting it down you might put down some extra words. If you rework it, and the words still ring true, leave them in. Probably any story that can’t be told in one sentence or at least one paragraph is not worth writing. The revision, the cutting out — in my own case, I’m lazy. I don’t like to work, and so I will do as much of it as possible in the mind, in thinking, before I undertake the arduous, hateful job of swatting it out on paper. I think the revision quite often follows because when the job is down on paper at last, it still is not quite what it should be, and so you change, you revise, you edit, you try to bring it closest to the ideal of perfection, which, of course, you’re not going to reach either. That is, what I’m trying to say is that the revision is I think for the writer more than the editor’s revision, which is for the reader.”
698. On the writer’s essential toolkit: A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination — any two of which, at times any one of which — can supply the lack of the others. With me, a story usually begins with a single idea or memory or mental picture. The writing of the story is simply a matter of working up to that moment, to explain why it happened or what it caused to follow. A writer is trying to create believable people in credible moving situations in the most moving way he can. Obviously he must use as one of his tools the environment which he knows. I would say that music is the easiest means in which to express, since it came first in man’s experience and history. But since words are my talent, I must try to express clumsily in words what the pure music would have done better.
699. On the best training for writing: “Read, read, read. Read everything — trash, classics, good and bad; see how they do it. When a carpenter learns his trade, he does so by observing. Read! You’ll absorb it. Write. If it’s good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out of the window.” (from a 1947 interview with The Western Review)
700. On also getting a job: “Don’t make writing your work. Get another job so you’ll have money to buy the things you want in life. It doesn’t matter what you do as long as you don’t count on money and a deadline for your writing. You’ll be able to find plenty of time for writing, no matter how much time your job takes. I’ve never met anyone who couldn’t find enough time to write what he wanted.”
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.