The ultimate List of writing tips
I found this at my future-college-teacher's blog/site. LOL There are very nice tips for writing and some are really very fun. Something we need to read everyday and remember every one of those tips, maybe will make better fiction and books in the future.
The Ultimate List of Writing Tips
1. Never open a book with weather, unless the weather is really weird.
2. Avoid prologues.
3. Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.
4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said” e.g. “he admonished gravely”.
5. Never use the words “suddenly”.
6. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters. In Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants”, what do the “American and the girl with him” look like? “She had taken off her hat and put it on the table.” That’s the only reference to a physical description in the story.
7. If it sounds like writing, rewrite it.
8. Read it aloud to yourself to be sure the rhythms of the sentences are OK.
9. Cut out all of the unnecessary words.
10. Make back-ups of your computer files. If you write on paper, have xerox copies of everything.
11. Do some exercise. Stretch your back. Walk around the block. Jump a rope.
12. Hold the reader’s attention.
13. Use the thesaurus and a grammar book, not to find fancier ways to write, but to find simpler and clearer ones.
14. You’re on your own.
15. Writing is hard work.
16. Nobody is forcing you to do this. Don’t whine.
17. Ask friends to read it before you give it to anyone in the publishing business. Not to your mother, not to your significant other. A neutral and honest friend.
18. If you’re lost in the plot or blocked, retrace your steps to where you went wrong.
19. Don’t keep a picture of your favorite writer in your desk. This will make you feel like you’ll never be as good as him or her. Instead, keep pictures of bad writers you hate.
20. Fill pages as quickly as possible, with double space. Regard every new page as a small triumph.
21. Do feel anxiety - it’s the job.
22. Define the work’s title as soon as possible. It will guide you along the way.
23. Stay away from the internet. If you need to do research, do it somewhere else, then go back to your working space.
24. Change your mind. Good ideas are often murdered by better ones.
25. Finish the day’s writing even if you still want to continue.
26. Read Keats’s letters.
27. Reread, rewrite, reread, rewrite. If it still doesn’t work, throw it away.
28. Learn poems by heart.
29. A problem with a piece of writing often clarifies itself if you go for a long walk.
30. If you fear that taking care of your children and household will damage your writing, remember J G Ballard lost his wife and then raised their 3 kids by himself.
31. Don’t worry about posterity.
32. Never worry about the commercial possibilities of a project. That stuff is for agents and editors to fret over.
33. Don’t write in public places.
34. Keep a diary. The biggest regret of my writing life is that I have never kept a journal or a diary.
35. Have regrets. They are fuel. On the page they flare into desire.
36. Have more than one idea on the go at any one time.
37. Beware of clichés. There are clichés of response as well as expression. There are clichés of observation and of thought - even of conception.
38. Do it every day.
39. If something is proving too difficult, give up and do something else for a change.
40. The first 12 years are the worst.
41. The way to write a book is to actually write a book. Keep putting words on the page.
42. Only bad writers think that their work is really good.
43. All description is an opinion about the world.
44. Write whatever way you like. It doesn’t matter how “real” your story is; what matters is its necessity.
45. Try to be accurate about stuff.
46. You can also do all that with whiskey.
47. Don’t drink and write at the same time.
48. Have fun.
49. If you sit at your desk for 15 or 20 years, every day, not counting weekends, it changes you. It may not improve your temper, but it makes you more free.
50. Marry somebody you love and who thinks you being a writer’s a good idea.
51. Think of others’ good luck as encouragement to yourself.
52. Don’t take any shit from anyone.
53. The reader is not an adversary or a spectator. It is a friend.
54. Fiction that isn’t an author’s personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn’t worth writing.
55. Write in the third person.
56. The most purely autobiographical fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more autobiographical story than “The Metamorphosis”.
57. You see more by sitting still than chasing after.
58. It’s doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.
59. Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.
60. Cut out the metaphors.
61. A story needs rhythm. Read it aloud to yourself.
62. Editing is everything. Cut until you can cut no more.
63. Find your best time of the day for writing and write. Don’t let anything else interfere. It doesn’t matter if the kitchen is a mess.
64. Don’t wait for inspiration. Have discipline.
65. Trust your reader. Not everything needs to be explained.
66. Put one word after another. Find the right word, put it down.
67. Finish what you’re writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it.
68. 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.
69. 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. Keep moving.
70. Write only when you have something to say.
71. Style is getting yourself out of the way, not putting yourself in it.
72. Never complain of being misunderstood. You can choose to be understood.
73. The greater your vocabulary, the more effective your writing.
74. Read widely and with discrimination. Bad writing is contagious.
75. Write what you need to write, not what is currently popular or what you think will sell.
76. 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.
77. Find out what keeps you happy, motivated and creative.
78. No amount of self-inflicted misery, altered states, black pullovers or being publicly obnoxious will ever add up to your being a writer.
79. 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.
80. Be without fear. Let the small fears drive your rewriting and set aside the large ones until they behave.
81. Remember you love writing. If the love fades, do what you need to and get it back.
82. Remember writing doesn’t love you. It doesn’t care. Nevertheless, it can behave with remarkable generosity.
83. Read “Becoming a Writer” by Dorothea Brande.
84. Write a book you’d like to read.
85. Concentrate your narrative energy on the point of change. When your character is new to a place, or things alter around them, that’s the point to step back and fill in the details of their world.
86. Description must work for its place. It is more effective if it comes from an implied viewpoint, rather than from the eye of God. If description is coloured by the viewpoint of the character who is doing the noticing, it becomes, in effect, part of character definition and part of the action.
87. If you get stuck, get away from your desk. Take a walk, take a bath, go to sleep, make a pie, draw, listen to music, meditate, exercise. But don’t make telephone calls or go to a party.
88. Read. Read everything you can lay hands on.
89. Find an author you admire and copy their plots and characters in order to tell your own story, just as people learn to draw and paint by copying the masters.
90. Introduce your main characters and themes in the first third of your novel.
91. If you are writing a plot-driven genre novel make sure all your major themes/plot elements are introduced in the first third, which you can call the introduction. Develop your themes and characters in your second third, the development. Resolve your themes, mysteries and so on in the final third, the resolution.
92. Carrot and stick - have protagonists pursued (by an obsession or a villain) and pursuing (idea, object, person, mystery).
93. Keep your well of ideas full. This means living as full and varied a life as possible.
94. Record moments, fleeting impressions, overheard dialogue, your own sadnesses and bewilderments and joys.
95. Once the skeleton of the story is ready, talk about it with other people to see how it sounds.
96. Decide when in the day (or night) it best suits you to write, and organise your life accordingly.
97. Write for tomorrow, not for today.
98. Don’t try to anticipate an “ideal reader” - there may be one, but he/she is reading someone else.
99. Be your own editor/critic. Sympathetic but merciless!
100. Keep a light, hopeful heart. But expect the worst.
101. Develop craftsmanship through years of wide reading.
102. Learn to be self-critical.
103. Learn what criticism to accept.
104. Be persistent.
105. Don’t look back until you’ve written an entire draft, just begin each day from the last sentence you wrote the preceeding day.
106. Always carry a notebook. And I mean always. The short-term memory only retains information for three minutes; unless it is committed to paper you can lose an idea for ever.
107. Live life and write about life.
108. The writing life is essentially one of solitary confinement - if you can’t deal with this you needn’t apply.
109. Regard yourself as a small corporation of one. Take yourself off on team-building exercises (long walks). Hold a Christmas party every year at which you stand in the corner of your writing room, shouting very loudly to yourself while drinking a bottle of white wine. Then masturbate under the desk. The following day you will feel a deep and cohering sense of embarrassment.
110. Don’t romanticise your “vocation”. You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no “writer’s lifestyle”. All that matters is what you leave on the page.
111. Leave a decent space of time between writing something and editing it.
112. Work on a computer that is disconnected from the internet.
113. Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.
114. Finish everything you start.
115. Stay in your mental pyjamas all day.
116. Stop feeling sorry for yourself.
117. No alcohol, sex or drugs while you are working.
118. If you have to read, to cheer yourself up read biographies of writers who went insane.
119. Forget “write about what you know”. Instead, seek out an unknown yet knowable area of experience that’s going to enhance your understanding of the world and write about that.
120. In the particularity of your own life lies the seedcorn that will feed your imaginative work. Don’t throw it all away on autobiography.
121. Never be satisfied with a first draft. In fact, never be satisfied with your own stuff at all.
122. When an idea comes, spend silent time with it. Along with your gathering of hard data, allow yourself also to dream your idea into being.
123. In the planning stage of a book, don’t plan the ending. It has to be earned by all that will go before it.
124. Respect the way characters may change once they’ve got 50 pages of life in them.
125. Writing fiction is not “self-expression” or “therapy”. Novels are for readers, and writing them means the crafty, patient, selfless construction of effects.
126. Don’t overwrite. Avoid the redundant phrases, the distracting adjectives, the unnecessary adverbs.
127. Discipline allows creative freedom. No discipline equals no freedom.
128. 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.
129. Take no notice of anyone you don’t respect.
130. Be ambitious for the work and not for the reward.
The Ultimate List of Writing Tips
1. Never open a book with weather, unless the weather is really weird.
2. Avoid prologues.
3. Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.
4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said” e.g. “he admonished gravely”.
5. Never use the words “suddenly”.
6. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters. In Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants”, what do the “American and the girl with him” look like? “She had taken off her hat and put it on the table.” That’s the only reference to a physical description in the story.
7. If it sounds like writing, rewrite it.
8. Read it aloud to yourself to be sure the rhythms of the sentences are OK.
9. Cut out all of the unnecessary words.
10. Make back-ups of your computer files. If you write on paper, have xerox copies of everything.
11. Do some exercise. Stretch your back. Walk around the block. Jump a rope.
12. Hold the reader’s attention.
13. Use the thesaurus and a grammar book, not to find fancier ways to write, but to find simpler and clearer ones.
14. You’re on your own.
15. Writing is hard work.
16. Nobody is forcing you to do this. Don’t whine.
17. Ask friends to read it before you give it to anyone in the publishing business. Not to your mother, not to your significant other. A neutral and honest friend.
18. If you’re lost in the plot or blocked, retrace your steps to where you went wrong.
19. Don’t keep a picture of your favorite writer in your desk. This will make you feel like you’ll never be as good as him or her. Instead, keep pictures of bad writers you hate.
20. Fill pages as quickly as possible, with double space. Regard every new page as a small triumph.
21. Do feel anxiety - it’s the job.
22. Define the work’s title as soon as possible. It will guide you along the way.
23. Stay away from the internet. If you need to do research, do it somewhere else, then go back to your working space.
24. Change your mind. Good ideas are often murdered by better ones.
25. Finish the day’s writing even if you still want to continue.
26. Read Keats’s letters.
27. Reread, rewrite, reread, rewrite. If it still doesn’t work, throw it away.
28. Learn poems by heart.
29. A problem with a piece of writing often clarifies itself if you go for a long walk.
30. If you fear that taking care of your children and household will damage your writing, remember J G Ballard lost his wife and then raised their 3 kids by himself.
31. Don’t worry about posterity.
32. Never worry about the commercial possibilities of a project. That stuff is for agents and editors to fret over.
33. Don’t write in public places.
34. Keep a diary. The biggest regret of my writing life is that I have never kept a journal or a diary.
35. Have regrets. They are fuel. On the page they flare into desire.
36. Have more than one idea on the go at any one time.
37. Beware of clichés. There are clichés of response as well as expression. There are clichés of observation and of thought - even of conception.
38. Do it every day.
39. If something is proving too difficult, give up and do something else for a change.
40. The first 12 years are the worst.
41. The way to write a book is to actually write a book. Keep putting words on the page.
42. Only bad writers think that their work is really good.
43. All description is an opinion about the world.
44. Write whatever way you like. It doesn’t matter how “real” your story is; what matters is its necessity.
45. Try to be accurate about stuff.
46. You can also do all that with whiskey.
47. Don’t drink and write at the same time.
48. Have fun.
49. If you sit at your desk for 15 or 20 years, every day, not counting weekends, it changes you. It may not improve your temper, but it makes you more free.
50. Marry somebody you love and who thinks you being a writer’s a good idea.
51. Think of others’ good luck as encouragement to yourself.
52. Don’t take any shit from anyone.
53. The reader is not an adversary or a spectator. It is a friend.
54. Fiction that isn’t an author’s personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn’t worth writing.
55. Write in the third person.
56. The most purely autobiographical fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more autobiographical story than “The Metamorphosis”.
57. You see more by sitting still than chasing after.
58. It’s doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.
59. Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.
60. Cut out the metaphors.
61. A story needs rhythm. Read it aloud to yourself.
62. Editing is everything. Cut until you can cut no more.
63. Find your best time of the day for writing and write. Don’t let anything else interfere. It doesn’t matter if the kitchen is a mess.
64. Don’t wait for inspiration. Have discipline.
65. Trust your reader. Not everything needs to be explained.
66. Put one word after another. Find the right word, put it down.
67. Finish what you’re writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it.
68. 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.
69. 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. Keep moving.
70. Write only when you have something to say.
71. Style is getting yourself out of the way, not putting yourself in it.
72. Never complain of being misunderstood. You can choose to be understood.
73. The greater your vocabulary, the more effective your writing.
74. Read widely and with discrimination. Bad writing is contagious.
75. Write what you need to write, not what is currently popular or what you think will sell.
76. 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.
77. Find out what keeps you happy, motivated and creative.
78. No amount of self-inflicted misery, altered states, black pullovers or being publicly obnoxious will ever add up to your being a writer.
79. 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.
80. Be without fear. Let the small fears drive your rewriting and set aside the large ones until they behave.
81. Remember you love writing. If the love fades, do what you need to and get it back.
82. Remember writing doesn’t love you. It doesn’t care. Nevertheless, it can behave with remarkable generosity.
83. Read “Becoming a Writer” by Dorothea Brande.
84. Write a book you’d like to read.
85. Concentrate your narrative energy on the point of change. When your character is new to a place, or things alter around them, that’s the point to step back and fill in the details of their world.
86. Description must work for its place. It is more effective if it comes from an implied viewpoint, rather than from the eye of God. If description is coloured by the viewpoint of the character who is doing the noticing, it becomes, in effect, part of character definition and part of the action.
87. If you get stuck, get away from your desk. Take a walk, take a bath, go to sleep, make a pie, draw, listen to music, meditate, exercise. But don’t make telephone calls or go to a party.
88. Read. Read everything you can lay hands on.
89. Find an author you admire and copy their plots and characters in order to tell your own story, just as people learn to draw and paint by copying the masters.
90. Introduce your main characters and themes in the first third of your novel.
91. If you are writing a plot-driven genre novel make sure all your major themes/plot elements are introduced in the first third, which you can call the introduction. Develop your themes and characters in your second third, the development. Resolve your themes, mysteries and so on in the final third, the resolution.
92. Carrot and stick - have protagonists pursued (by an obsession or a villain) and pursuing (idea, object, person, mystery).
93. Keep your well of ideas full. This means living as full and varied a life as possible.
94. Record moments, fleeting impressions, overheard dialogue, your own sadnesses and bewilderments and joys.
95. Once the skeleton of the story is ready, talk about it with other people to see how it sounds.
96. Decide when in the day (or night) it best suits you to write, and organise your life accordingly.
97. Write for tomorrow, not for today.
98. Don’t try to anticipate an “ideal reader” - there may be one, but he/she is reading someone else.
99. Be your own editor/critic. Sympathetic but merciless!
100. Keep a light, hopeful heart. But expect the worst.
101. Develop craftsmanship through years of wide reading.
102. Learn to be self-critical.
103. Learn what criticism to accept.
104. Be persistent.
105. Don’t look back until you’ve written an entire draft, just begin each day from the last sentence you wrote the preceeding day.
106. Always carry a notebook. And I mean always. The short-term memory only retains information for three minutes; unless it is committed to paper you can lose an idea for ever.
107. Live life and write about life.
108. The writing life is essentially one of solitary confinement - if you can’t deal with this you needn’t apply.
109. Regard yourself as a small corporation of one. Take yourself off on team-building exercises (long walks). Hold a Christmas party every year at which you stand in the corner of your writing room, shouting very loudly to yourself while drinking a bottle of white wine. Then masturbate under the desk. The following day you will feel a deep and cohering sense of embarrassment.
110. Don’t romanticise your “vocation”. You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no “writer’s lifestyle”. All that matters is what you leave on the page.
111. Leave a decent space of time between writing something and editing it.
112. Work on a computer that is disconnected from the internet.
113. Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.
114. Finish everything you start.
115. Stay in your mental pyjamas all day.
116. Stop feeling sorry for yourself.
117. No alcohol, sex or drugs while you are working.
118. If you have to read, to cheer yourself up read biographies of writers who went insane.
119. Forget “write about what you know”. Instead, seek out an unknown yet knowable area of experience that’s going to enhance your understanding of the world and write about that.
120. In the particularity of your own life lies the seedcorn that will feed your imaginative work. Don’t throw it all away on autobiography.
121. Never be satisfied with a first draft. In fact, never be satisfied with your own stuff at all.
122. When an idea comes, spend silent time with it. Along with your gathering of hard data, allow yourself also to dream your idea into being.
123. In the planning stage of a book, don’t plan the ending. It has to be earned by all that will go before it.
124. Respect the way characters may change once they’ve got 50 pages of life in them.
125. Writing fiction is not “self-expression” or “therapy”. Novels are for readers, and writing them means the crafty, patient, selfless construction of effects.
126. Don’t overwrite. Avoid the redundant phrases, the distracting adjectives, the unnecessary adverbs.
127. Discipline allows creative freedom. No discipline equals no freedom.
128. 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.
129. Take no notice of anyone you don’t respect.
130. Be ambitious for the work and not for the reward.