Writer's Block

On originality

“Art is never finished, just abandoned”

One of the main differences between writers and people who want to be writers is that writers just write. 

Another of of the main differences between writers and people who want to be writers is that the wannabes assume writers know how to express themselves clearly. Writers know that they don’t and yet they write anyway. 

They are brave enough to vomit bullshit all over lovely, clean pieces of paper. Then they gradually and painfully shape that bullshit into clear, evocative prose. 

Wannabes falsely believe writers write perfect first drafts. Writers know that first drafts read as if they were written by demented parrots holding pens in their beaks.

Writers don’t even try for perfection in first drafts. They know that perfection comes, as much as it ever does, during countless edits and rewrites.

Sometimes wannabes even know that the key is to write a shitty first draft and then to polish it into gold, but they don’t want to do it. They are egotistical enough to feel they are exempt from writing shitty first drafts. Or they are too lazy to write multiple drafts, and just the thought of having to go back over something many times makes them want to quit. Writers aren’t lazy. They simply do the work. They get on with it. 

The secret is that our brains are better at reacting than acting. If we have something to react to, we can improve it, react to the improved version, and keep on improving until we’re satisfied. This is why it’s easier to edit someone else’s text than to write one’s own. Editing is reacting. This is also why it’s so important to write BAD prose – prose that doesn’t express itself well – so there’s SOMETHING on the page. Once that something exists, you can react to it, and once you start reacting, the real artistry begins.

The secret is to write badly. 

Here’s the best advice about writing I’ve ever come across:

… The ego is the enemy of the imagination. Anything that you think about writing when you’re not writing is a product of the ego and is absolutely wrong. One hundred percent, all the time, wrong. And if you take a step back and think how much time you spend trying to purify yourself in order to get ready to write, that’s like 95% of the time. And the reason for that is the ego has a stake in perpetuating the behavior that you’ve already engaged in. We do not think our way to right action; we act our way to right thinking.

So what I do is I start writing. If I think about my writing before I start to write, what I’m really doing is justifying not writing, because … I’m not writing. … I’m going to find a way to keep not writing. So what I say is I don’t have the idea yet; it’s not fully realized yet… Not only that: I don’t have pencils; my pencils are not sharpened; I don’t have the right notebook. … Whoa! Eleven-forty five already. Time for lunch.

… When you think about exercising, what you invariably say to yourself is, “You know, I’m too fat. What’s the point? I’m too old; I’m too fat; I’m too old; I’m too slow; I’m too this; I’m too that…” And all you’re doing is justifying the fact that you’re not exercising.

– David Milch

Don’t just plan to write—write. It is only by writing, not dreaming about it, that we develop our own style.

[The] Resistance knows that the longer we noodle around “getting ready,” the more time and opportunity we’ll have to sabotage ourselves. Resistance loves it when we hesitate, when we over-prepare. The answer: plunge in.

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.

Work on a computer that is disconnected from the internet.

Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style. I am not urging you to write a novel, by the way — although I would not be sorry if you wrote one, provided you genuinely cared about something. A petition to the mayor about a pothole in front of your house or a love letter to the girl next door will do.

Find an organizational scheme for your notes and materials; keep up with it (if you are transcribing sound files or notebooks, don’t let yourself fall behind); and be faithful to it: Don’t obsess over an apparently better scheme that someone else has.  At some point during your work, someone will release what looks like a brilliant piece of software that will solve all your problems. Resist the urge to try it out, whatever it is, unless 1) it is endorsed by people whose working methods you already know to be like your own and 2) you know you can implement it quickly and easily without a lot of backfilling. Reworking organizational schemes is incredibly seductive and a massive timesuck.

Hone your outline and then cling to it as a lifeline. You can adjust it in mid-stream, but don’t try to just write your way into a better structure: think about the right structure and then write to it. Your outline will get you through those periods when you can’t possibly imagine ever finishing the damn thing — at those times, your outline will let you see it as a sequence of manageable 1,000 word sections.

Get through a draft as quickly as possible. Hard to know the shape of the thing until you have a draft. Literally, when I wrote the last page of my first draft of “Lincoln’s Melancholy” I thought, Oh, shit, now I get the shape of this. But I had wasted years, literally years, writing and re-writing the first third to first half. The old writer’s rule applies: Have the courage to write badly.

Treat writing as a job. Be disciplined. Lots of writers get a bit OCD-ish about this. Graham Greene famously wrote 500 words a day. Jean Plaidy managed 5,000 before lunch, then spent the afternoon answering fan mail. My minimum is 1,000 words a day – which is sometimes easy to achieve, and is sometimes, frankly, like shitting a brick, but I will make myself stay at my desk until I’ve got there, because I know that by doing that I am inching the book forward. Those 1,000 words might well be rubbish – they often are. But then, it is always easier to return to rubbish words at a later date and make them better.

[Be] willing to write really badly. It won’t hurt you to do that. I think there is this fear of writing badly, something primal about it, like: “This bad stuff is coming out of me…” Forget it! Let it float away and the good stuff follows. For me, the bad beginning is just something to build on. It’s no big deal. You have to give yourself permission to do that because you can’t expect to write regularly and always write well. That’s when people get into the habit of waiting for the good moments, and that is where I think writer’s block comes from. Like: It’s not happening. Well, maybe good writing isn’t happening, but let some bad writing happen… When I was writing “The Keep,” my writing was so terrible. It was God-awful. My working title for that first draft was, A Short Bad Novel. I thought: “How can I disappoint?”

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.

Don’t look back until you’ve written an entire draft, just begin each day from the last sentence you wrote the preceeding day. This prevents those cringing feelings, and means that you have a substantial body of work before you get down to the real work which is all in… The edit.

In private correspondence the great mystery writer Raymond Chandler once confessed that even if he didn’t write anything, he made sure he sat down at his desk every single day and concentrated. I understand the purpose behind his doing this. This is the way Chandler gave himself the physical stamina a professional writer needs, quietly strengthening his willpower. This sort of daily training was indispensable to him.

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.

Don’t hang around with people who are negative and who are not supportive of your writing. Make friends with writers so that you have a community. Hopefully, your community of writer friends will be good and they’ll give you good feedback and good criticism on your writing but really the best way to be a writer is to be a writer.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.

“Back in the day, Walter would, every once in a while, forget how to draw. Remember?” Louise said. 

“Oh yeah,” Walter agreed. “That still happens occasionally. It’s like, ‘Oh my god, nothing I’m drawing looks any good anymore. My life is over as an artist.’ And what I realized, because I was an editor at the time, and had seen a lot of work go past me, was that when you hit this phase where suddenly your stuff, which looks just like it did yesterday, doesn’t look good to you anymore, it’s because your mind has made a leap. Your brain has gotten farther than your hand has learned to do it yet. But eventually, give it a few weeks, keep it up and you’ve made a leap in your own craft. That was a big help because it was so depressing when you realize you couldn’t draw anymore.” 

There’s a trick that I can share with you that I got from Ernest Hemingway.

Hemingway - there’s a guy who could write a story.

Start Writing like Hemingway Hemingway! But Hemingway was a genius! He won the Nobel prize for Literature for goodness’ sake!

True, but even he used to find it difficult to get started on a story.

What chance have we got, when Hemingway struggled?  Well, some, because we can learn from the master.

This is what Hemingway said he did:

Sometimes when I was started on a new story and I could not get going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, “Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.”

Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

One True Sentence

The idea that what you need to do to get started is write One True Sentence is one that lots of authors and story theorists have used and found to work:

• Ernest Hemingway called it one true sentence.
• In Story, Robert McKee calls it the controlling idea.
• In The Art of Dramatic Writing , Lajos Egri calls it the premise. But they’re all talking about the same thing. What they’re talking about it is:

What you are trying to say.

Call it the truth, call it the controlling idea, call it the premise, what we need to do is think about what we want the reader to come away from the story believing.

We want to change their mind.

That’s the question, you see: what do you passionately believe? What makes you want to grab people by the shoulders and shake them until they agree with you? That’s One True Sentence.

No idea and no situation was ever strong enough to carry you through to its logical conclusion without a clear-cut premise.

  Lajos Egri, The Art of Dramatic Writing

And because it’s your story, you can metaphorically grab the reader by the shoulders and shake them until they listen.

Storytelling is the creative demonstration of truth. A story is the living proof of an idea, the conversion of idea to action. A story’s event structure is the means by which you first express, then prove your idea… without explanation.

Robert McKee, Story

So that’s the thing to think about. Don’t worry about characters yet, don’t worry about setting, don’t even worry about plot. Think about something that you think is true. Write it down. Make it the truest thing in the world.

Write One True Sentence

You think you have problems writing? Imagine trying to write on this.

A Problem (and an Opportunity)

I know what you’re thinking: grabbing people, and shaking them? They will hate me if I just go on a rant about ‘the truth’ like some crazy person. That’s true. If we write a story that just expresses our One True Sentence the story will be what we call ‘preachy’. Preachy is not fun because it abandons the core of storytelling - conflict. That’s the problem.

But we aren’t done yet. There’s also an opportunity.

The Sentence of Doom

Now we have our One True Sentence, it should be easy to write down the exact opposite. Write the most evil thing you can think of. Write something False. Write a Sentence of Doom.

Now we are getting somewhere, because if our story shows One True Sentence in opposition to a Sentence of Doom then it will have conflict — and conflict is what stories are all about.

Personification

Robert McKee makes a good point at the end of the quote above — “prove your idea… without explanation”. That’s similar to the classic writing advice — show don’t tell. 

The One True Sentence doesn’t go in the story, and neither does the Sentence of Doom.  They’re something we write down and refer to. What we need to do is personify the conflict by introducing some characters.

We can use the archetypal characters from Archetypes that Make Your Story Resonate to personify our story. Probably the Protagonist is on the side of Truth and the Antagonist is on the side of Falsehood. Or perhaps the story is more complicated? It’s up to you, but start thinking about how the characters can personify the conflict.

Plotting

So we have our One True Sentence, our Sentence of Doom, and our Archetypal Characters to personify both sides of the story. Now we can start to think about illustrating the conflict. To do that:

Something Happens

The something that happens is the plot. 

Plot is a huge subject. Writing Spy Fiction with an Unputdownable Plotstarts to help us think of a plot.   Examples

Here are some examples of One True Sentence in spy fiction:

There’s no moral high-ground in espionage. 

The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, John le Carré

Wake up Britain! Germany is becoming a threat!

The Riddle of the Sands , Erskine Childers

Spying is a ridiculous thing.

Our Man in Havana, Graham Greene

Note two things:

• The One True Sentence is never explicitly stated in those books (althoughThe Riddle of the Sands comes pretty close). Their truth is shown, not told.
• You might not agree with any of those book’s One True Sentences, but that’s not the point. The authors believed them and set out to prove them. Start Your Writing with One True Sentence

So next time you’re staring at a blank screen, or the wall, or out of the window, don’t despair. 

• Think of something true.
• Write down that One True Sentence.
• Then start to think about how you can use storytelling techniques to illustrate that truth. How can you prove that truth to the world? Now you are thinking about how to write the story, not what to write about.

And that’s better than just staring at a blank screen, isn’t it?

Graemme Shimmin

Being a Writer by Dorothea Brande

• Divide yourself into two Halves: The Artist and The Critic
• Early morning writing: Write as soon as you wake up before doing anything else
• Writing by agreement to yourself. After the morning routine is set in place, allocate another time slot during the day and stick to it like your life depended on it. “It is a debt of honour, and must be scrupulously discharged; cannot be retracted”
• But a journalist’s career does teach two lessons which every writer needs to learn —that it is possible to write for long periods without fatigue, and that if one pushes on past the first weariness one finds a reservoir of unsuspected energy —one reaches the famous ”second wind.”
• Be specific in your suggestions to yourself. Too many short declarative sentence? Do you slide over an emotional scene so rapidly that the reader might miss on the thing you are trying to convery? (Swinburne, Carlyle, or anyone more sensational than decorous vs 18th century english writers like Howells, Willa Cather, Repplier for reverse). Dull and Prosy note, then Chesterton.
• Avoid draining influences. Set the right conditions which make you buzz with ideas.  
• Be one of those people on whom nothing is lost.  

Zadie Smith

1. When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.
2. When an adult, try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.
3. 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.
4. Avoid your weaknesses. But do this without telling yourself that the things you can’t do aren’t worth doing. Don’t mask self-doubt with contempt.
5. Leave a decent space of time between writing something and editing it.
6. Avoid cliques, gangs, groups. The presence of a crowd won’t make your writing any better than it is.
7. Work on a computer that is disconnected from the ­internet.
8. Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.
9. Don’t confuse honours with achievement.
10. Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand — but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never ­being satisfied.

Yehong Zhu on Writing

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”

So said Ernest Hemingway, who knew a thing or two about pouring one’s élément vital onto a blank page. I wholeheartedly agree with the late Mr. Hemingway in the sense that I don’t think writing ever gets easier. I do think, however, that with focus and a bit of dedication, it’s certainly possible to improve tremendously over time.

Without further ado, here are three tips on how to write like your life depends on it.

1. Don’t let your thoughts be limited by your vocabulary.

When I was in high school, I used to memorize SAT words.

I had a list that I’d pull from—the 500 hardest, most commonly missed words.

Aberration. Abeyance. Abject. Abstruse. Abnegation. It was all Greek to me at first.

But after months of daily memorization, the words started to stick.

I got really good at taking apart critical reading passages and contextualizing difficult words. Eventually my efforts paid off beyond my wildest dreams, and I ended up with a great score on the SAT.

Beyond the immediate benefits of acing a test that required an extensive college-level vocabulary, I was now a high schooler with an extensive college-level vocabulary. This didn’t earn me any cool points with the boys, but I could now read and understand more difficult material without having to look up all the words.

That’s when a golden nugget of insight hit me. I realized that all these words I’d memorized weren’t just “SAT words.” They were just words. Words that existed in the world. Words that literate people knew how to use, with flair.

No more flipping through vocabulary flashcards as a dreaded chore. Every unfamiliar word I come across now is a precious learning opportunity.

So next time you come across a word you don’t know, don’t skip over it. Remember that words are the foundation of your writerly bandwidth—that you can only think as far as your vocabulary. Treat each new word like your new best friend.

2. Use reading as an excuse to hone your sense of beauty.

Whenever I read a phrase that really resonates with me—a clever snippet from the New Yorker, a sly remark from Vice, a beautifully wrought metaphor in a book—I always write it down.

Doing this has not only made me a better reader, it’s made me a better thinker.

It forces me to critically examine how the information was presented. It cements interesting insights into my mind. It trains my brain for faster recall, giving me easy access to the best parts of everything I’ve read.

Perhaps most importantly, it hones my sense of beauty, so that I can recognize and appreciate good story-telling for what it is.

I’ll give you a line that I read recently, written by Milan Kundera in 1984.

He could have talked at length about how bothersome she found the music, about how she couldn’t sleep at night, how it tortured her, how she couldn’t escape. But why mince words? Why not have ten times the visceral effect on the reader by planting the image of a pack of bloodthirsty hounds, being sicked on its prey?

That’s the mark of a good writer—elegance in simplicity. That’s why we still read Milan Kundera today.

Tricks like these are everywhere, as long as you care enough to seek them out. So while I absolutely agree that it’s important to read a lot, it’s a lot more important not to read blindly. Find writing that strikes a chord. Notice the aha! moments you experience, the little word-gasms you get from reading. And write them down.

The more you seek out beauty in your reading material, the more you’ll seek it out in the world at large. Eventually you’ll hold your thinking to higher standards, and your writing will follow as an extension of your thoughts.

3. Understand that your writing needs a reason to exist.

This point is so important that I’ll illustrate it with a ten-second fairy tale.

Once upon a time there was a beautiful princess. She had rose-gold tresses, cerulean eyes, and a tiara encrusted with a thousand shimmering gems. Like all princesses from time immemorial, she also had the gentlest of dispositions and a heart of gold.

But underneath all her glitter and grace she had an aching loneliness that nobody knew how to cure—not the doctor, not Prince Charming, not the King or the Queen, not the fortune teller or the astrologist or the mystic, not even God Himself.

Then one day, she was visited by a faraway philosopher. He gently takes her hand and asks, “Princess, why are you here?” And the princess is quiet for a long, long time.

“I don’t know,” she finally muses.

And with that, she dissolves into stardust and fades away.

What the princess was missing all along was a reason for being. You’ll notice that I never gave her one. I used her as a gimmick to practice my descriptive writing—to prove a rhetorical point. I never thought about why she existed, who she was under the surface, or what made her tick.

But nobody likes a careless creator. Even fairy tale princesses need a reason to exist.

Purposeful creation is the secret ingredient behind every good story, something you need for the magic to work. Like love or sentimentality, you can’t always pinpoint what it is, where it is, or why it’s there. But when it’s there, you just know.

And in writing, as in life itself, when you have a reason for being, the rest will fall into place. You’ll find a way to tell the stories closest to your heart. They’ll come pouring out of you, fully formed. You’ll be throwing everything you have into the darkness, hoping to land among the stars.

After all, there is nothing to writing.

All you do is sit down at a typewriter, and bleed.

1. Read, read, read, read, read, read. Everyone else said this also because it’s true. But not just anything, read various styles of writing, and create a basic taxonomy of styles of writing that you can refer to mentally, in a mindset that’s more like concentrated practice than just breezy reading. Pay attention to structure, tone, form, use of (or wilful disregard for) grammar, and cadences, etc.
2. Learn how to break down basic sentence structure. Know what a gerund phrase and subordinate clause are, or a sentence splice. You can ignore the “rules” but you need to know them.
3. Clarification to #2 that’s the most important: identify instinctively the subject, verb, and object of your sentences. Every sentence has ‘em, at least subject and verb. This isn’t a firm rule but there’s an excellent chance that your sentence’s perceived meaning hinges on them, no matter how complicated. That last sentence by the way was “there” “is” and “chance” mind you, not the thing that looks like a sentence and follows the word “that.” Now that you know what they are exploit them. Chances are there’s a better verb than variations on “to be” like “is” “was” “has been” to be had, for one example.
4. Write. But don’t just write whatever comes to mind (though you should do that too): write to form. Now that you’re being observant of how certain styles are structured and their conventions you can try for yourself. Attempt to mimic the way certain kinds of prose are written. Here are a few examples of the same thing in various styles picked at random: 

“Triangle” - straight news format aka New York Times or AP style

Wilson Phillips, an internet user from Skokie, Illinois, visited the popular online site Quora today in an attempt to learn how to write. In a visit  Mr. Phillips described as “disturbing,” site contributors were alleged to have committed several acts of hostility, including accusations he was an disgruntled former employee of Myspace, a claim Mr. Phillips denies.  “Time Magazine” - famous backwards construction used in features

The clicks on the keyboard started out even, but soon picked up in speed. As comments were added, tempers flared. A voice rang out. “They should be so lucky as to work for Rupert!” it said, as minutes became hours. Broad daylight gave way to a dim monitor glow, and a grim realization took hold. It was almost midnight, and Wilson’s secret was out.  “Gawker” - ie snarky news/blog style

It looks like Wilson won’t be getting off this island any time soon. Sources tell us the ex social-ite had a run in with the valley mafia late last night on Quora, which is quickly turning from a minor Mike Arrington masturbatory obsession into a digital mob.  “Gonzo” - Hunter S. Thompson, the master

They’re a vile bunch, mean on a good day and as vicious as a badger when cornered. And to them Wilson was prey. A life and reputation torn into meat and bone, the bastard never had a chance. Of course for predators that’s the price of a meal, and he wasn’t even the first that day. 

Heh. The details matter. Ask most people to write the first sentence of a story about a run of the mill news event like a house fire and they’ll probably do something like “A house on Main Street burned down today” when in real life those stories usually come at the news sideways. For example: “Broken windows and car alarms were among the unpleasant sights this morning at the site of a residential blaze that claimed three downtown homes”.

And so on… ya get the point. And that’s just journalism; do the same with modern fiction, magical realism, classic literature, your favorite writers, etc. Once you can separate style from subject you have a set of tools that can evoke a mood. Like a musician practices ear training to identify pitch or major from minor keys you should know the mechanics that underpin a certain feel or tone, and use them, even when you forget you’re using any style and just have your own voice. 

$0.02

Nick Baily

“A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.” —Joan Didion

Iris Murchoch on Ego as the killer of good writing One can see here very clearly the contrast between blind fantasy and visionary imagination. The bad writer gives way to personal obsession and exalts some characters and demeans others without any concern for truth or justice, that is without any suitable aesthetic ‘explanation’. It is clear here how the idea of reality enters into literary judgement. The good writer is the just, intelligent judge. He justifies his placing of his characters by some sort of work which he does in the book. A literary fault such as sentimentality results from idealisation without work. This work of course may be of different kinds, and all sorts of methods of placing characters, or relation of characters to plot or theme, may produce good art. Criticism is much concerned with the techniques by which this is done. A great writer can combine form and character in a felicitous way (think how Shakespeare does it) so as to produce a large space in which the characters can exist freely and yet at the same time serve the purposes of the tale. A great work of art gives one a sense of space, as if one had been invited into some large hall of reflection.

Artists are often revolutionary in some sense or other. But the good artist has, I think, a sense of reality and might be said to understand “how things are” and why they are… The great artist sees the marvels which selfish anxiety conceals from the rest of us. But what the artist sees is not something separate and special, some metaphysically cut-off never-never land. The artist engages a very large area of his personality in his work…

I would like to say that all great artists are tolerant in their art, but perhaps this cannot be argued. Was Dante tolerant? I think most great writers have a sort of calm merciful vision because they can see how different people are and why they are different. Tolerance is connected with being able to imagine centres of reality which are remote from oneself. Tere is a breath of tolerance and generosity and intelligent kindness which blows out of Homer and Shakespeare and the great novelists. The great artist sees the vast interesting collection of what is other than himself and does not picture the world in his own image.

I cannot write novels (like Quorans Graeme Shimmin, Cristina Hartmann, Aman Anand, Clifford Meyer) or extremely persuasive pieces (Jon Mixon, Gary Teal, Marcus Geduld), nor can I distill massively complex issues to a single truth (Erica Friedman, Robert Frost, Alon Amit, Oliver Emberton). To name a few. But, for my writing style, this is what has helped me: 1. I practice I write for hours, every day. Most of it I’ll never use, but it gets easier, faster, better. First thing I do in AM is exercise my brain with 20 min of writing nonsense. Through practice I’ve honed my voice and I know what feels like me. That is most important; have confidence in your words, your style, your tone. You find it through practice. 2. I learned structure from PowerPoint and business concept writing Consulting is the art of condensing massive amounts of information into a visual medium. To be effective, PPs must be well-organized. They have main topics, sub-topics, supporting evidence, conclusions, and excellent flow. I learned this structure in consulting and I apply it to my writing. As well as numbers, bold, italics and other visual aids. 3. I take a hacksaw to sentences, paragraphs, and words Original sentence: I have a tendency to make sentences overly complicated by adding more and more words until the meaning of the sentence is obfuscated under the weight of so many superfluous words. Post-edit: I’m verbose. I edit. I reduce. Tighten. Improve. 4. I copy the best stuff around, make it my own Some mild plagiarism is common in my more humorous writings. Well, notplagiarism, more like mild flirtation with plagiarism under the guise of “inspired by…” I read a lot and watch good TV. I copy what interests me. I use similes, like my favorite TV comedy writer Ben Elton, and I pilfer silly words from my favorite humor author, P.G. Wodehouse. I also copy the intimate conversational style of David Sedaris, Bill Bryson and Tina Fey. 5. I am my own audience If I can make myself laugh, I post it. If I can touch my heart, I post it. If I read it and it sounds like me, I post it. (And I try to put in one LOTR reference in everything I write. For my amusement.) 6. I understand and nurture my creative process This was very difficult. I took me awhile to realize I needed it. I’d sit and sit but no words would come. Finally, I read Becoming a Writer, by Dorothea Brande (written in 1934, but timeless). She discusses psychological blocks that writers face and how to overcome them. What I learned was in order to write, you have to open your mind and let your unconscious—your creativity –flow freely. I have an organized mind and desire for control so this is difficult. I have found ways to do this now, but only recently. Practice helps. 7. MOST IMPORTANT of all, I observe Observing comes naturally to me. Because I’m introverted. I’d rather watch the play than act in it. Yes, stuff has happened to me. Yes I have a never-ending string of eccentric people around me who stuff also happens to. But I pay attention, I watch, I listen, I notice things. The obvious, the subtext, and the sub-sub-text. I think my observational abilities are unique. This answer is incomplete without mentioning there are many many things I struggle with that keep me from being an even better writer. For example: I think in tweets, not chapters. I generate a lot of material, but it’s word-based, not concept based. It’s hard to mold my thoughts into anything longer than essays. I’m commitment phobic and fickle: I simply cannot commit to the same story, same characters even same concepts day after day after day. Makes me inconsistent. I find it insanely hard to get the level of alone time and lack of interruption I need to tap into my creativity. The more I find my voice, the more I get bored by it. And the mantra that beats like the drums of cave trolls; “What if it isn’t good enough?” I believe a balanced diet of technical training, practice, and overcoming psychological barriers will improve my – and anyone’s – writing. So that is what I subscribe to. And now I’m going to hacksaw this answer. One more time.

Three practical tips, two easy, one hard:

First,

Read everything you write aloud. 

And when you come across anything that strikes you as well written by someone else, read that aloud too.

Nothing will improve your writing faster.

Why?

Because it will remind you that punctuation is for breaths, and paragraphs are for discrete units: a new idea, or a minor advance in an idea already in play.

It will show you when you’re overwriting, because your mind is attuned to sound; you will hear yourself “getting” the point before the sentence is over.  

Plus, running out of breath before you reach a punctuation mark is–generally speaking–a sign you’ve overstuffed a phrase.

Also, if you’re writing dialogue, it will instantly improve. The sound and your own familiarity with speaking will expose mistakes you missed reading silently.

If you’re writing a speech, it will force you to consider pacing and tone–something you can miss while quietly dreaming you’re earth’s finest orator. 

Even if you’re writing for an audience that’s going to read silently, this practice matters, if for no other reason than your readers have had many hours of speaking and listening to speech, so they will pick up on what seem like natural verbal cues, even when written.

But there is another reason; more on this in Item Three…

Second, 

If you’re writing at a computer, make a second copy of the text, change the orientation of the page to Landscape, and hit enter after every period.

You will end up with a stack of sentences, one per line, with no space between.

Run your eyes down the left edge. 

Does the same word keep popping up? A lot of you’s, the’s, he’s, she’s, it’s, they’s, Jimmy’s or Cassandra’s? 

Do the sentences almost always–or invariably–start with a noun or a noun phrase? Is every sentence subject first, then predicate? Do any of them have commas or semicolons? Do they all have at least one comma? Are there loads of semicolons?

Now look at the lines abstractly, as if they’re drawn, not typed.

Are they all the same length? I mean literally–the length on the page, not the word count. When you step back from the page, does the print look like a perfect rectangle?

Now read each sentence as though it were a standalone, and not related to what precedes or follows.

Do they all work the same way? Do you have a stack of if-thens? Are they all descriptive? Is it a bunch of Intro: List constructions? Are they all images? Or abstractions? Do they all do the same job, so to speak?

Now…

I’m not saying these repetitions are necessarily mistakes. If you’re conscious you’re committing to them, if you’re doing them for an effect, okay.

But this is a great exercise for thinking structurally, exposing habits, and drawing your attention to what you might be missing when you’re editing one sentence at a time while the words are in paragraphs.

It’s also a great exercise for taking every sentence (and ideally, every word) seriously. Both for its meaning and its order.

Why does this matter?

Because the eye gets bored with the same sentence lengths, paragraph widths, the same progressions, the same orders. If you don’t vary sentence lengths or structures, or even opening words, you’re sending this message to the reader’s brain: 

I didn’t pay that much attention, so you don’t have to either. A flash look at the next page, and you’ll get the pattern: it’s more of the same. Time to skim.

And with that, you’ve lost your reader.

Varying sentences lengths, opening with different words, mixing the order of subjects and predicates and modifying clauses–each in service to what you’re trying to say, of course–sends a different signal to the reader’s brain:

I’m like a great tour bus driver–I’m in such command, you don’t have to think about the driving. All you have to do is look out the window. 

Now, readers aren’t going think this consciously, but when someone says “that person knows how to write,” well, guess what–a lot of it is mechanics that register subconsciously. And this exercise helps you convey that kind of command. Because, once again, you’re paying attention to what the sentences are doing and how they’re doing it at a detailed level. 

It will convey. You wouldn’t believe how well.

Third, 

Time for the Adult Swim advice: 

Learn English prosody.

This means you should learn to accurately scan a line of metrical poetry, as well as find precisely where the stressed syllables (the beats) are in a sentence. And you should get good enough at it that you can scan the line without writing it down. Which means you can scan by ear.

This should take about 200 hours, all told. The good news is, there’s no rush, and a couple hours here and there counts. Might take a couple of years, but it’s worth it. 

And the work itself? You should know the iamb and dactyl in particular by sight and sound, know a substitution when you see or hear it, and you should be able to write 4-10 lines of blank verse (unrhymed, 10 syllables a line with 5 iambs–also known as iambic pentameter) that sound natural in 30 minutes. The opposite of fancy, actually; like ordinary speech.

Why bother?

Because it’s the secret to memorable writing. Even in prose. 

Especially in prose. 

If you know how to match impact words with beats in a sentence, you can write with tremendous power. The natural rhythm of English is the iamb (an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable). If you can get three or four good ones in a row, you’ve got a ballad-worthy line (a hell of a lot of song lyrics still depend on these lengths and this rhythm). You get to five iambs, and now you’re on the court with Keats, Yeats, Shakespeare and Auden. I’m not saying you’re as good. I’m saying you’re using the same time-honored tools.

If you can add another 100 hours or so learning about assonance (vowel sound repetition) and interweaving repetitions of 2-3 vowel sounds in different combinations, your writing gathers even more power, just from technique alone. 

Go find Evelyn Waugh, and read those gorgeous long sentences aloud; he knew prosody. Go scan Dylan Thomas’s The FORCE that THROUGH the GREEN FUSE DRIVES the FLOWer, and there it is again: a normatively iambic run with substitutions, tails and headless iambs–he’s attacking the sound and rhythm to reinforce the attack of the subject matter. That’s not just brainy, it’s goosebump material. Read it aloud, and you’ll hear.

Maybe you think this stuff is just for poetry.

Oh yeah? 

Again, the natural English rhythm is the iamb. 

da-DUM. Like a heartbeat.

toMORRow IS aNOTHer DAY…

you HAD me AT helLO.

Maybe you think it doesn’t convey with silent reading.

Wrong again. 

HOW GOES the NIGHT? Saint GILES’s CLOCK is STRIKing NINE. The weather is dull and wet, and the long lines of street lamps are blurred, as if we saw them through tears. A DAMP wind BLOWS and TAKES the PIEman’s FIRE out, when he opens the door of his little furnace, carrying away an eddy of sparks.

Charles Dickens. Iambic runs tucked in a prose paragraph. 

That second sentence? Perfect iambic tetrameter. 

Not an accident. 

It’s a technique. It works because iambic runs sing. Not an exaggeration: the word sonnet derives from song, and that form lives and dies with iambs.  They’re…pretty. And readers sense them, even reading silently. 

You learn to spot iambic runs, and you’ll catch great writers from Melville to DeLillo working this technique all over the place. Dactyls, spondees and trochees too, all with different effects when repeated two, three, four, five and six times. Or when they’re subbed in for the expected foot in a run with a different normative rhythm. It’s not a trick, it’s an inherent element in the language. 

And hey, you speak and write English. So you can do this too. You can learn it. You can. You want to write with all the power you can muster, this is where you need to go.

THIS is WHERE you NEED to GO

…headless iamb/iamb/iamb/iamb…iambic tetrameter, a singsong rhythm that aids memory, especially with simple words…a formal phrase ending a sentence that opened with a free verse (prose) phrase…no rhythm then rhythm…disorder then order…suggestion then result…intro then payoff…an encapsulation of the third point in one sentence to close out the argument, and a beat falls on the the last word, a verb from childhood, with a subtext of playing, a one-syllable call to action, and the sound of an open-ended vowel: 

“go.” 

It works. It’s happening all around you right now. The reading brain is smarter than you think; subconsciously, it’s picking up a lot of this already. 

A little study, and you’ll see it all.

The 10% rule.

I got this from Stephen King, in his book On Writing.

It’s simple. After you write something, put it away for a while. If you wrote an entire novel, put it away for a few days or weeks. If it’s a short text, several hours will do.

Then, cut down the size by at least 10%.

You can do this by removing unnecessary words, such as needless adverbs or parentheses.

An example from the book (pp.340, draft for ‘1408’):

Mike sat down in one of the chairs in front of the desk. He expected Ostermeyer to sit behind the desk, where he could draw authority from it, but Ostermeyer surprised him. He sat in the other chair on what he probably thought of as the employees’ side of the desk.

Trimmed down to:

Mike sat down in front of the desk. He expected Olin to sit behind the desk, but Olin surprised him. He took the chair beside Mike.

Granted, this is an extreme case, where King brings down the word count from 51 to 26 (51%).

Still, it’s a good practice. In general, your text will be easier to read and you’ll be more successful in getting your message across.

Make sure you remove most dialogue tags and words such as ‘that’, ‘I think’ and words ending with ‘-ing’. As per these excellent answers by Christopher Kingeryand Belle Elida.

But don’t overdo it!

King also gives an example where he actually expands on the original draft:

‘Hello, ex-wife,’ Tom said to Doris as she entered the room.

Becomes:

‘Hi, Doris,’ Tom said. His voice sounded natural enough - to his own ears, at least - but the fingers of his right hand crept to the place where his wedding ring had been until six months ago.

It goes without saying that the first draft is about as subtle as a Flat Earther aboard the ISS.

The second draft is longer, but it’s not all about reading speed here.

Finally, King has a tip that will make you a guara

Writing in the morning

On writing more - there’s always more deep down

But in person Derek could be raucous, silly. Once, after I had recited Auden’s “The Fall of Rome” during his office hours, Derek said, “My god! Are you chewing gum? That was like an audition for ‘Guys and Dolls.’ “ At the Mexican restaurant where I showed him my pages about Kenneth Koch, Derek joked with the waitress, who had announced that the special was cactus soup. “Are there prickles in it?” he asked. English wasn’t her native language, and she wasn’t sure what he was asking. She said, twice, “I’m sorry, sir, we don’t have pickles on the menu.” He asked again, “Are there prickles in the cactus soup?” And she said, “No, no pickles,” and he asked, “What if there are?” I was too shy to correct or translate, but finally the waitress smiled. “If there are pickles, you won’t have to pay.” Derek, delighted, ordered a bowl of soup for each of us.  Once, over a different meal, Derek turned to me and asked if I was “actually Jewish.” It was possible to be Jewish, he told me, but not Jewish enough; black, but not black enough. When I asked enough for what, he told me, “to be clear.” At the time, I thought, Who wants that? But Derek knew that, on some level, we all do. He spent his life in exile, writing the islands, painting the sea with watercolor as well as words; he was an outsider, an insider, a citizen of the global South, a black man in the Northeast. In 2007, the colicky critic William Logan wrote a harsh review of Walcott’s “Selected Poems,” suggesting that Walcott’s work was shallow and conceited, the reflections of an invented persona. Indignant at the attack on our mentor, my friend the poet Kirun Kapur and I weren’t sure exactly how to set the record right, only that we had to try. We stayed up late crafting a letter to the editor, explaining how Walcott’s poems captured the experience of an entire generation in exile, how it showed that individuals can be made of more than one place, how it reflected “his particular ancestry and tongue, but also those of anyone who has ever felt alienated, bicultural, lost or re-found.” When the letter ran and Derek saw it, he called me to say, “It’s as if I’ve died and you’ve written the memoir.” I can hear him saying the same thing now. And saying, too, as he did that night over cactus soup, “There’s a thread that runs through poetry, or that is supposed to, and that’s truth.” I was writing down everything he said on the back of my Kenneth Koch eulogy. “The problem with students,” Derek continued, “is that they’re not taught love.” I said, “In life, you mean?” And he said, “In poetry.” One of the many lessons Derek Walcott taught us was how to watch and listen for the overlap between the two.

As someone who has written extensively about the topic of writing, here are snippets of advice I have given in the past that could be useful to writers of fiction in particular:

Learning to see beauty in the world (or how anyone can become a writer) One of the great myths surrounding gifted writers is that they are born with superior faculties to interpret their surrounding world, that their heightened senses allow them to see a magnified sense of beauty in each thing.  However, if we think about some of the finest writers of any era, the likes of Homer, Dante, Shakespeare and Joyce, on closer reading we find that they are equally capable of conveying the unrelenting ugliness of certain aspects of the world and human nature as well.   If you wish to see beauty, you must be prepared to absorb ugliness in all its forms as well; the best writers are capable on drawing on beauty, ugliness and everything in between. Sounds hard? In truth, it is achievable, and here are some ideas to help you:

• Remember the sheer wonder of being a child - as Alia says, the importance of unlearning many of the things you know so that you can start to see things as they are rather then as how you’ve come to accept them as being, is of great importance.

• Read widely and expansively - reading is not just important to help you become a better writer, it is essential in helping you become a better thinker to gain a deeper understanding of the world around you. Expanding both your knowledge base and your vocabulary will enable to see the world in a new light.

• Become more humble - there is no greater disruptive influence on your ability to see beauty and ugliness in the world than your ego. Thinking you have a better sense of understanding than others will only serve to restrict your world view and narrow your understanding. If you want to see more beauty, only because you wish your name to become synonymous with great writing, you will never achieve that which you desire. Only when you start accepting how minute your position is in this universe, will you be able to start seeing the world in a purer light. Aman Anand’s answer to Creative Writing: How can one learn to see more of the beauty in life and then write about it in a way which makes it come alive for the reader too?

Learning to translate this beauty into writing

Always remember no matter how good your writing is, there will remain a group of readers who will never enjoy what you’ve written. When I was younger, I was flabbergasted to learn that there are people who’ve read some of my favourite writers and been unmoved by their skill with words.There is no universal reader. Once you realise that, a big weight will be released off your shoulders and you can start writing with more freedom. How can any writer develop a voice that will connect with some readers? For the first time on Quora, I must disagree with something Alia has said. Being direct is a worthy piece of advice for some writers, but certainly not all writers. Some of the finest word smiths of the last century (e.g. Joyce, Nabokov & Wallace) were anything but direct. Instead, I would suggest the following:

• Practice incessantly - as with anything, practice will only improve you as a writer. So long as you have put your ego aside, you will be able to write sentence after sentence and paragraph after paragraph of utter crap. Eventually though, you will start finding a rhythm, finding a way to express yourself in a way that others will want to read.
• Find your voice - any writer I’ve ever enjoyed and connected with, whether fiction or non-fiction share one common quality: they write like no other person could. Admire those you came before you, but do not worship them, that has been the downfall of many a writer as it leads to them trying to sound like someone else. Whether is direct or obtuse, hard or soft, or maybe even all of the above, write like only you could write.
• Write the fiction you would want to read - I have said it elsewhere but it is worth repeating: don’t write the book your creative writing teacher wants to read, don’t write the book you think the critics at The New York Times want to read, write the book you want to read. That will help you connect with a group readers, whether it is about elephants moonwalking on Mars or the haunting tale of a betrayed lover. Writers are no more born that politicians are. With enough diligence and creativity, any of us can develop into talented writers. Aman Anand’s answer to Creative Writing: How can one learn to see more of the beauty in life and then write about it in a way which makes it come alive for the reader too?

What makes writers write?

Think of the writer’s brain as being akin to a kettle. As ideas begin to whirl around in our imagination (the boiling chamber), they require an outlet (the chimney), which of course is our writing. The beauty of this analogy is that just as we are unable to perfectly replicate our thoughts when we write, the steam which arises from the kettle has also been transformed by the heating of the water inside the kettle.  Without the escape mechanism of the chimney our ideas start to stagnate and constrict the flow of ideas inside our imagination. The act of writing is essential to ensure that the proverbial cyclical process of transforming ideas into narrative continues unabated.  For me, the most exciting part of being a writer is trying to replicate the thought process when I write. I know it is an uphill and at times impossible struggle, but it is a challenge I relish undertaking.  I’ve long come to accept that some ideas will never be realised and that some stories will never be finished, but it is the process of writing which most excites me. Some white whales must be chased… Aman Anand’s answer to Writing: What is the feeling that makes writers write?

Turning an idea into a book

Trying to harness and reproduce the anarchic, non-linear landscapes of the imagination is a wonderfully terrifying task. It is never quite the same for any given idea, but its the ideas that keep returning to the forefront of your mind that are worth following through on… Aman Anand’s answer to Ideas: What is the process of turning an idea into a script or book like?

Hacks for writing on a daily basis

Some tips: 

• Find a writing project you believe in - you can set aside as many hours in a day as you like, but if there isn’t a purpose to your writing, you will run out of ideas and stop writing very quickly. For years, I struggled with writing on a daily basis. But then I came up with an idea for a blog (writing about the great films in chronological order) and I found myself writing on a daily basis for months. After a while, I ventured into fictional writing and have been writing (or researching) ever since.

• Don’t force it - that may sound counter-intuitive if you are trying to write everyday, but if you look at it as homework or an assignment, it will become unattractive and even if you do write daily, it should not feel like a chore as you will then look for excuses not to do it. Instead, it should feel like one of the more pleasant aspects of your life, such as watching the sunrise or making love to your partner. Once you have thatsort of connection to it, your urge to write daily will never go away.

• Write an answer a day on Quora - there will be a time when you hit a wall and run out of ideas; all of us have this problem at some point. When this happens, log on to Quora and answer a question where you feel you can make a positive contribution. I have done this on numerous occasions and have found it gets the creative juices flowing. Last Friday, after writing three answers on Quora, I finally wrote 400 words for my latest fictional project. I don’t think it is a coincidence that this came about straight after I had answered those questions.

• Write anywhere - while technology can disrupt the creative process in numerous ways, it can also help it along too. If you’re stuck on a bus or train, jot down a few thoughts on your phone. If you dislike technology, carry a small notebook with you and jot down your thoughts on paper. Make sure that you have somewhere to pen your ideas. I even make notes on my shower window (I then get changed quickly, grab a notebook and jot down what I’ve written)!

• Set up a ‘mind gym’ with someone you trust - find a friend who also has writing aspirations and then set up a timetable where you both aim to write X amount of works everyday, for X amount of weeks. I have done this several times with two friends and each time it has worked brilliantly. There is nothing like a bit of healthy competition to get you writing.

• Read your writing the next day - this may sound like an obvious point, but there is no point in writing everyday if it is purposeless and directionless. By reading your writing the following day, you can gauge what areas you might need to work on, what ideas need to be followed up and what things are simply not working. Doing this will not only improve your writing, it will also give you added motivation each day that you write.

• Write out of your comfort zone one day a week - the creative process is all about expanding your consciousness, so writing about the same thing for weeks may not be in your best interests as it encourages the wrong type of thinking. That is why I recommend trying to write in a style of writing or about a subject matter you would normally shy away from. At first, it may prove difficult, but with time it will make you a better writer and allow you to view your work(s) in progress from a different perspective. You will eventually find yourself looking forward to this day each week as it gives you an opportunity to craft a new proverbial writing tool.

• Writing doesn’t just involve writing - As Alia points out, a lot of the leg work for writing can be done in your mind before you ever put pen to paper as Joe states, rewriting is just as important as writing itself. I would add that research can often play a key role in the writing process as well. So remember that there is a lot more to writing than jotting down X amount of words. This should not scare you; instead, it should allow you to realise that there are many different aspects to the writing process, giving you numerous options on days that you are stuck writing the main body of the essay, story or novel. Aman Anand’s answer to Writing: How do I get in the habit of writing every day?

The most important lesson

Write the book you would want to read. That may sound easy, but I think it is one of the hardest things to do.  Think about how many preconceptions and prejudices we have about writing, how often we try and appease an imaginary voice or audience.  The more I read about my favourite works of fiction and the work that has gone into them, the more I realise that the common thread that they share is that the author is willing to write the exact book he or she wanted to read. The great thing about this advice is that it can apply to any author, whether they write erotica or spy fiction.  Be brave, write the book you want to read, and you will have authority and authenticity by the bucket load. Aman Anand’s answer to Writing: What is authenticity in writing?

Factors to consider before writing a novel

Ask yourself the following questions:

Why I am writing a novel? Too many new authors jump straight into the deep end and write a novel without first writing a few short short stories or a short novella. That is the equivalent of trying to driving a car without taking any lessons, it may work out for a while, but once you hit a motorway (highway), you will be in deep trouble. Taking on the burden of writing a novel without writing any shorter fiction can be an almost impossible task. Start out by writing shorter pieces and build your way to sustaining a novel length story. So, for example, you could start out by writing a particular scene from a bigger project you had in mind. Make sure you understand the obligations that come with writing a novel and feel confident working within the form. What are my reasons for telling this particular story? Why have you chosen to write about the particular world or subject? If it is because, say, vampires are really popular and you want to cash in on their success, you might face an uphill struggle. You might think that you have to write a ‘serious’ novel about the human condition to be taken seriously as a ‘literary author’. If you are planning to write your novel for these or similar reasons, you may find it very difficult to finish the book, because your motives are all wrong. Write about a particular subject that you are genuinely interested and feel you may have something interesting to say about. There is nothing more important than ensuring that you  are deeply engaged with the novel you are producing; trust me, readers can spot cynicism and boredom with ease.   What style of writing will I employ? An all too often overlooked element of writing a novel is choosing the writing style you adopt; in fact, few things are more important as the way you tell the story, it is just as important as the content of the story. This is aspect of writing novel that allows you to become a writer, as you have total freedom in determining the style of writing (some experimental novels may use more than one style) you employ. So, for example, let’s say you are writing a novel about the rise and fall of an American footballer. Do you want to tell the story in the first or third person? If you choose the third person, do you want the narrator’s voice to be detached and neutral or colourful and satirical. Do you feel comfortable writing in the style that you have chosen? Which style suits your strengths as a writer best? These are all important points to consider. Cristinacorrectly points out in the comments section below that some authors may develop their voice while they write; this is an equally valid approach. What both approaches require is an understanding that you are trying to craft a unique voice that draws in your reader. Aman Anand’s answer to What are the first things an author should consider before writing a novel?

How to start your story

The most important thing to ensure is that the idea can be ‘translated’ into the format of storytelling you plan to use. This means you should avoid over developing the back story for a character in a short story while you should ensure that you have a detailed outline of the entire plot summary for a series of novels before you starting writing them.   Otherwise, the beauty of writing fiction is that you can start anywhere.But always remember that the genesis of an idea is nowhere near as important as its culmination. Writers usually come up with new ideas on a regular basis; it is the ones that they complete that matter most. Aman Anand’s answer to Creative Writing: How do you start your story? With a character, plot, scene or something else?

Preventing a saggy middle

• Don’t rely on gimmicks - some of the answers above mention false climaxes and twists for their own sake. My advice that only incorporate twists that fit into the overall plot, do not sacrifice a carefully constructed plot for a few gimmicks that undermine the rest of the story.

• Don’t get the size of your opening and closing act wrong. Too many writers I have read seem to think the opening and closing of a book is akin to being born and dying, while everything that happens in between is the middle. Whether you decide to employ  three act or five act structure, make sure you give your book the right sized opening and closing. If the vast majority of your book is middle, it is bound to sag.

• Don’t get too caught up in structures. While it is essential to get the structure of the book right, over-thinking this area of the book can lead to you overemphasising it and ruining the ‘natural flow’ of the book. Some of the greatest novels use unconventional structures, don’t be afraid of trying something completely different. Aman Anand’s answer to Storytelling: How do you prevent a “saggy” middle?

What a great ending requires

• Great endings elevate the work to new heights of brilliance - a great ending is not a mere summation of events or the inevitable conclusion of a story. A truly great ending lifts the work in question to previously uncharted heights within that particular work of fiction. Some of the best examples of this can be found in Shakespeare’s tragedies. The devastating climaxes of King Lear, Hamlet, Othello andRomeo & Juliet give all four works depth, resonance and pathos. Most of all though, they provide the reader with striking images in their finales that stay with them for years to come.

• Great endings make you want to reread the rest of the work - the best endings allow the work to either come full circle or complete a circle. Either way, such endings ensure the book has a sense of closure (or in the case of serialised fiction, a perfect cliffhanger ending that still manages to be a satisfactory self-contained work) that breeds a deep curiosity to revisit earlier parts of the story to further our understanding of the overall story. When I finished the likes of Moby Dick and Lolita,their endings made me want to return to earlier parts of those respective books, for this very reason.

• Great endings are never quite what the reader expects them to be - even if you know the work you are reading is a comedy or tragedy and are therefore that genre conventions will lead to a certain type of ending, the finest conclusions to a work of fiction will still manage to end the story in a way which subtly defies the reader’s expectations. So, for example, in Macbeth, Macbeth’s haunting, final soliloquy makes the reader sympathise with this tyrant in his final few hours, turning his inevitable death not into a moment of triumph, but instead leaving us with a strange dual sensation of relief and sadness. Aman Anand’s answer to Endings: What characterizes a great ending in fiction?

Making characters believable

Try not to overemphasise characterisation - I would argue that the pacing of the story and careful world building take precedence over authentic characterisation. Over such a short period of text, no-one is expecting you to portray multiple sides of a character’s personality; in fact, overemphasis of a character’s personality traits can weigh down on the two aforementioned elements of the story and ruin the story’s balance.  One of the best approaches to crafting believable characters in short stories is to act as if the story is a chapter in a novel. Too often, short story writers will force their characters into taking overtly dramatic action to try and compensate for the fact that the reader will only see the character for a short period of time. Aman Anand’s answer to Writing: What are general tips for making characters believable when writing a short story?

Creating a character smarter than yourself

Make yourself smarter - sometimes the most obvious answer is the best one. If you’re writing about a super smart brain surgeon, read up bucket loads of textbooks that cover that field of expertise, talk to surgeons and do whatever it takes to increase your understanding of that subject. There are plenty of shortcuts that you can take, but always remember how smart readers are, they will spot a ‘blag’ a mile off. Sure, you need to make sure you frame the character in such a way that doesn’t require you to actually become a prominent brain surgeon, but if you try to write your character with little or no knowledge of the subject in hand, it could sabotage your entire novel. Aman Anand’s answer to Writing: What are some writing tips for creating a character who is smarter than you?

Writing isn’t easy

That hard work is as important as creativity. Various anecdotes and biopics have created the impression that good writers are able to conjure great novels and poems from pure inspiration, that’s why a lot of people assume that writers have an easy life.  The reality is very different as it takes a great deal of hard work to craft a coherent novel, let alone a great one. Aman Anand’s answer to Writing: What are some things that full time writers know that most people don’t?

The myriad of possibilities a writer has when choosing perspective

After plotting, I consider perspective to be the next most important aspect a writer must decide on while they are planning their story.  Let us take an example: I decide I want to write a short story about a man whose briefcase is stolen on a crowded train. After deciding on this brief plot, my next option is to consider what perspective I should tell the story from, and the options are far more varied than choosing between first, second and third person perspectives.  I could tell the story from the following perspectives:

• An omniscient third person narrator
• An unreliable third person narrator
• The man who has his briefcase stolen
• The person who steals the briefcase
• The briefcase itself
• The train
• One of the many passengers on the train
• The train conductor

• A combination of these perspectives Aman Anand’s answer to Writing: How do you choose the perspective for your stories? The importance of dealing with feedback on your writing

  If the writer is both highly sensitive and inexperienced, it can be difficult to accept when a person they respect vehemently dislikes their work. Often, it will lead to the writer questioning their ability to write altogether as self-doubt paralyses their writing process. The truth is that no matter how good your writing is, there will always be a number of people who will find fault with it and this will include people that you admire. Of course, the writer must make certain they do not delude themselves into having a heightened opinion of their talents, yet they should not allow one or two stinging responses to their work destroy their confidence in their own ability.  So long as they try and improve their work in regards to specific constructive criticism that helps elevate their work while remaining assured about their overall vision for the book in its entirety, they can learn a great deal from such encounters.   Aman Anand’s answer to Writing: What is the hardest part about getting feedback for writers?

Learning to speak in metaphors and pictures

Write like you dream. The moment you commit your pen to paper, you are no longer bound by the Newtonian laws of our universe. You are entering what the poet Hart Crane described as ‘those gleaming cantos of unvanquished space’. Shape this terrain as only you can.  Too much modern fictional writing is fixated on ideas like authenticity, character development at the expense of everything else and mirroring reality. Yet some of the writer’s finest tools are those which stretch the reader’s imagination; similes and metaphors can momentarily transport the reader to another space, drawing a comparison that enriches their reading experience. Aman Anand’s answer to Life Advice: How can one learn to speak in metaphors or pictures?

Writing metaphors today

Writing metaphors today though, is very different to pre 20th Century literature. First of all, such raw sincerity as demonstrated above would not work as well in our postmodern world. However, we now have a wealth of imagery that has arisen from our ‘industrial’ surroundings. What makes a metaphor ‘great’ today can be very different to the criteria for the Shakespeares and Wordsworths of yesterday. Some of the worst metaphors I have encountered in recent years are when writers try to imitate the greats and fail miserably.  This may come down to personal taste, but I would much rather see a writer overreach with their metaphors by using strange and timely metaphors than ones which try to mirror what has come before. So instead of using the metaphor I use at the very start of this answer, I think it would be far more interesting to say, A great metaphor is like a sharp electric current passing through a switch, it jolts the reader into experiencing something unexpected and removes them from their comfort zone. Aman Anand’s answer to Writing: What makes certain metaphors so good?

How to insert humour into a literary work Here is how: 

• Give your narrative voice a sharp sense of humour - this will not work in all instances, but if you can give your narrator a voice that is both authoritative and humorous, you will go a long way to incorporating a wide expanse of emotions and ideas within your work. Develop an inimitable voice that has a broad range and will succeed in incorporating an air of joviality in your work.

• Don’t take yourself or your writing too seriously - the problem with a great deal of contemporary literary fiction is its singular earnestness. Writing devoid of any element of humour is like rain falling every single day of the year, it is as annoying as it is predictable.

• Humour comes in many shapes and forms - Cristina provides some specific examples of humour that can be utilised; I cannot emphasise the importance of trying to incorporate a wide range of devices when portraying humour. A good way to work out how to pull this off is to make a list of all the different types of humour you can think of and then try and write a short story that features them all. Keeping writing stories until the appearance of each brand of humour fits in naturally within the narrative.

• There is no such thing as too dark - some of the finest examples of humour I have read in major literary works are almost too offensive to post here. In most writers hands, these episodes would be vile, but the most skilful writers manage to make such moments resound in your mind long after you finish reading that particular book. Do not try and conjure such humour for the sake of it, but if it does fit within the framework of your writing, do not be afraid to include it. 

• Create a fictional world where characters are free to experience the full range of human emotions - others rightfully point to the fact that you shouldn’t make your characters too bland, but I would argue that it is perhaps more important to ensure that the fictional world you create is a place where its inhabitants can express themselves in a variety of ways. If humour turns out to be just one of many strings in their bow, then it will come off as both natural and enjoyable. Aman Anand’s answer to Writing: What are some tips for including an element of humor in a serious literary work?

How to research period specific dialogue

1. Read numerous primary documents from that period - if you are lucky enough that the period in question has video footage, that can be equally helpful in allowing you to immerse yourself in the language of that period. Primary sources are extremely helpful, in that they allow you to pick up slang and the specific phrasing of words from that particular period. This will allow you to layer your dialogue with far greater authenticity.
2. Read as much fiction from that period - if you are setting your fictional work in a particular year - look up that year on Wikipedia and you will find a comprehensive list of fiction from that period. Read as much of it as you can; this will allow you an invaluable insight into how writers were using language during that period; you can make subtle references to their ‘phraseology’ or a character may end up reading one of their books. However you choose to use this knowledge, it will show when you write dialogue as you will have a far greater understanding of how writers of the time wrote dialogue sequences. Aman Anand’s answer to Writing: What are good ways to research and write authentic period dialogue?

Dealing with writer’s block

Realise that there is no such things as writer’s block. Is this necessarily true? No, there is still considerable debate as to whether writer’s block ‘exists’. Given its unverifiable nature, the best way to deal with it is to reject its very existence. How, you ask? Realise that this condition has few parallels in other walks of life. Another slightly more controversial option is to have a few drinks and see how quickly you loosen the tightness of your writing muscle. Aman Anand’s answer to Writing: How do writers deal with writer’s block?

Pros and Cons of using a pen name

Pros

• Allows you to write from a completely different perspective from any writing you have published under your own name.
• Provides you with an opportunity to write about sensitive information that you may not have been comfortable with publishing under your real name.
• There is no limit to the number of pen names you can have. Many of the great pulp writers had a dozen and produced a wonderfully varied and eclectic range of writing under all of their pen names.
• Challenges you to write about genres and topics you wouldn’t have been comfortable approaching while writing under your real name. Cons
• You lose any readership you may have under your real name and have to start from scratch.
• Some writers use pen names as an excuse to indulge their excesses and do not treat with the same respect they treat writing under their real name. This results in them writing novels of an inferior standard to what they would have produced if they were writing under their real name. Aman Anand’s answer to Writing: What are the pros and cons of using a pen name for writing novels?

Making the Clackity Noise

Buffering [Sonny Payne] When I was a percussionist in high school, we were responsible for keeping the jazz band, full orchestra, concert band, and marching band in time, and we did so through a haze of marijuana and hormones and passed-down stories of some guy’s uncle who saw Gene Krupa perform a 12-minute solo using every part of a high hat while eschewing the rest of the kit. And to this day, when I see videos like this, I get an urge to skip class and go make out with a bassoonist in a sound-proof practice room. After all, life is short, and lunch period is even shorter. Did you read that? That was swell. One hundred five words. Less thanhalf a page. That’s all it took for this person (whom I’m pretty sure I’ve never met) to make my day. Now I want to follow this person or star this person or favr this person or whatever the fuck au courant verb box I need to mash on in order to see more things like that. Yes, I realize I am — already, again, seemingly forever — carrying on like that weird relative who always smells of gin and Starlight mints as he threatens to “set you up with a sweet Doobie Brothers mix.” I love Starlight mints, but please don’t misunderstand me. I genuinely enjoy looking at oversaturated pictures of coltish women I’ll never meet. I’m always game to make fun of “improperly” punctuated “signs.” And God knows I love reading (and posting) elliptical quotes from famous books I never finished reading. Stipulated. But, brother. Do I ever wish more people would write little stories like Buffering’s. It’s just so wonderful. You know? I mean, Jesus Christ, people, LOOK. We have keyboards! Literally right in front of us. Right this second. You have one, too, right? See it? Really look. No, look down. Down there. No, not that. That’s your enormous energy drink. No, not that either. That’s your ironic Garfield lamp. Okay, here: Remember last week when your phone battery croaked, but you were frantic to tell something called a Facebook wall that you were “yeah still po0opn lots since teh yuck tacoz rofl bt OTOh fuck yeah top up my side salad for xtra dollar bitch!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” Remember that? Okay, good. That. That was the keyboard that you were using then. It’s the keyboard that helped make the Facebook wall get your words on it. That was the clackity noise. That was the keyboard. Please use that keyboard to talk about your life sometimes. Your real life. Not just the canned version of life on which we slap adhesive labels like happy or sad, poor or rich, employed or unemployed, “eating lunch” or “hatin’ life”, “it’s complicated” or “serial entrepreneur,” “meh” or “whatever.” Tear off your fucking labels.

Tell me something that happened. Use the names of people you’d forgotten about, and say what you’d thought would happen but didn’t. Write down what part of the song was playing when you slammed the door only to realize you had to go back inside for your car keys. Can you remember when you were still little enough to hide under the kitchen sink where it smelled like ammonia and Comet and old sponges? What was the color of the clunky old car your Dad would let you help steer. What brand did he smoke? My Dad smoked Winstons, from a red and gold pack that never seemed to empty. Lots and lots of Winstons. And, I loved when my Dad would let me help steer the vomit-green Pontiac with the plastic seats down the maniac curves of Boomer Road. I’d sit on his lap in this giant, ridiculous automobile, with cigarette smoke swirling around our heads and out the cracked window, listening to a Reds game on WLW, laughing and steering. My Dad had the same name as me and he never should have smoked as much as he did. And, I swear to God, thirty-five years later, I can still see his big hands on the wheel, and still smell those Winstons, and still hear Joe Nuxhall’s call, as Pete Rose stretches another double into an impossible head-first triple, and as I type this, I’m just remembering that whenever we were pulling out of my Grandparents’ driveway, my Dad would always flip the vomit-green Pontiac’s lights on and off three times. Blink. Blink. Blink. That’s how we said goodbye. Man. Okay, so, that’s what was in my keyboard just now. I didn’t know it was in there when I sat down to compliment Buffering on his 105 words that made me think about how I love little stories. This is why writing is fucked up and awesome and makes a 42-year-old man cry about cigarettes and Pete Rose and an ugly green car on a perfectly temperate Sunday afternoon. Your keyboard will have different things in it than mine does, of course. But, it’s impossible to know what’s in there until you’ve made the clackity noise for a few minutes. You think you know what’s in there. But you don’t. It’s not your brain that makes the clackity noise, it’s your fingers. Your brain helps you to breathe and to buy beer and to pretend to understand Kant and to use Spanish to ask the hot waitress for “mas salsa,” and, thank God, your brain is a boon companion at helping you avoid deadly attacks by bears, monsters, and SEO marketers. But, your brain’s a piece-of-shit writer. I know this, because mine is too. So, let me assure you that there’s no point in waiting for your brain to start making the clackity noise for you. It can’t. That’s all on you, and on me, and on each of our extant fingers. Weird thing is I still have to relearn this every single day. Hand to God. The only way I can tell I’m relearning this is I notice that the keyboard has been making the clackity noise for several contiguous minutes. I see that words have started to come out and sometimes they’re good and almost always they’re not and increasingly I’m not all that worried about it either way. I’ve learned that my job is to just sit down and start making the clackity noise. If I make the clackity noise long enough every day, the “writing” seems to take care of itself. On the other hand, if there’s no clackity noise, no writing. No little stories. The stories may be in there, alongside God knows what else, but there’s no way to know. You must make the noise. You can totally do this. I know you know that. I mean to say, I know you know you know that you own a fucking keyboard and understand how to use it. But, you do need to be reminded of what that keyboard can help you make. I need to be reminded. Everybody needs to be reminded. Just because we know it doesn’t mean we’re actually making the clackity noise happen. Far from it. Maybe just try it. You don’t even have to show anyone. Make the clackity noise until a little story falls out. Just a little bit and just for a little while. Just until you notice one tiny, dumb, pointless story that the keyboard wanted you to remember. Today, the clackity noise helped me remember my Dad. I wonder who’s in your keyboard and what brand he’s smoking. Anyhow. Thanks, Buffering. I was also in band, I enjoyed pot, and I still think Gene Krupa is the tits.

Yep. Little stories are the internet’s native and ideal art form. Apart from the coltish women, the email from old friends, and the low-bit WAV files of Dr. Who quotes, I think it was the little stories that got me most excited about hearing that modem start to hiss. It’s definitely what keeps me excited today. Little dumb stories that I never expected. 

the three biggies

Beginners often need to learn three things:  (1) write every day; (2) read everything you write out loud;  (3) and make multiple drafts. Almost every writing book makes these suggestions, but when I first started writing, I refused to follow them. Why? Because I was egotistical and lazy. I thought maybe other writers needed to write every day, but surely I didn’t need to. Besides, it was too much work. And I felt the same way about reading aloud and making multiple drafts.  Writing well is hard. You need to practice every day, because it’s the only way you’ll improve—and you can easily backslide. So you need to “practice scales,” like a pianist.  If you can’t think of anything to write today, just describe your morning: “The alarm went off. I groaned and refused to get out of bed. But it kept ringing, so finally I threw the covers aside and stumbled to the bathroom…” It doesn’t matter what you write. It doesn’t have to be interesting. You don’t need to show it to anyone. Just write, write, write… You don’t get to call yourself a writer unless you write every day. But if you write every day, you’re an official writer, even if you’ve never had anything published. You need to read everything you’ve written out loud, because that’s the only way you’ll know if it sounds natural. As soon as I mouth my words, I find all sorts of forced and awkward-sounding passages. (TIP: if you’re at work or a coffee shop and can’t read out loud, at least move your lips. It will force your brain to imagine you’re reading out loud.) You have to make multiple drafts because editing is easier than writing. And you need to first get something down on paper so you have something to edit. Think of your first draft as a data dump. Then you start chiseling away at it, going over each word, adding and subtracting.  Stephen King, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jane Austen … they all work (or worked) with multiple drafts. If you’re a serious writer, you need to do that, too.  Every once in a while, you’ll hear about an amazing writer who doesn’t redraft. Yes, they exist. They are freaks of nature. Don’t assume you’re one of them. 

PS. You don’t have writer’s block! See Marcus Geduld’s answer to How can I deal with writer’s block when I have so many ideas in my head, but no way to write them down? And keep in mind what Ira Glass has to say about taste (emphasis added):
Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions.  And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.

every piece of writing counts

If you want to be a writer, you should always be “on.” Give up the idea of “tossed off writing that’s not real writing.” Proof-read and redraft your emails, your text messages, your shopping lists. If you’re a writer, you care about writing. You always care. You always take care. The flip version of this “law” is: you know you’re a writer when you start proof-reading your text messages, worrying over each word—when you can no-longer conceive of not caring how you write a sentence.  Do you know any professional chefs? I do. They don’t say, “I know I’m a chef, but I’m just making a sandwich for a snack.” They are incapable of being around food without caring. When they are around food, they care. 
write to somebody

It’s much easier to write to a specific person than “the general reader.” Sometimes, when I’m stuck, I write in gmail instead of MS Word. I start a letter to a friend—with no intention of sending it—and start describing, storytelling, arguing or whatever.  We evolved to talk to specific people, not people in general. So use that part of your nature! When you’re writing, make a case to your mom; argue with your husband; write a love letter to your teddy bear… Later, you can generalize it. By the way, writing to a specific person can help you find a “voice.” You will find yourself writing differently if it’s an “email” to a six-year-old than if it’s an email to your boss. This technique tends to work for programmers, too. It’s useful in many fields. We’re social animals. Understand that fact and use it to your advantage. SeeRubber duck debugging.
read every day…

… and when a writer gives you a strong sensation, surprises you, or makes an idea pop into focus in your brain, stop and ask, “How did he do that?”
study rhetoric

The ancient Greeks formalized the study of persuasion and coined all sorts of terms for various writing structures. A well-known example is “antithesis”—the tension between opposites. For instance, let’s say I’m trying to convince you to move to New York. Here’s a way to do with using antithesis: “New York is a a dirty city. Gum wrappers and soda cans decorate the gutters; used condoms float in Central Park’s lakes; and, at night, you’ll see rats scurrying around the subway tracks; but you’ll never find a city more full of life! New York will dazzle you with color and light; it will seduce you with its scents of jerk chicken, gyros, spicy corn and candied peanuts; you’ll follow proud, long-legged women up Madison Avenue, and everywhere you’ll grab fistfuls of money.” See Rhetoric, Figure of speech, and Rhetorical device. Here’s a clearly-written, inexpensive book on rhetoric for writers:Amazon.com: Rhetorical Devices: A Handbook and Activities for Student Writers eBook: Brendan McGuigan, Douglas Grudzina and Paul Moliken: Kindle Store
write rule-based poetry

Writers need to become word experts, and one of the best ways to do that is to challenge yourself with constraints, like writing in e-prime (see below) or refusing to use any word containing the letter ‘e.’ 

Whenever you constrain your prose, you should always do so with the goal of sounding natural. Can you give your e-less essay to a friend without him noticing anything odd? When you can write fluidly with constraints, you’ll be able to write wonderfully without them. (I remember when my dad taught me to drive with a stick shift, telling me that I’d find automatic transmission a cinch if I mastered shifting gears, first.) The most common form of constrained writing is poetic verse. There are many forms you can try, for instance the Shakespearean sonnet. Here are its rules:  1. Each line must be ten syllables long. 2. You should be able to speak each line —without it sounding forced —with every other syllable (starting with the second) getting more stress than the one before it. Example: “She stood and tortured me then slammed the door. 3. There must be 14 lines total. 4. The rhyme scheme for the first 12 lines is ABAB, with every other line rhyming: Example: She stood and tortured me then slammed the door. I cried, “Please stop!” but she ignored my pleas. She laughed and sang and danced and laughed some more, While I unraveled, shaken, ill at ease… 5. The last two lines (the final couplet) should rhyme with each other: Though cruelty was her skill and pain her art, I loved her even as she broke my heart. If sonnets are too complicated, try a simpler from, like the haiku or the limerick. Look it up on wikipedia, learn the rules, and have a go. SeeCategory:Poetic form. And I urge all writers —no matter what form of writing they do—to read Stephen Sondheim’s two books on lyric writing. They trap you in the mind of a writer who cares about each and every word he writes. Hat Box: The Collected Lyrics of Stephen Sondheim: Stephen Sondheim: 9780307957726: Amazon.com: Books
try e-prime

E-Prime, a constrained English, forbids you to use any form of the verb “to be,” so instead of writing, “She was scared,” you must write, “She shivered” or “She ran screaming to her mother.” I spent a year writing in e-prime (always working to make my prose sound natural, despite the constraint), allowing myself to use “to be” forms only in quotes, as in this paragraph. E-prime forces you to craft every sentence around an agent doing something, e.g. a woman shivering, a dog peeing, or a bomb exploding. My e-prime year improved my writing more than any other exercise. 
break a rule

You’ve heard teachers say, “You have to know the rules before you can break them.” Okay, well: you know the rules. So now go ahead and smash them to pieces. You may not be a grammarian, but you know at least some rules of writing. Those are the ones you’re allowed to break, and those are the ones you must break. Why? Because writers don’t let words own or dominate them. Writers ownwords. Writers hypnotize nouns and order them to act like verbs; they gleefully stick square pegs in round holes; they spit in the eyes of their fifth-grade English teachers. I am not excusing shoddy, lazy work. What I am saying is this: if you don’t know the rules, the words control you. If you’re controlled by the rules, the words still control you. You must become the master of the words and the rules, using them as tools, not as bosses.  Obviously, if you’re a student and writing “ain’t” will get you an F, don’t do it. But in your own writing, be the boss and don’t let anyone else push you around.  Unless you’re writing experimental poetry or prose (or colloquial dialogue), go easy on the departures from standard English. They should be the spice, not the main course. If every word is surprising, none of them are surprising. The eccentric is only effective when it’s hidden within the ordinary.  You don’t have to keep all your experiments. You’re also in control over what goes into the final draft. Just keep playing. Keep loose with language.  “My Lit professor assigned Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and Othello, and now my brain is totally Shakespeared, and I don’t know whether to be or not to be.” “She ordered me to get her lunch, then she made me fix the toilet, then she told me to wash all the dishes, then she ordered me to drive her mom to the airport, then she gribbled me to grickle her grapper grouper until I smashed her head with a doodle doodle doo!”
extend metaphors

In Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson explain that our writing and speech is laced with metaphors we fail to notice. For instance, here are a couple of sentences from earlier in this post: “It’s much easier to write to a specific person than ‘the general reader.’ Sometimes, when I’m stuck, I write in gmail instead of MS Word.” Note that I likened being unable to write with being physically trapped and using gmail as being inside something. Such metaphors should convince you—if you still need convincing—that we’re sensual creatures: that when faced with something murky like writer’s block or interacting with a computer, we evoke physical concepts, like being stuck and being inside a container. Here’s a fun and useful exercise: find a passage written by yourself or someone else, locate all the buried metaphors and extend them: In my passage, in addition to “stuck” and “in,” there’s “writing to,” which seems to evoke the idea of words traveling towards a person, as if they’re birds or arrows. Here’s my attempt of an extended version: “It’s much easier to write to a specific person—pushing each word towards him and watching them waddle off like baby ducks—then it is writing to a general reader. Sometimes, when I’m stuck in a deep well with nothing at the bottom except blunt pencils and blank pieces of paper, I claw my way to the top, stumble out onto the grass, rush inside, open my laptop and dive into gmail, as if it was an olympic pool, and I swim frantically towards a friend or former lover.” I’m not suggesting you should write this way normally. But it’s a great, playful exercise that turns words into toys and makes you deeply aware of what you’re writing.  Turn words into toys!
inspiration

… The ego is the enemy of the imagination. Anything that you think about writing when you’re not writing, is a product of the ego and is absolutely wrong. One hundred percent, all the time, wrong. And if you take a step back and think how much time you spend trying to purify yourself in order to get ready to write, that’s like 95% of the time. And the reason for that is the ego has a stake in perpetuating the behavior that you’ve already engaged in. We do not think our way to right action; we act our way to right thinking.  So what I do is I start writing. If I think about my writing before I start to write, what I’m really doing is justifying not writing, because … I’m not writing. … I’m going to find a way to keep not writing. So what I say is I don’t have the idea yet; it’s not fully realized yet… Not only that: I don’t have pencils; my pencils are not sharpened; I don’t have the right notebook. … Whoa! Eleven-forty five already. Time for lunch. … When you think about exercising, what you invariably say to yourself is, “You know, I’m too fat. What’s the point? I’m too old; I’m too fat; I’m too old; I’m too slow; I’m too this; I’m too that…” And all you’re doing is justifying the fact that you’re not exercising. – David Milch, creator of “Deadwood.”  You can decide if Milch is going overboard or not, but in my opinion what he’s saying is basically sound. The more time you waste on “Which word processor should I use?” and “outlining,” the less time you are writing. And it’s all about writing! Honestly, if a member of your team is stuck for ideas, tell him to write about what he had for breakfast that morning. Writinganything is a step forward.
Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass. – Anton Chekhov
Some films are slices of life. Mine are slices of cake. – Alfred Hitchcock
Style is the art of getting yourself out of the way, not putting yourself in it.  – David Hare
if it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.  – Elmore Leonard
He was doing a film, and he explained to his writer that the beginning of the film had to show that this man had been married a long time and that he is kind of tired of it. He had gotten used to his wife and had a roving eye. So the writer brought him four pages of introductory exposition of character. Lubitsch looked at it and said, ‘You don’t need all that.’ He took all four pages out. ‘Just put down this—the man walks into the elevator with his wife, and keeps his hat on. On the seventh floor a pretty blonde walks in, and the man takes his hat off.’ – Director Rouben Mamoulian (Love Me Tonight, The Mark of Zorro, Blood and Sand) remembering director Ernst Lubitsch.
Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect. – Teller
There is a great difference, whether the poet seeks the particular for the sake of the general or sees the general in the particular. From the former procedure there ensues allegory, in which the particular serves only as illustration, as example of the general. The latter procedure, however, is genuinely the nature of poetry; it expresses something particular, without thinking of the general or pointing to it. – Goethe
People are very good [at] thinking about agents. The mind is set really beautifully to think about agents. Agents have traits. Agents have behaviors. We understand agents. We form global impression of their personalities. We are really not very good at remembering sentences where the subject of the sentence is an abstract notion. – Daniel Kahneman
Begin with an individual and you find that you have created a type; begin with a type and you find that you have created — nothing. – F. Scott Fitzgerald And make sure you read this: David Mamet on Dramatic Writing.

“Don’t be didactic — don’t write about poverty. Write about poor people. When you dramatize their lives and let life and characters be your inspiration, you will express the ‘idea’ dynamically and without preaching.” — Robert McKee

“Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often is has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed in.” — C.S. Lewis … the times where I worried too much about the market were the times I wrote my worst fiction. And the times where I wrote: “this is what I want to read — this is what I’m passionate about,” I wrote my best fiction. And so that’s what I would advise.

… I wrote 13 books before I got published, and at the end of the day I decided I would rather keep writing and never publish than give up writing or go do something else. And if I reached the end of my life and had 70 unpublished novels, I’d still consider myself a successful writer. That decision has driven me ever since and it’s worked out for me.

“Comedy, we may say, is society protecting itself–with a smile.” — J.B. Priestly

“Comedy has to be based on truth. You take the truth and you put a little curlicue at the end.” — Sid Caesar

“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”. — Mark Twain

“A long time ago, when I was writing for pulps, I put into a story a line like “he got out of the cars and walked across the sun-drenched sidewalk until the shadow of an awning of the entrance fell across his face like the touch of cool water.” They took it out when they published the story. Their readers didn’t appreciate this sort of thing: just held up the action. And I set out to prove them wrong. My theory was they just thought they cared nothing about anything but the action; that really, although they didn’t know it, they cared very little about the action. They things they really cared about, and that I cared about, were the creation of emotion through dialogue and description; the things they remembered, that haunted them, were not for example that a man got killed, but that in the moment of his death he was trying to pick a paper clip up off the polished surface of a desk, and it kept slipping away from him, so that there was was a look of strain on his face and his mouth was half open in a kind of tormented grin, and the last thing in the world he thought about was death. He didn’t even hear death knock on the door. That damn little paper clip kept slipping away from his fingers and he just couldn’t push it to the edge of the desk and catch it as it fell.” — Raymond Chandler

“… The ego is the enemy of the imagination. Anything that you think about writing when you’re not writing, is a product of the ego and is absolutely wrong. One hundred percent, all the time, wrong. And if take a step back and think how much time you spend trying to purify yourself in order to get ready to write, that’s like 95% of the time. And the reason for that is the ego has a stake in perpetuating the behavior that you’ve already engaged in. We do not think our way to right action; we act our way to right thinking.

So what I do is I start writing. If I think about my writing before I start to write, what I’m really doing is justifying not writing, because … I’m not writing. … I’m going to find a way to keep not writing. So what I say is I don’t have the idea yet; it’s not fully realized yet… Not only that: I don’t have pencils; my pencils are not sharpened; I don’t have the right notebook. … Whoa! Eleven-forty five already. Time for lunch.

… When you think about exercising, what you invariably say to yourself is, ‘You know, I’m too fat. What’s the point? I’m too old; I’m too fat; I’m too old; I’m too slow; I’m too this; I’m too that…’ And all you’re doing is justifying the fact that you’re not exercising.” — David Milch

“The task of a writer is not to solve the problem but to state the problem correctly.” — Anton Chekhov

“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.” — Neil Gaimon

“The perfect novel from which to make a movie is, I think, not the novel of action but, on the contrary, the novel which is mainly concerned with the inner life of its characters. It will give the adaptor an absolute compass bearing, as it were, on what a character is thinking or feeling at any given moment of the story. And from this he can invent action which will be an objective correlative of the book’s psychological content, will accurately dramatize this in an implicit, off-the-nose way without resorting to having the actors deliver literal statements of meaning.

…People have asked me how it is possible to make a film out of Lolita when so much of the quality of the book depends on Nabokov’s prose style. But to take the prose style as any more than just a part of a great book is simply misunderstanding just what a great book is. Of course, the quality of the writing is one of the elements that make a novel great. But this quality is a result of the quality of the writer’s obsession with his subject, with a theme and a concept and a view of life and an understanding of character.

Style is what an artist uses to fascinate the beholder in order to convey to him his feelings and emotions and thoughts. These are what have to be dramatized, not the style. The dramatizing has to find a style of its own, as it will do if it really grasps the content.” — Stanley Kubrick

On film director Ernst Lubitsch: “He was doing a film, and he explained to his writer that the beginning of the film had to show that this man had been married a long time and that he is kind of tired of it. He had gotten used to his wife and had a roving eye. So the writer brought him four pages of introductory exposition of character. Lubitsch looked at it and said, ‘You don’t need all that.’ He took all four pages out. ‘Just put down this—the man walks into the elevator with his wife, and keeps his hat on. On the seventh floor a pretty blonde walks in, and the man takes his hat off.’” — Rouben Mamoulian

“There is a great difference, whether the poet seeks the particular for the sake of the general or sees the general in the particular. From the former procedure there ensues allegory, in which the particular serves only as illustration, as example of the general. The latter procedure, however, is genuinely the nature of poetry; it expresses something particular, without thinking of the general or pointing to it.” — Goethe

“The essence of dramatic form is to let an idea come over people without it being plainly stated. When you say something directly, it’s simply not as potent as it is when you allow people to discover it for themselves.” — Stanley Kubrick

“People are very good [at] thinking about agents. The mind is set really beautifully to think about agents. Agents have traits. Agents have behaviors. We understand agents. We form global impression of their personalities. We are really not very good at remembering sentences where the subject of the sentence is an abstract notion.” — Daniel Kahneman

“The truth is that art does not teach; it makes you feel, and any teaching that may arise from the feeling is an extra, and must not be stressed too much. In the modern world… we are obsessed with the notion that to think is the highest achievement of mankind, but we neglect the fact that thought untouched by feeling is thin, delusive, treacherous stuff.” — Robertson Davies

“…good prose is so much less of a mystery, finally, so much less of a shock, than bad prose. Good prose, after all, relates to our shared essence: we know it when we read it, we assent to it, we get it. Bad prose, on the other hand, is arrestingly weird. It stops the clocks and twists the wires. It knits the brow in perplexity: What the hell is this? What’s going on here?

I was brought up short, for example, very early in Matthew Pearl’s latest novel, ‘The Technologists,’ by the following line: ‘Incredulously, the captain extended his spyglass.’ I wavered and then stopped. How does one incredulously extend a spyglass? And what else can one do incredulously? Incredulously, they cut down the hanged man. … Incredulously, she flossed her perfect teeth. …” — James Parker

“… sympathy in novels need not be simply a matter of the reader’s direct identification with a fictional character. It can also be driven by, say, my admiration of a character who is long on virtues I am short on (the moral courage of Atticus Finch, the limpid goodness of Alyosha Karamozov), or, most interestingly, by my wish to be a character who is unlike me in ways I don’t admire or even like. One of the great perplexities of fiction – and the quality that makes the novel the quintessentially liberal art form – is that we experience sympathy so readily for characters we wouldn’t like in real life. Becky Sharp may be a soulless social climber, Tom Ripley may be a sociopath, the Jackal may want to assassinate the French President, Mickey Sabbath may be a disgustingly self-involved old goat, and Raskolnikov may want to get away with murder, but I find myself rooting for each of them. This is sometimes, no doubt, a function of the lure of the forbidden, the guilty pleasure of imagining what it would be like to be unburdened by scruples. In every case, though, the alchemical agent by which fiction transmutes my secret envy or my ordinary dislike of “bad” people into sympathy is desire. Apparently, all a novelist has to do is give a character a powerful desire (to rise socially, to get away with murder) and I, as a reader, become helpless not to make that desire my own.” — Jonathan Franzen

“Don’t ever write a novel unless it hurts like a hot turd coming out.” — Charles Bukowski

“… the attempt to render visual intricacy makes words feel unwieldy, like sacks of meaning that must be lugged into place, dragged here and there, then still don’t fell accurate.” – Mark Doty

“Begin with an individual and you find that you have created a type; begin with a type and you find that you have created — nothing” — F. Scott Fitzgerald

“I dislike thinking in terms of allegory—quite a lot. I’ve disagreed with Tolkien about many things over the years, but one of the things I agree with him about is this lovely quote where he talks about having a cordial dislike for allegory.

The reason for that is partly something that Frederic Jameson has written about, which is the notion of having a master code that you can apply to a text and which, in some way, solves that text. At least in my mind, allegory implies a specifically correct reading—a kind of one-to-one reduction of the text.

It amazes me the extent to which this is still a model by which these things are talked about, particularly when it comes to poetry. This is not an original formulation, I know, but one still hears people talking about ‘what does the text mean?’—and I don’t think text means like that. Texts do things.

I’m always much happier talking in terms of metaphor, because it seems that metaphor is intrinsically more unstable. A metaphor fractures and kicks off more metaphors, which kick off more metaphors, and so on. In any fiction or art at all, but particularly in fantastic or imaginative work, there will inevitably be ramifications, amplifications, resonances, ideas, and riffs that throw out these other ideas. These may well be deliberate; you may well be deliberately trying to think about issues of crime and punishment, for example, or borders, or memory, or whatever it might be. Sometimes they won’t be deliberate.

But the point is, those riffs don’t reduce. There can be perfectly legitimate political readings and perfectly legitimate metaphoric resonances, but that doesn’t end the thing. That doesn’t foreclose it. The text is not in control. Certainly the writer is not in control of what the text can do—but neither, really, is the text itself.

So I’m very unhappy about the idea of allegoric reading, on the whole. Certainly I never intend my own stuff to be allegorical. Allegories, to me, are interesting more to the extent that they fail—to the extent that they spill out of their own bounds. Reading someone like George MacDonald—his books are extraordinary—or Charles Williams. But they’re extraordinary to the extent that they fail or exceed their own intended bounds as Christian allegory.

When Iron Council came out, people would say to me: “Is this book about the Gulf War? Is this book about the Iraq War? You’re making a point about the Iraq War, aren’t you?” And I was always very surprised. I was like, listen: if I want to make a point about the Iraq War, I’ll just say what I think about the Iraq War. I know this because I’ve done it. I write political articles. I’ve written a political book. But insisting on that does not mean for a second that I’m saying—in some kind of unconvincing, ‘cor-blimey, I’m just a story-teller, guvnor,’ type-thing—that these books don’t riff off reality and don’t have things to say about it.

There’s this very strange notion that a writer needs to smuggle these other ideas into the text, but I simply don’t understand why anyone would think that that’s what fiction is for.” — China Mieville

“Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.” — Anton Chekhov

“Style is the art of getting yourself out of the way, not putting yourself in it.” — David Hare

“if it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.” — Elmore Leonard

pick up a book by a poet I liked, read for an hour or two to get filled up with it. Then, try to write like that poet. 

• Joan Didion, Goodbye To All That (http://www.mtholyoke.edu/~zkurmu…),
• David Foster Wallace, Federer as Religious Experience(http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/2…), Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars Over Usage (http://instruct.westvalley.edu/l…)
• Paul Graham, The Age of the Essay (http://www.paulgraham.com/essay….), How To Do What You Love (http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html)
• Philip Larkin, The Pleasure Principle (http://www.mrbauld.com/larkinpl….)
• Stephen Booth, On The Value of Hamlet (http://books.google.com/books?id…). This is the single greatest essay on a piece of writing I have ever read. Also Close Reading Without Readings(http://books.google.com/books?id…)
• Zadie Smith, Fail Better (http://faculty.sunydutchess.edu/…)
• Noam Chomsky, The Responsibility of Intellectuals(http://www.chomsky.info/articles…)
• Derek Parfit, Personal Identity (http://mind.ucsd.edu/syllabi/03-…). One of the nicest things about philosophical essays is that you can sometimes see a mind at work. Watching Parfit’s mind at work is thrilling. Ditto Wittgenstein (sadly out of the specified time range).
• JM Coetzee, The Lives of Animals (http://www.tannerlectures.utah.e…)

“The Delta Factor” by Walker Percy in “The Message in The Bottle” “Fiction and the Figures of Life” by William Gass, in a book of the same name “Puritans and Prigs” by Marilynne Robinson in “The Death of Adam”

–

The most important thing is for writers to swim in words. There’s little point in recommending a few good books, because writers should be reading hundreds of books. They should read every day.  My advice is … 1) Read reviews, to get a general sense of which books are praised by critics and/or popular with readers, and … 2) Vary your reading, picking books from every genre you can.  If your goal is to be a sci-fi author, make sure you’re not just reading sci-fi. Read romance novels, westerns, literary classics, mysteries, and non-fiction books about History, Science, Psychology, Crime, Biography, and so on.  If you really want a list, here’s a rather arbitrary one that should keep you busy for a while. It’s purposefully a hodge podge of books by writers I happen to think are good: “Lonesome Dove” by Larry McMurtry Essays by George Orwell “Wuthering Heights” by Emily Bronte “1Q84” by Haruki Murakami “Sense and Sensibility” by Jane Austen “Hiroshima” by John Hersey “The Island of Dr. Moreau” by H.G. Wells “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” by Raymund Carver Personal essays by Phillip Lopate “Bleak House” by Charles Dickens “The Queen’s Gambit” by Walter Tevis “Huckleberry Finn” by Mark Twain “Cat’s Eye” by Margaret Atwood “Winnie The Pooh” by A.A. Milne “House of Mirth” by Edith Wharton “Catherine the Great” by Robert K. Massie  “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez “Neromancer” by William Gibson “The Shadow Knows” by Diane Johnson “Middlemarch” by George Elliot “The Accidental Tourist” by Anne Tyler “Fox in Socks” by Dr. Seuss The Rabbit books by John Updike “Housekeeping” by Marilyn Robinson “The Extra Man” by Johnathan Ames “The Botany of Desire” by Michel Pollan “Catcher in the Rye” by J.D. Salinger “In Cold Blood” by Truman Capote “The Color Purple” by Alice Walker “The Scarlet Letter” by Nathaniel Hawthorne “To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee Jeeves and Wooster stories by P.G. Wodehouse “The Golden Compass” by Philip Pullman “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” by Oliver Sacks “Alice in Wonderland” by Lewis Carol “Watership Down” by Richard Adams “Up in the Old Hotel” by Joseph Mitchell Short stories by Anton Chekhov “Master and Commander” by Patrick O’brian “1984” by George Orwell The Stories of John Cheever

I tend to read new books more-often than I reread, but there are some I return to over and over:

1. “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I am one of many people for whom it’s a perfect novel. I’m an atheist, but if anything could make me believe in God, it’s this book. I don’t see how a human can reach that level of perfection. It’s also a writing manual for me. Each time I read it (at least once a year, and I also listen to audiobook versions of it), I learn new techniques.
2. “Fox in Socks” by Dr. Seuss. It’s a book of tongue twisters, but it’s also the story of a power struggle between two well-delineated characters. It has a simple but tight construction, and it rides like a locomotive towards its inevitable conclusion.
3. “House of Mirth” by Edith Wharton. Lily Bart is my favorite female character of all time. She’s flawed–I only like flawed characters–and she somehow manages to be both petty and heroic. The book evokes a long-gone (but somehow still here) New York, for which I feel both nostalgia and disdain–similar to how I feel when I watch “Mad Men.”
4. “This Perfect Day” by Ira Levin and “The Queen’s Gambit” by Walter Tevis. I am lumping these together, because, for my money, they are the perfect genre novels. Levin’s book is a sci-fi dystopia, somewhat like “Logan’s Run,” and Tevis’s book is basically a sports story, with chess being the sport. Neither has any pretension of being high art, but both are gems, crafted with simple, confident prose and genius plotting. I’d like to give a shout-out here to Levin’s mystery novel, “A Kiss Before Dying,” which is impossible to film, though several people have tried and failed.
5. “Now We Are Six” and “When We Were Very Young” by A.A. Milne. I prefer these little books of poems to the Pooh stories. They’re a lovely mixture of wit, nostalgia, observation, and craft.
6. “Catcher in the Rye” by J.D. Salinger. I often pick it up when I’m bored, intend to read just a few pages, and get utterly hooked by the narrator’s voice.
7. “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Same.
8. “The Box of Delights” by John Masefield is my favorite young-adult novel about magic. It’s not as well known as the Harry Potter books or the Hobbit, but it should be!
9. “Bleak House” by Charles Dickens. Dickens at his best.
10. “The Short Stories of John Cheever.” I rarely read short stories. I prefer getting lost in long novels. These are the exceptions. Each one is like a novel.
11. “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The best world-building I’ve ever read. Marquez created his own universe with its own ambiguous but consistent laws. Magical. Epic. Devastating. Lusty.
12. “Uncle Vanya” by Anton Chekhov. My favorite play by my second-favorite playwright.

13. “The Complete Works of William Shakespeare.” My bible.

The Economist is amazing if you want to know about politics, business, and economic events all over the world. Most of the articles are shorter, running a few hundred words, but they will also have in-depth dives into certain issues. It’s great for a big-picture look at the world from a politics and economics standpoint. It’s very well-written and edited, but it tends to be data-driven and analytical rather than personality- or narrative-driven. For example, the Economist recently had a cover feature about how Uber is planning to change the transportation industry, but the article focused on strategic issues rather than getting behind the personalities of the key players. The New Yorker would approach this very differently. A writer there would get on the ground and get into the mind of, say, a top Uber engineer as he tries to get a self-driving car to navigate a problem. The New Yorker is amazing if you want more personal, in-depth features on a broader range of topics. Sure, politics and global affairs get covered, but you’ll also get stories about culture, music, film, food, personal essays, health, lifestyle, fashion, and much more. The writing styles in the New Yorker are much more varied, but you’re usually getting a storyabout people rather than an article about a political or economic event. Edit: I find the Economist does a much better job of keeping me informed about the world. However, I find the New Yorker’s best stories to be more memorable, and more likely to change how I see the world. This story from 2004 by Katherine Boo is a breathtaking piece of literary journalism and is my all-time favourite magazine story.

The writers for the New Yorker are quite varied. I would never mistake a Malcolm Gladwell story for a George Packer or Elizabeth Kolbert story. At the same time, many New Yorker contributors also write for other magazines like the Atlantic, Vanity Fair, New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, etc. I have a friend who writes for the New Yorker and many other magazines. He’s a terrific writer and does not get laughed out of buildings. The ability to write well and tell a great story is incredibly useful for all sorts of publications. Personally, I’ve long used the New Yorker as a model for how to write features. It teaches so many great lessons: how to write details that illuminate a character, how to assemble a messy jumble of facts into a coherent thesis and resonant narrative, how to structure a feature, how to build context, how to build a story arc, etc.

Write because you have to. If you don’t have to, don’t write. Because … you don’t have to. Don’t write because you want to be a writer. Writers don’t write because they want to be writers; they write because they have to. Don’t write because you want to make money as a writer. Very few writers earn a living writing. Money is nice if you wind up getting it, but the real reason to write is because you have to. If you have to write, and you do write (every single day, without exception!) and you work on your craft—on pacing, prose mechanics, metaphors, grammar, clarity, sensuality, etc.—then there’s a good chance your writing will improve to the point that others will start noticing it. Write every day. Make multiple drafts. Research. Edit what you write. Labor over every word. Oh, and if you’re a writer, then you’re always switched on, whenever you write. There’s no distinction between the the important writing you do and the tossed-off stuff, because, since you have to write, and since you care deeply about words, even a shopping list deserves your precision and scrutiny. Don’t write because you want a Quora T-shirt; don’t write because you want to be one of the cool kids. Don’t write because you want people to notice you. Write because you have to. I write because I have to. I can’t think clearly unless I write. Unless I describe a situation in words, it’s as if it never happened to me. I have to write in order to fix my world, in order to stop it from spinning into a confused muddle of arbitrary giraffes and pipe cleaners. Aside from the fact that my writing is (hopefully) always improving, I write exactly the same way, and the same amount, as I did before I became a Top Writer. And if Quora takes my quill away, I’ll continue writing the same way and the same amount. I appreciate the honor, but I don’t write to be a Top Writer; I write because I have to. Which is why I am a Top Writer. None of the Top Writers I know tried to become Top Writers. PS. You’re not an aspiring writer. Never call yourself that again! You’re either a writer or you’re not. Maybe you’re not a published writer. So what? Plenty of famous writers weren’t published (or were published and then forgotten) during their lifetimes. Many good and great writers never get published. Maybe you’re not a paid writer. Many published writers don’t get paid are barely paid. I know one who made 36 cents on her first book, and it wasn’t a vanity project: it was put out by a well-known publisher! Maybe you’re a bad or mediocre writer (who will, hopefully—with lots of hard work—improve over time), but a bad writer is still a writer. If you devote yourself to writing, write ever day, and toil at your craft, then (good or bad, paid or unpaid, published or not), you’re a writer; if you don’t do those things, you’re not. Because a writer is someone who writes. Step one: call yourself a writer. Step two: write. Step three: repeat steps two and three.

Five things: 1. By developing a deep love of language. This mostly happened through constant reading. I only read books by writers who care about language.  2. By spending years writing every day and, each time, laboring over the language. (Trying to make it as good as the language in the great books I was reading.) 3. By learning how to type really fast. I didn’t really enjoy writing until I was able to type almost as fast as I could think. When the physical act of writing slowed me down, I was spending more time being aggravated about that than focusing on the words I was using. (I learned to type fast by writing a book. By the time I was done, my fingers were flying over the keyboard.) 4. By reading aloud everything I write. 5. By assuming everything my teachers told me about writing was bullshit.

Jon Ronson on writing fiction From an Interview with Jon Ronson, in which he was asked about a screenplay he’d written:

[Have you written other fiction?]

No, first time. At first, I just couldn’t get my head around it. You know, what we do, whatever happens at this table is our material. But in a movie, you go into a restaurant, you sit down, and there’s fucking nobody there. The restaurant doesn’t exist. It’s like a big white space, and that completely sort of fucked with my mind, because I was thinking, well, there’s nothing to tell me what is acceptable for this script and what is not acceptable. Like in journalism, what’s acceptable is what actually happened, and what’s not acceptable is what didn’t happen. But with fiction, nothing happened, so you have to make these kind of complete judgments on what would the character do that? And it’s like, you could say, yeah, of course the character would do that, because this character doesn’t exist, so he could do fucking anything. He can go up to space, he can do anything.

So that completely screwed me with me for about two years. This was like a five-year process. Then after awhile, these characters start to form, and you do start to think, okay, I know enough about [the characters] to sort of know what they would or wouldn’t rationally do in a situation. So the further into the process you get, the more it actually feels like journalism. Because the stuff you’ve written does exist and then that informs the rest of it. So the second half of the process was actually really similar to journalism and I really liked it a lot. I don’t know whether I could do it again.

– “Silly, Funny Stories About Really Serious Things”: A Chat With Writer Jon Ronson

And here’s a similar quote, from Lawrence Weschler on why he doesn’t write fiction:

[T]he part of my sensibility which I demonstrate in nonfiction makes fiction an impossible mode for me. That’s because for me the world is already filled to bursting with interconnections, interrelationships, consequences, and consequences of consequences. The world as it is is overdetermined: the web of all those interrelationships is dense to the point of saturation. That’s what my reporting becomes about: taking any single knot and worrying out the threads, tracing the interconnections, following the mesh through into the wider, outlying mesh, establishing the proper analogies, ferreting out the false strands. If I were somehow to be forced to write a fiction about, say, a make-believe Caribbean island, I wouldn’t know where to put it, because the Caribbean as it is is already full––-there’s no room in it for any fictional islands. Dropping one in there would provoke a tidal wave, and all other places would be swept away.

– Mark Athitakis’ American Fiction Notes

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Profile photo for Dinesh Dharme Dinesh Dharme · December 6, 2013 I like the second quote probably because I could pull out a matching reference, from the movie Adaptation.

Adaptation. Quotes

“KAUFMAN Sir, what if a writer is attempting to create a story where nothing much happens, where people don’t change, they don’t have any epiphanies. They struggle and are frustrated and nothing is resolved. More a reflection of the real world —

MCKEE The real world?

KAUFMAN Yes, sir.

MCKEE The real fucking world? First of all, you write a screenplay without Conflict or Crisis, you’ll bore your audience to tears. Secondly: nothing happens in the world? Are you out of your fucking mind? People are murdered every day! There’s genocide, war, corruption! Every fucking day somewhere in the world somebody sacrifices his life to save someone else! Every fucking day someone somewhere makes a conscious decision to destroy someone else! People find love! People lose it! For Christ’s sake! A child watches her mother beaten to death on the steps of a church! Someone goes hungry! Somebody else betrays his best friend for a woman! If you can’t find that stuff in life, then you, my friend, don’t know CRAP about life! And WHY THE FUCK are you wasting my two precious hours with your movie? I don’t have any use for it! I don’t have any bloody use for it!

How can I deal with writer’s block when I have so many ideas in my head, but no way to write them down? I don’t feel confident enough to write and I suppose I am not literate enough in TV and film. How can I get more confident to write? This question previously had details. They are now in a comment. Profile photo for Marcus Geduld Marcus Geduld , Published author, lifelong reader. Updated Jun 10, 2014 · Upvoted by Sheri Fresonke Harper , Sheri started writing poetry 20 years ago and started taking courses through the University of Washington Ext… Originally Answered: How can I deal with writer’s block when I have so many ideas in my head, but no way to write them down? Writing has very little to do with “ideas” and nothing to do with confidence.

Get out a sheet of paper (or start up a text editor) and write. If your idea is a mystery about a wife who kills her husband by rubbing contact poison on his TV remote control, start describing the home they live in. Or her haircut. Or what he does while he’s at work.

Maybe none of this stuff will make it into your script, but that doesn’t matter. You’re writing what you’re currently able to write, and exploring your fictional world. And the secret of writing is writing. Most writers write many pages of prose they don’t use for each page that winds up in their finished manuscripts.

I’ve never met a confident writer. Writers don’t start from a place of confidence. They write their way to confidence. They sit down and write garbage, knowing it will be garbage and that they’ll probably throw it out. They keep doing this until there are a few gems—sentences here and there, phrases—buried in the garbage, and then they keep going until there gem-to-garbage ratio is acceptable. At which point they feel confidence. Or they don’t. Point is, they’ve written something.

Then they start all over with the next piece, feeling no confidence but writing their way to confidence.

To be a writer is to sit down at one’s desk in the chill portion of every day, and to write; not waiting for the little jet of the blue flame of genius to start from the breastbone – just plain going at it, in pain and delight. To be a writer is to throw away a great deal, not to be satisfied, to type again, and then again, and once more, and over and over…

— John Hersey

Writer’s block is a phony, made up, BS excuse for not doing your work.

— Jerry Seinfeld

A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.

— Richard Bach

I rewrote the ending of ‘Farewell to Arms’ 39 times before I was satisfied.

— Ernest Hemingway

… The ego is the enemy of the imagination. Anything that you think about writing when you’re not writing, is a product of the ego and is absolutely wrong. One hundred percent, all the time, wrong. And if take a step back and think how much time you spend trying to purify yourself in order to get ready to write, that’s like 95% of the time. And the reason for that is the ego has a stake in perpetuating the behavior that you’ve already engaged in. We do not think our way to right action; we act our way to right thinking.

So what I do is I start writing. If I think about my writing before I start to write, what I’m really doing is justifying not writing, because … I’m not writing. … I’m going to find a way to keep not writing. So what I say is I don’t have the idea yet; it’s not fully realized yet… Not only that: I don’t have pencils; my pencils are not sharpened; I don’t have the right notebook. … Whoa! Eleven-forty five already. Time for lunch.

… When you think about exercising, what you invariably say to yourself is, “You know, I’m too fat. What’s the point? I’m too old; I’m too fat; I’m too old; I’m too slow; I’m too this; I’m too that…” And all you’re doing is justifying the fact that you’re not exercising.

— TV Writer David Milch, http://biblioklept.org/2011/04/14/the-ego-is-the-enemy-of-imagination-david-milch-on-writing/

Discipline allows magic. To be a writer is to be the very best of assassins. You do not sit down and write every day to force the Muse to show up. You get into the habit of writing every day so that when she shows up, you have the maximum chance of catching her, bashing her on the head, and squeezing every last drop out of that bitch.

― Lili St. Crow

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

— Samuel Beckett

I deal with writer’s block by lowering my expectations. I think the trouble starts when you sit down to write and imagine that you will achieve something magical and magnificent—and when you don’t, panic sets in. The solution is never to sit down and imagine that you will achieve something magical and magnificent. I write a little bit, almost every day, and if it results in two or three or (on a good day) four good paragraphs, I consider myself a lucky man. Never try to be the hare. All hail the tortoise.

― Malcolm Gladwell

If I waited till I felt like writing, I’d never write at all.

— Anne Tyler

Keep writing, because not only does practice improve skill, it gives you more chances to score on the market. I did that for eight years before making my first sale.

— Piers Anthony

What I try to do is write. I may write for two weeks ‘the cat sat on the mat, that is that, not a rat.’ And it might be just the most boring and awful stuff. But I try. When I’m writing, I write. And then it’s as if the muse is convinced that I’m serious and says, ‘Okay. Okay. I’ll come.’

— Maya Angelou

Every writer I know has trouble writing.

— Joseph Heller

The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one.

— Mark Twain

The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day … you will never be stuck. Always stop while you are going good and don’t think about it or worry about it until you start to write the next day. That way your subconscious will work on it all the time. But if you think about it consciously or worry about it you will kill it and your brain will be tired before you start.

— Ernest Hemingway [I’d been doing this for years before I read this Hemingway quote. I usually quit writing mid-sentence, when the end of that sentence is obvious from context, such as “He put on his coat, left his apartment, and went to the …” The next day, I can instantly pick up where I left off and feel a sense of accomplishment and momentum.]

“Many years ago, I met John Steinbeck at a party in Sag Harbor, and told him that I had writer’s block. And he said something which I’ve always remembered, and which works. He said, “Pretend that you’re writing not to your editor or to an audience or to a readership, but to someone close, like your sister, or your mother, or someone that you like.” And at the time I was enamored of Jean Seberg, the actress, and I had to write an article about taking Marianne Moore to a baseball game, and I started it off, “Dear Jean . . . ,” and wrote this piece with some ease, I must say. And to my astonishment that’s the way it appeared in Harper’s Magazine. “Dear Jean . . .” Which surprised her, I think, and me, and very likely Marianne Moore.”

— George Plimpton [This is another technique I’ve used for years, and I was happily surprised to come across the Plimpton quote. The thing is, we’re social animals, and we’re used to talking and writing to specific people, not “the masses.” So sometimes, when I’m having a hard time writing, I put aside my text editor and start a letter in gmail. I address it to my mom, my best friend, or whoever. I write, “Dear __, I’m having trouble writing about __, but I thought you might find it interesting. You see, what happened was…” I never send these emails. I just copy them and paste them into my text editor. But just the ritual of writing to a specific person frees me.]

You can’t say, I won’t write today because that excuse will extend into several days, then several months, then you are not a writer anymore, just someone who dreams about being a writer.

— Dorothy C. Fontana

Writer’s block…a lot of howling nonsense would be avoided if, in every sentence containing the word WRITER, that word was taken out and the word PLUMBER substituted; and the result examined for the sense it makes. Do plumbers get plumber’s block? What would you think of a plumber who used that as an excuse not to do any work that day?

The fact is that writing is hard work, and sometimes you don’t want to do it, and you can’t think of what to write next, and you’re fed up with the whole damn business. Do you think plumbers don’t feel like that about their work from time to time? Of course there will be days when the stuff is not flowing freely. What you do then is MAKE IT UP. I like the reply of the composer Shostakovich to a student who complained that he couldn’t find a theme for his second movement. “Never mind the theme! Just write the movement!” he said.

Writer’s block is a condition that affects amateurs and people who aren’t serious about writing. So is the opposite, namely inspiration, which amateurs are also very fond of. Putting it another way: a professional writer is someone who writes just as well when they’re not inspired as when they are.

— Philip Pullman

I disagree that’s the problem. Anyone reading this can solve that problem instantly. Here’s how: Get out a piece of paper and pen (or a keyboard and a monitor) and write, “This morning, I got up, brushed my teeth, and…” and then spend an hour describing your day, up to the point you started writing, in as vivid detail as you can. (Make sure you do this for an hour, not for five minutes. Expect it to be boring. Do it every day. You may or may not enjoy it, but you have the skills to do it.) Or write, “I am upset because I can’t think of any good ideas, and I don’t know how to start my novel. I want it to be exciting, but I don’t even know what the characters should be like, and…” You do know how to sit down and start writing. You may not know how to sit down and write what you want to be writing or what you should be writing, but that’s a distraction. Ignore it and simply write.  I will repeat David Milch’s words: “Anything that you think about writing when you’re not writing, is a product of the ego and is absolutely wrong. One hundred percent, all the time, wrong. …” You’re not worried that you can’t write. You’re worried you can’t write anything about the subject you want or need to write about. And that worry is one of the “anythings” Milch was referring to. Don’t let that anything be the excuse that stops you from putting pen to paper. Milch continues…. “So what I do is I start writing. If I think about my writing before I start to write, what I’m really doing is justifying not writing, because … I’m not writing. … I’m going to find a way to keep not writing. So what I say is I don’t have the idea yet; it’s not fully realized yet… Not only that: I don’t have pencils; my pencils are not sharpened; I don’t have the right notebook. … Whoa! Eleven-forty five already. Time for lunch.  … And all you’re doing is justifying the fact that you’re not exercising.” Not knowing how to start is an the same as “SoWhat I say is I don’t have the idea yet,” and “What’s the point of writing about brushing my teeth when I’m trying to write a book about politics?” is one of the bugaboos Milch is talking about. “What’s the point?” is ananything. It’s an excuse, just like “I don’t have pencils.”  Just start writing anything, keep at it for an hour, and you will write your way through writer’s block and to your subject. Maybe you won’t do that today, but if you build up the habit of writing whether you’re inspired or not, over time you’ll be able to write your way out of any corner you’re stuck in.  This is what Milch means when he says, “We do not think our way to right action; we act our way to right thinking.” The action he’s talking about is writing. Putting words on paper. Write your way to right thinking! Also, please keep Malcolm Gladwell’s words in mind:  “I deal with writer’s block by lowering my expectations. I think the trouble starts when you sit down to write and imagine that you will achieve something magical and magnificent—and when you don’t, panic sets in. The solution is never to sit down and imagine that you will achieve something magical and magnificent. I write a little bit, almost every day, and if it results in two or three or (on a good day) four good paragraphs, I consider myself a lucky man.” If you’re not as experienced as Gladwell, one good sentence a day is a triumph. You’ll work up to two or three good paragraphs over time, but only if you put in the labor.  You can never use “I can’t think of anything to write” as an excuse, again, because I’ve told you what to write: write about brushing your teeth. “But that’s not my subject” isn’t an excuse, either. Write your way to your subject. “But it’s boring to write about brushing my teeth” isn’t an excuse. Writing often is boring. It always will be. It’s not a magic, heightened state; it’s a job, like plumbing (as Phillip Pullman suggests) or cooking.  “A lot of the time, the people who do have the self-discipline to sit down and write are quite lousy writers…” is not an excuse, either. You have the talents and abilities you have. Maybe they’re lousy, maybe they’re great. They’re the tools you have to work with them. If you’re a ditch digger, and you only have a rusty shovel, you can say, “I don’t want to dig with this rusty shovel,” or you can go ahead and start digging. Only one of those two actions will produce a ditch.  When you quit writing because you don’t have any good ideas, don’t know “how to start,” or feel like it’s pointless starting before you are inspired, don’t let yourself say, “I have writer’s block.” Don’t romanticized laziness. Instead, say, “I am unwilling to do the grunt work necessary to be a writer.” At least that’s honest, and honesty is a great tool for writers.

Oh, I don’t mean to imply that it’s simple. It’s anything but that. Raking all the leaves in a huge yard isn’t simple. It’s laborious, boring, and arduous, but we all know how to do it. Sticking to it is tough, especially if no one is forcing you to do it. What’s hard about writing—I don’t mean writing well, I just mean sitting there and doing it—is (as Milch said) battling ego.  You have to flick away all those flies that say, “You suck,” “This is boring,” “Xbox would be more fun,” etc. You also have to flick away, “That was a good sentence, so I think I’m done for the day,” (Imagine saying, “I raked those leaves really well, so I’m going to quit.”) “When this novel is made into a movie, I think Harrison Ford should be the star,” and “I can’t wait to show this to my friends!” None of that, good or bad, puts words on paper.  And the battle with ego is never won. You never conquer it. You just push it away for five minutes. Then you have to push it away again… and again… Ifyou develop a habit of writing every day (for longer than it takes to toss off a short Quora answer), the individual battles gets easier to win.  This is because there are two obstacles to winning: (1) outsmarting your opponent; (2) having faith you’ll be able to outsmart him. Without the second, you won’t even face your adversary. But each win will give you more and more faith in yourself. You’ll know you’ve bitch-slapped your ego before, so you’ll feel confident you can do it again.  Ann Tyler, a writer with countless novels under her belt, says, “If I waited till I felt like writing, I’d never write at all.” Writing on Quroa (or similar sites/blogs) is good exercise in some senses, but there’s a downside, unless you want forum posts to be your main sort of writing. The trap is that you get instant response. That’s a good thing for ego, but it’s bad for training your writing muscles to be self-sufficient.  If someone hired you to build a brick wall around his house, you wouldn’t call him outside every half hour and say, “Look! I got more done!” You’d show it off when it was finished. It’s important to learn to write without the constant ego boosts of upvotes or comments. Most novelists and non-fiction writers write (and revise) hundreds of pages before showing them to anyone.  And the other seduction of Quora is that you can get upvotes for subpar work. As soon as it’s good enough to get a response, there’s a temptation to quit: to forgo redrafting, to not worry about individual word choices.  This is like working out in front of a crowd, lifting weights that look heavy, but which aren’t very challenging for you. The crowd my applaud, but you won’t increase your muscle mass.

I agree with others here who have said: 1. read constantly.  2. write every day, the more the better. 3. copy the work of other writers. One more thing: if you can afford it, pay a stern editor to work with you, even if you’re not writing for publication. I did this when I was in school.  I wanted to improve my writing, but my teachers were of no help. In most schools, once you reach a level of competency, they’ll just slap an A on your papers, say “Nice work,” and focus on students who need help more than you do. Okay, but I knew I had miles to go (and still do) before I was F. Scott Fitzgerald. So I paid an editor to spend an hour with me each week. She was merciless. She went over my texts word-by-word, forcing me to justify each choice and “kill all my darlings.” It wasn’t fun, but I came out of it a much stronger writer. I was able to spot all sorts of problems I hadn’t been able to see, before. It was money well spent.

This is going to sound like a cop-out answer, but it’s the truth: I started writing by putting one word in front of another, and then, when I was done, I put another word in front of that. I kept repeating that process, and I’ve never stopped.

When I was younger, I wasn’t a writer; I was a “one day I’m gonna be a writer.” Which mostly involved “coming up with cool ideas” and imaging what the covers of my novels would look like. I lavished time and energy imagining who would star in the movie versions of my stories. I also read lots of books about writing and pontificated freely about other people’s prose. And I was obsessed with writing tools: I spent hours researching the best pens, the best notebooks, the best text editors, the best coffee shops … In short, I did everything except write.

They one day I decided to start writing and I simply kept on doing that.

Years later, I heard (TV-writer) David Milch say the following in an interview. It resonated so strongly with my experience, I transcribed it:

… The ego is the enemy of the imagination. Anything that you think about writing when you’re not writing, is a product of the ego and is absolutely wrong. One hundred percent, all the time, wrong.

And if you take a step back and think how much time you spend trying to purify yourself in order to get ready to write, that’s like 95% of the time. And the reason for that is the ego has a stake in perpetuating the behavior that you’ve already engaged in.

We do not think our way to right action; we act our way to right thinking.

So what I do is I start writing. If I think about my writing before I start to write, what I’m really doing is justifying not writing, because … I’m not writing. … I’m going to find a way to keep not writing. So what I say is I don’t have the idea yet; it’s not fully realized yet… Not only that: I don’t have pencils; my pencils are not sharpened; I don’t have the right notebook. … Whoa! Eleven-forty five already. Time for lunch.

… When you think about exercising, what you invariably say to yourself is, “You know, I’m too fat. What’s the point? I’m too old; I’m too fat; I’m too old; I’m too slow; I’m too this; I’m too that…” And all you’re doing is justifying the fact that you’re not exercising.

http://biblioklept.org/2011/04/14/the-ego-is-the-enemy-of-imagination-david-milch-on-writing/

You always have inspiration to write.

Write a description of the room you’re in or what you did yesterday. The inspiration for that is the room you’re in or what you did yesterday.

Perhaps that’s not what you mean when you say you lack inspiration to write. Maybe you mean you aren’t inspired to write about anything interesting. Okay, but don’t let that stop you from writing. “Not having inspiration” is no excuse to stop. You are perfectly capable of describing your bedroom or the route you take to work. So do so.

Edison said “genius is one-percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.” The one percent doesn’t need to come first, and, in fact, it generally doesn’t. Don’t waste time waiting for it. Simply get to work.

As you write, don’t try to be interesting, but be as evocative as you can. Imagine I’m your reader (or imagine the reader is your mom, best friend, worst enemy) and make me (or whoever) experience whatever you’re describing. Pick sensual details, such as the scratched-wood surface of the coffee table or the train you have to take that smells vaguely like urine. Labor to tickle the reader’s five senses.

It doesn’t matter if you have a writing project and this has nothing to do with it. Just keep writing. Slide over to your project when you’re ready. Or write something tangential about your project. If you’re writing a sci-fi story and you can’t come up with a way to get your hero out of a failing space ship, write a description of his onboard computer or of the type of shoes he’s wearing.

So I’ll be writing Jon Snow chapters, and I’ll carry that Jon Snow sequence as far as I can. And then at some point, maybe I’ll get stuck or not be sure what I should do next … [so I’ll] switch from Jon Snow to Sansa or Daenerys or somebody like that.

– George R.R. Martin, http://www.austinchronicle.com/blogs/books/2013-08-29/lonestarcon-3-the-george-r-r-martin-interview/

Simply write. Write about a lie you told, an elephant you saw at the zoo, cutting your toenails, making a cup of coffee… Bring it to life. Bring it to life doesn’t mean “make it exciting” or “make it important.” It means make the reader see it, hear it, taste it, touch it, and smell it…

Writing is no different from any other field in this regard. You continue to develop by working outside your comfort zone, failing at first (if you don’t, you’re not far enough outside your comfort zone) and pushing past failure.

Since there are many aspects to writing, there are many ways you can push. For instance…

• write about a subject you’ve never written about before.

• if you usually write fiction, try non-fiction. If you’ve only written prose, try poetry. Try writing a play. Try writing an instruction manual. Try writing a speech. Try writing a children’s book. Etc. Try writing something much shorter than usual – or much longer. Find a from with strict rules, such as a haiku or three-act play, and work creatively within that structure.

• fiction: if you generally write protagonists of one gender, switch to another gender. If you generally write about young people, write about old people. If you generally write about Americans, write about Koreans. Etc.

• Use a tense you’re not all that used to. Write a whole story or essay in present tense. Make it work.

• Write in E-Prime. It’s a varient of English in which you’re not allowed to use any form of “to be.” You can’t write, “He was a cop,” because “was” is a form of “to be.” Instead, you have to write “He joined the police force.” I forced myself to write in E-Prime for a year, and it massively improved my writing. I didn’t tell anyone I was doing it either, so I had to make everything sound natural. I literally wrote everything in E-Prime, including text messages and emails to my mom.

See E-Prime.

• Try a very different style of writing than you’re used to. If you’re generally pithy, write in a baroque style. If you write complicated sentences, full of asides and meanders, force yourself to write like Hemingway.

• Speaking of Hemingway, try your hand at imitations. Pick a different writer every week – Fitzgerald, Carver, Austen… – and try writing a short piece in his or her style.

That’s a small list of the sorts of things you can try. You can, I’m sure, come up with all sorts of other exercises. The point is to keep working out.

• Draft Number 4 by John McPhee

• The Middle of Things

• No Draft Approach of Menand
• Waiting for Confidence