1 – Read as often, as much and as many varied things as you can.
This is usually in one of these lists, and usually near the top, so you just know how important and useful it is. Writers would usually be readers anyway, you would think, but this advice also alludes to the fact that reading is also studying, seeing what makes some books work better than others, learning the conventions of writing and understanding what readers expect. As Stephen King said, ‘If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time — or the tools — to write. Simple as that.’
Similarly, William Faulkner advised, ‘Read, read, read. Read everything – trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it, just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it’s good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out of the window.’
2 – Creativity is boundless.
If you are the kind of person who reads, and who wants to write, it’s fairly safe to assume you have a bunch of good ideas. Apparently writers, and especially new writers, will often save a good idea for the next post or article or story, worrying that they’ll run dry. Well, pish-posh, we say. One promising idea will, more oft’ than not, lead to another, and then another. Most often the biggest hurdle for a writer isn’t finding ideas, it’s putting them to use. As Maya Angelou said, ‘You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.’
3 – Journaling.
They say that daily journaling is the best way to build a good writing habit. Anyone can jot down their thoughts, feelings and ideas in a way in which they don’t have to worry about anyone else seeing it. To go a step further, you may want to follow the idea of writers like David Sedaris who, when recording what he has been doing each day, puts it all in the form of a story. He includes character descriptions, locations, dialogue, metaphors etc, and these scenes serve as a source for his essays. He said, ‘I know for myself it’s very important to write every single day… So much happens by sitting at your desk when you don’t have an idea… you need to sit there and not have the internet and see what happens.’
If you fancy giving this a go, I think the best journaling app by far is Day One although, if you happen to be an Apple-ite, they are apparently introducing their own journaling app with IOS17 this autumn.
4 – Balance.
It can be difficult for writers to find that work-life balance, maybe because writing is traditionally such an individual activity and that, many would say, working with the written word is a rather introverted profession. Therefore, it can be a struggle to find that balance between writing and cultivating friendships, hobbies and spending time with your family. I’m lucky in that, although Tracie and I share a work room so I’m not alone, we are both working and so there’s plenty of time to concentrate. We often have Audible reading some book or other in the background, too – usually something we’ve already heard, and it kind of blurs into the background very nicely.
5 – Do a little bit every day.
It’s all about learning and developing, keeping those writing muscles trained and in tip-top shape. The more you do it, like many other things, the better you get at it. For example, Jerry Seinfeld (who, along with Larry David - in my respectful opinion - is responsible for the greatest television comedy of all time) tasked himself with writing one joke every day. He would mark the days off on a calendar, a large ‘X’ signifying the day’s success, building them into a chain. He said that his only job was, ‘Don’t break the chain’. In his recent book, Is This Anything?, he advises that writing every day is a certain way to build a body of work and improve your craft, much more so than trying to write for hours just once or twice a week.
6 – The difference between writing and editing.
These are two different things, engaging different parts of the brain. If you try to do your editing while still writing your first draft, you’re almost certain to never finish anything. When Joan Didion finished a draft of an article, essay or book, she would leave it in the freezer* for weeks. Having forgotten about the specifics of the draft she would then return to it and, cold as it most probably was, she would edit and rewrite ruthlessly. As she said, ‘There’s a point when you go with what you’ve got. Or you don’t go.’
*This is not advised if you are using a laptop, Supernote or anything electrical. Freezer bad for that. But you knew that already, right?
7 – Don’t fear the reaper rewrite.
Tamika Waititi (Jo Rabbit, Thor Ragnorak) often takes the editing process one step further, rewriting a script or draft from scratch months after finishing it. ‘I will write a draft,’ he says, ‘and put it away for a year or so. Sometimes it will be two years, sometimes three. Then I’ll come back to it, and I’ll read it two or three times. Then I’ll throw it away and start over from page one, based on the memory of what I’ve read.’
8 – Writing is (gulp) work.
You ever hear a doctor complain that he’s not feeling it before surgery? A plumber bemoaning his lack of inspiration to a client? Probably not, and writing is no different. Sometimes you might have to sit there, blank page in front of you, word count or deadline looming over you, and you may be feeling tired or completely devoid of ideas. But, the only way to become a better writer is by doing the work. You just have to buckle up and dive in. As Oliver Stone so eloquently put it, ‘Writing is butt on chair.’
9 – One page ÷ one day = book
It’s not easy, writing a book. Not easy at all. Writing thousands of words about a single story can be off-putting for new writers, requiring months of commitment to turn the idea into a first draft, and that’s before all the repeated editing. So, rather than go at it like a wood pigeon at a peanut factory, it’s far better to break it all down into far smaller chunks, like a daily word count or a single page a day. In that way you can achieve small, but measurable, progress on your book each day. As John Steinbeck told the ‘Paris Review’ in 1943, ‘Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day; it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.’
10 – When the going gets good, the good stop going.
Sitting in front of a blank page, wondering just what the dilly-o you’re going to write, usually leads to one place – frustration. Even, should you choose to believe in such a thing, writer’s block. Instead of putting themselves through that, successful authors and famous writers set up the following day’s work in advance. Stop in the middle of a sentence or paragraph; this will leave triggers for the subconscious to work on the story in the meantime. This ensures they don’t run out of ideas or inspiration when it comes time to write, making it easier to progress through a difficult first draft. Ernest Hemingway was once heard to remark, ‘The most important thing I’ve learned about writing is never write too much at a time… Never pump yourself dry. Leave a little for the next day. The main thing is to know when to stop. Don’t wait till you’ve written yourself out. When you’re still going good and you come to an interesting place and you know what’s going to happen next, that’s the time to stop. Then leave it alone and don’t think about it; let your subconscious mind do the work.’
11 – Precision and clarity, not assiduousness and unambiguousness.
Those who don’t spend a lot of time writing until they have to, like executives who need to write reports, often rely heavily on complex words and terminology that do nothing but hinder their readability. This is also true for most fiction; being clear and precise matters far more than trying to impress with your knowledge of the dictionary or thesaurus. George Orwell agreed, saying, ‘Never use a long word where a short one will do.’
12 – Chekhov and his famous gun.
As our dear Anton once wrote to a friend, ‘One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn’t going to go off. It’s wrong to make promises you don’t mean to keep.’ In other words, a gun that appears in act one must be fired by act three, otherwise it has no place being there at all. If you mention any detail or character in a story, it must have consequences for the characters or the plot.
13 – Reject this.
Just as the sun shall rise and the jeans will, eventually, need to be washed, so all writers will face rejection at some point in their career. They may fail to snare an agent, land a deal for their manuscript or write a best-seller. Learning how to handle this is all part of the process and, usually, writers can use these moments to figure out what they need to improve. Neil Gaiman has a Masterclass course, in which he says, ‘People ask me, ‘How do you cope with rejection?’ … And there are only two ways to do it—one of which is you go down. You get sad. You put the thing away. You stop writing. You go and get a real job, go and do something else. And the other is a kind of crazed attitude that actually the most important thing now is to write something so brilliant, so powerful, so good nobody could ever reject it.’
Writing is a rewarding thing to do. It’s fun working with words and language, creating stories, meeting characters and building worlds. It is, however, also hard work. BUT, if you have the stories inside you, don’t let the fact that it’s not easy put you off. Write and read, imagine and invent and, most of all, have fun. Like they say, when something stops being fun, it means it’s time to do something else.
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