The 22 Best Writing Tips Ever
Brian Clark over at Copyblogger has issued a challenge to bloggers in his post “The Cosmo Headline Technique for Blogging Inspiration.”
The idea is to use headlines from magazines like Cosmopolitan for inspiration, and to write your headlines before composing your article.
I’ve taken Brian up on his challenge and as a result, I bring you the 22 best writing tips ever.
Best Writing Tips
- Do it. Write.
- Read as much and as often as you can. Remember, every writer is a reader first.
- Keep a journal or notebook handy at all times so you can jot down all of your brilliant ideas.
- Make sure you have a dictionary and thesaurus available whenever you are writing.
- Be observant. The people and activities that surround you will provide you with great inspiration for characters, plots, and themes.
- Invest in a few valuable resources starting with The Chicago Manual of Style
, Eats, Shoots & Leaves
, and The Elements of Style
.
- Grammar: learn the rules and then learn how to break them effectively.
- Stop procrastinating. Turn off the TV, tune out the rest of the world, sit down, and write.
- Read works by highly successful authors to learn what pleases publishers and earns a pretty penny.
- Read works by the canonical authors so you can understand what constitutes literary achievement.
- Join a writers’ group so you can gain support from the writing community and enjoy comradery in your craft.
- Create a space in your home especially for writing.
- Proofread everything at least three times before submitting your work for publication.
- Write every single day.
- Start a blog. Use it to talk about your own writing process, to share your ideas and experiences, or to publish your work to a live audience.
- Subscribe to the top writing blogs on the Internet. Read them, participate, and enjoy!
- Use writing exercises to improve your skills, increase your talent, and explore different genres, styles, and techniques.
- Let go of your inner editor. When you sit down to write a draft, refrain from proofreading until that draft is complete.
- Allow yourself to write poorly, to write a weak, uninteresting story or a boring, grammatically criminal poem. You’ll never succeed if you don’t allow yourself a few failures along the way.
- Make it your business to understand language. Do you know a noun from a verb, a predicate from a preposition? Do you understand tense and verb agreement? You should.
- You are a writer so own up and say it out loud: “I am a writer.” Whether it’s a hobby or your profession, you have the right to this title.
- Write, write, write, and then write some more. Forget everything else and just write.
Do you think these are the very best writing tips? If you have any tips to add to this list, leave them in the comments!
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Cynth:
I disagree about the Stephen King book. He does not advise anyone to write the way he does, and his instruction and encouragement are not geared at teaching writers how to do so. King gives a lot of solid advice in his book. His recommendation to avoid deliberately trying to increase your vocabulary is among the best advice I’ve heard or read anywhere– no one can be a good writer using words he doesn’t know how to use properly.
You may not like King’s work, but he writes for himself and has luckily found an audience who likes to read him. You might consider his writing awful tripe, but it’s written for a little more than profit. If you have any doubt, compare King’s novels to Dean Koontz’s.
I also think it’s more than a bit hypocritical to recommend reading practical advice only if you’re more interested in getting a paycheck than writing well, then, in the next paragraph, to recommend having “letters” attached to the end of your name in order to get a paycheck for your crappy writing. Higher education is certainly valuable (I have both a baccalaureate and a professional degree), but getting your crappy writing published because you have a degree does not make your writing better than writing published because it is “gory” or “tawdry.”
Anything that helps a writer identify the flaws in his writing and work to diminish them is the kind of instruction that writer needs.
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Why thank you.
You can never underestimate the power of writing poorly. I have friends who get so frustrated that their writing isn’t coming out well so they just call it quits. It’s important to remember that it might turn out bad sometimes, but you need to find what you like in the poor stuff and expand on it.
I think most artists and creative people go through phases where they struggle and everything just seems to come out all wrong. That’s why sticking with it is so important. Never give up!
Great tips. I really like the one about creating a writing space in your own home. When I had my own place, I had an extra room that I could use as a writing study, and it did wonders for my concentration.
Now that I’ve moved back in with my parents, it’s harder to find the space. Of course, writing isn’t about where you do it, so it’s not a big deal, but I’m looking forward to the day when I can have a writing study again.
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Creating a writing space is probably one of the most difficult of all these tips because a lot of people just don’t have room in their homes. However, all you really need to write is a notebook and a pen, so your writing place could always be a comfy chair or a seat by a window with an inspiring view.
I wanted to offer a tip of my own, for consideration. When I’ve written numerous pages at a time and I feel as if the ‘moment’ is passing, I like to have a cd burned with instrumentals of different songs to kind of carry the emotion over page by page, word by word. The classics, such as Beethoven and Mozart are helpful keeping me mellow and yet still inspired and of course if the story calls for drama, or excitement- I must have some Biggie Smalls instrumentals playing in the background. ; ) Hope that would help someone if they tried it.
When you can’t write anything, it means you need to read something.
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Definitely!
good tips
I especially like rules 6 and 10. Strunk & White is indeed great! More extensive guides I really like are Sheridan Baker’s THE PRACTICAL STYLIST and Diana Hacker’s A WRITER’S REFERENCE.
Though not a Vonnegut fan, I can’t help enjoying an odd-sounding rule attributed to him:
Write like somebody else.
(This will have zero appeal to most writers of free-verse poetry, who think that the whole point and sole point is to express YOURSELF.)
:-,?
I haven’t read much Vonnegut (maybe none), but I am extremely interested in reading some of his work. I’ve eyed Hocus Pocus a few times and it’s definitely on my wish list! Wonder if I’ll like it… I do like “write like somebody else.” That’s a great tip for fiction writers!
Really very useful tips. Thanks a lot !
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You’re very welcome! thanks for reading and commenting!
Some writing tips:
Writers always need to be true to themselves.
Write down everything.
Know your proofreading marks.
Take a college level or English Compsition course.
Yes! Thanks for adding these tips!
FOCUS on one subject or topic.
I almost included something like that, but then I realized that single-subject writing doesn’t work well for many writers. But if you work best when sticking to one topic, then you definitely should. This is why one of the secrets of great artistry is trying different methods and techniques to see what works best for you. Thanks!
Amen to #21
“I am a writer”
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Amen and hallelujah!
It amazes me how many times people have to hear point 1 before they get it. The only way anyone succeeds at anything is by practising. If you’re not writing more than the next man, you’ll never learn to write in a more interesting way than the next man.
Thanks!
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Even though we writers are supposed to avoid cliches, “practice makes perfect” comes to mind. There’s a reason it became cliche (because it was true enough to be repeated often!).
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