The 22 Best Writing Tips Ever
By Melissa Donovan
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 the content. I’ve taken Brian up on his challenge and as a result, I bring you the 22 best writing tips ever:
- 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 composing.
- 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: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation
, and The Elements of Style, Fourth Edition
.
- Grammar: learn the rules and then break them.
- 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 enjoy support and 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 expand your talents 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.
December 4, 2007 | Filed Under Writing Tips and Tricks
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63 Responses to “The 22 Best Writing Tips Ever”
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Great tips, Melissa! Very encouraging
Smiles,
Michele
This is a wonderful list of 22. I love how you’ve covered so many important elements but broken them down to simple rules to live by.
These are some great advice but may i point out that at number 2, when there was no litriture out where did the first writers come from if there was nothing to read?
Be sure to re-read anything you wrote while “inspired”: it usually sucks. Your best writing is done with a cool head.
Very useful tips for an aspiring writer like me. But, i believe I follow some of those.
I’m going to get to work writing my own list right now!
Great tips!
On #7, I’d add some emphasis: “Learn the rules and then break them. But LEARN THEM FIRST.”
I have been ever so unmotivated of late, I feel a bit encouraged by these tips. Thank you.
Very nice set of tips here. I’ve been in this business for over two decades and I can attest to the fact that she didn’t miss a thing. Good job.
Thanks for the great tips. I have been procrastinating about starting my own blog, and your advice is very helpful. Plus, the “Shoots and Leaves” will make a great gift for one of my grammatically-challenged co-workers.
This a shoddy list. I cant think of any way this process and encouragement could actually better someone. It is treating writing like a job that anyone can be trained to do, involving only education and refinement of skill, when really writing is an expression of thought that does not require perfect grammar. If it understandable it can be proofread by someone who treats writing like employment. The author needs the ability to materialize plot and characters, even poetically. Just create great characters. Kurt Vonnegut has much better advice than this.
wow, almost all of these, except for the ones that mention blogging, are right of of “On Writing” by Stephen King.
way to make an effort
Wasco,
Writing is a job that most people can be trained to do. The best writers also possess some talent, which simply makes them lucky. Oh, and this list was not compiled specifically for fiction writers. I tried to put together a list that would be useful for a wide range of writers, whether they are freelance copywriters, poets, or authors (fiction or non-).
Thanks for stopping by.
Melissa
Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.
- Stephen King
Wow. Unlike a lot of advice I’ve seen about writing on the web, these tips are actually useful. ^_^ I’m so jazzed!
I’m working on a novel so I will be sure to remember these.
These are some awesome ideas and I am going to try and use them all , they are all very useful tips that everyone needs.
I tend to agree with wasco … this list is pretty cliche, though I bet it would be useful to amateurs or people who like to journal. If you want to work on a professional level, this list won’t help. Oh, and writing is absolutely not something anyone can be trained to do. That doesn’t mean you *have* to have gobs of talent, but without some natural facility, you’ll never gain a real audience.
I cannot even begin to tell you how much starting a blog got me going. And all after, oh, about 40 years of wanting to write!!!
You should look “comradery” up in the dictionary.
comradery
(shrug)
Melissa, recently I added your great post to my favorite stumbleupon. Apparently, the referred image alarmed you as ’stealing content and/or bandwidth’, which I never intended, but apologize if this caused you any trouble. Perhaps my whole idea about social bookmarking needs finetuning.
Thanks for the advices is just what i needing.
English is not my second language but the websites I’m promoting.
Is a big challenge for me to be a copywriter using another language but it’s works and will works.
Best regards
http://alfonsoruiz.ws
These are great tips for writers in every field ‘camaraderie’ or not. When you get some good short film scripts send them my way and I’ll make them into movies. Thats what writing is all about. Camaraderie.
Andrew Hamilton
Hamilton International Productions
http://www.hiproductions.com
I stumbled upon this page and I’m glad I did. I’m going to take heed to your list
There’s too many of them
Great tips! I think that learning the rules and then breaking them applies to more than just grammar - it applies to structure, to headline writing, and beyond. Especially in blogging. Freedom, flexibility and creativity in writing are so critical, as is variety. It’s so easy when you write often to come up with formulas that work - and then stop looking beyond that for what could be better, or even just more interesting. That’s why I loved this challenge from Brian so much. Glad you participated!
“How to be A Great Writer” - Charles Bukowski
You’ve got to fuck a great many women
beautiful women
and write a few decent love poems
and don’t worry about age
and/or freshly arrived talents.
just drink more beer
more and more beer
and attend the racetrack at least once a week
and win
if possible
learning to win is hard-
any slob can be a good loser.
and don’t forget your Brahms and your Bach and
your beer.
don’t overexercise
avoid paying credit cards
or anything else on time.
get a large typewriter
and as the footsteps go up and down
outside your window
hit that thing
hit it hard
make it a heavyweight fight
make it the bull when he first charges in
and remember the old dogs who fought so well:
Hemingway, Celine, Dostoevsky, Hamsun.
If you think they didn’t go crazy
in tiny rooms
just like you’re doing now
without women
without food
without hope
then you’re not ready.
drink more beer.
there’s time.
and if not
that’s all right
too.
The best book ever about writing is called ‘Writing Down the Bones’ by Natalie Goldberg. My sister gave me that Stephen King book, and it pretty much was an uninspiring mishmash compared to Goldberg’s tome. I’ve tried reading practical books about writing books and have come to the conclusion that the only way to make money as a writer is by writing a book telling other writers how to write.
Of course, if you’re more interested in getting a paycheck than in actually writing, then the “practical advice” including that in King’s book will work. But some of us long for the lost art of not writing either gory or tawdry bestselling fiction.
One bit of advice you do miss, and one that I find more than useful, is to complete your higher education. You don’t have to get a Master’s Degree to be a writer, but it sure helps to get your book published if you have a few letters attached to the end of your name. Either that, or be a celebrity.
Regarding point #11, it really does help to have other writers read your work. There are many writers-only community websites that don’t cost anything to join–Gather.com being one of them. I have learned more about writing from being in that community than by reading any book on the subject, no matter how good or recommended that book may be.
the list is really keepable in (at least) mind…!!!
thnx….
I don’t want to offend an above commenter, but I completely disagree with having to have a higher education to write, as one of the above commenters said. If someone loves to write, then WRITE - don’t worry about your status in life. Not all published authors possess college degrees just as Bill Gates and many others also don’t have collegiate degrees. Just because you have a degree doesn’t mean you can write. Anyone can write. A rare few possess that extraordinary quality that puts them on the top tier of literary genius and those people were not taught that by any level of degree. However, a degree does help for technical and non-fiction writing or to get a job at a newspaper. I hate seeing people say they can’t write because they don’t have a college degree. I’ve read writing by people with college degrees that was terrible and writing by those without degrees that was some of the best writing I’ve ever read. When you have a pen in hand or sit down at your computer, throw away your social status, your background, etc. and breathe life into your story. Your actual writing will say FAR more about you than a title behind your name will.
I would never aspire to BE a writer, buying every book on the subject…you just DO it. Look for interesting stories to tell (they are all around you). Open up a local newspaper, watch people, become intrigued with people in the real world. A writer’s best tool is a natural sense of curiousity about the world and the desire to tell the story behind it. If you can drive down a suburban street and wonder about the lives of those behind closed doors, you have the curiousity it takes to write good fiction.
One great writer I’ve read said that if you want to write lyrical and beautiful content, read poetry before you write. For some reason, it works. It’s like it shifts the gears and takes your writing to a whole new level.
I get the feeling that you think if someone wants to be a writer that they should… write a lot?
To anon: I’d venture a guess and say that many of the first writers were transcribers of stories/poems passed down through oral tradition. A good example of this is Homer. The Odyssey and The Iliad were originally performed as songs. Given their lengths, writing them down is a preferrable alternative to going hoarse on a regular basis.
Really fruitful tips……..Thank You
Excellent advice, all.
I agree.Good tips for writting.
Melissa,
God knows I had a hard enough time constructing this response to your tips without utter abuse, and perhaps I will never be a great writer, but I believe that your 9th suggestion is an outrage.
In fact, I couldn’t read past it.
Imitation is suicide. I don’t understand how you or anyone as an individual with a unique voice could possibly identify with the mantra that you seem to espouse in your 9th tip.
I’m certain, since you’ve read the “great authors”, that you’ve read Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance”, but it may be worthwhile for you to revisit such an important expression in defense of the individual’s voice in order for to become a better advisor to young writers.
Matthew Ramsey
“in order for *you to become”
Irony.
I agree with Matthew Ramsey on his main point. Imitation only serves to perpetuate the myth that the only writing worth doing is in service of the publishers and their egos as well as their bad taste in writing. Authentic authorship is not as cost-effective for publishers to promote as is “fast food” writing.
The sad reality is that people are averse to taking chances. So-called “revolutionary” writing is hailed when the only radical approach these writers take is to twist the same plot that everyone else uses so that it really isn’t all that different in a substantial way. The music industry is just as bad, asking original-sounding artists “can you sing more like Mariah Carey” or “can you play this song more like U2? (You can use whomever else fits nicely in their stead.)
Of course, we’re just hitting our heads against this new wave of intellectual fry cooks who would rather make money than create significant original writing. After all, there’s really no money to be made in being true to our voices when the same old crap sells. There is no end to those more than happy to write to the tastes of the lowest common denominator. The same is true of non-fiction as well.
This may damn me for an everlasting place in the pantheon of the shunned, but I couldn’t care less about that. Life is too short to write horrid fiction anyway, and the best authors are those who are better known a century after they are dead–another sad commentary, showing that dead authors who won’t rock the boat are preferable to living ones who do.
Cynthia and Matthew,
I appreciate your strong feelings about imitation. However, since nowhere in this list did I encourage writers to imitate, I’m quite unclear as to how you’ve both become so engrossed in the issue.
If one’s intent is to become a writer, then it stands to reason that one would make study of the trade, and in doing so, would read a variety of literature, eventually gaining understanding of what gets published, what sells, what readers enjoy, and what earns recognition and acknowledgment.
For those who want to make a career out of writing, it must, on some level, be treated as a business. Anyone with an ounce of business sense will tell you to do your market research.
This doesn’t mean you should sell out, or lose your voice, let alone use another’s voice. It just means know what’s out there, if for no other reason than to make sure you don’t, unwittingly, imitate.
Melissa
I’ve been feeling so dry lately when it comes to my writing. I’m twenty years old and I feel so inexperienced with life. But these tips are helping me revive my writing past.
At the age of 74, and with no college experience ,I am sure I will never be a ‘great’ writer. you have,however, renewed my desire to write. My passion is people and life, and writing my outlet. I want to touch hearts and make the world a better place,at least for some, or someone. I will write from my heart,though I know without the head there would be no writing. Whatever may be, I pray the world will be a better place because I tried.
Thank you for the inspiration to try again.
Great tips! Cosmo will be jealous…
-Jason
QuickEssayEditing.com
23. Read your draft aloud.
I like what you said about Rule #7. Learn the grammar rules, and then break them.
The trick is to know how to adapt to your audience.
As Mr. Project Engineer, I spend the entire day writing dry technical documents that obsessive-compulsive managers love to micro-edit to half to death. This is when strict adherence to proper grammar and spelling is mandatory.
But, when I write as the Friar, I kinda relax the rules (like I am right now). It’s more fun to write this way even though it’s not grammatically perfect. It also makes my stories more readable.
If I wrote my Blog as Mr. Project Engineer, I’d have zero readers.
@Friar, I used to work as a technical writer and for years I did mostly business writing. Switching back to a creative mode takes a bit of effort
(for me, anyway).
Melissa
I agree….until recently, the only writing I ever did was technical. It’s painful, nit-picky writing.
This “creative” writing is completely new to me. I need to unlearn some of my old habits.
Kind of like trying to teach a draftsman who’s only used AutoCad how to paint a landscape.
@Friar, I hear you! It’s a difficult adjustment but I’m sure we both can do it!