Five Brilliant Writers, and Their Advice to You

Writing is one of the strangest arts. Nearly everyone is, at some level, capable of doing it. But very few seem capable of doing it well. Perfectly literate people find that they can put words on a page, but can’t keep a story going. This is a shame, as many people who do have a great idea for a story never really learned how to put it down.

Don’t worry, great minds are here to help. Many of the best and brightest authors there are left us with their tips on how to write.

1 – Our first is Kurt Vonnegut, an excellent writer whose work spanned many genres and mediums. He had seven simple rules to follow if you wanted to write. They are best for short stories, but can be used anywhere.

Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.

Start as close to the end as possible.

Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them, in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

2 – Perhaps Vonnegut isn’t your guy. That’s OK, we have another option in Ricky Gervais. While his video goes further, his advice can be summed up in one classic sentence, “write what you know”. He also reminds us that it is better to “make the ordinary extraordinary, it’s so much better than starting with the extraordinary”. For Gervais, his advice is applied to joke writing and directing, but he learned these rules writing short stories for school.

3 – John Steinbeck, who won the Nobel Prize for his novels, gave us these six pieces of advice for writing. This list was once offered to a friend, and Steinbeck himself tried to follow this list.

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.

Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on. It also interferes with flow and rhythm which can only come from a kind of unconscious association with the material.

Forget your generalized audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death and in the second place, unlike the theater, it doesn’t exist. In writing, your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person—a real person you know, or an imagined person and write to that one.

If a scene or a section gets the better of you and you still think you want it—bypass it and go on. When you have finished the whole you can come back to it and then you may find that the reason it gave trouble is because it didn’t belong there.

Beware of a scene that becomes too dear to you, dearer than the rest. It will usually be found that it is out of drawing.

If you are using dialogue—say it aloud as you write it. Only then will it have the sound of speech.

4 – Margret Atwood has no formula, as she tells us in her Big Think interview. For her the really difficult part of writing is deciding what to write. A problem many people, in her experience, fail to solve first. In terms of method, she first handwrites, on any available surface, then types. For her this is a blessing, as it allows for the story to be put down twice and improved.

5 – And lastly, sometimes we need a change of scene. Maya Angelou would often check into a hotel room to write. Asking that the staff remove all sources of stimulation form the room, including the pictures on the walls. She bought the room, which was near her home, by the month, to allow for writing sessions at her leisure. This method allowed her to fully concentrate on the task at hand.

There you have it, five great writers and how they wrote. Maybe this advice will work for you, perhaps not. Their advice is at least worth a try, after all it does work for them. Maybe you won’t win a Nobel Prize, but you don’t need to. All you need to do is write.