50 Writing Tips
This is our ever growing list of writing tips. It is a general list of suggestions that we hope will help you in your writing and in the life of writing.
This means it will help in more ways than just on the page. The tips are general tips that many writers know. Some paraphrase famous writers. We are also asking that you add your tips in the comments.
If I like them, I will add them to the list. I would really like for these writing tips to make it to 500 some day.
1. Write everyday.
2. Have a build in crap detector. This paraphrases Hemingway.
3. Ask for feedback, always!
4. Don’t always believe what people say about your work.
5. Have thick skin.
6. Find and join a workshop.
7. Always believe in luck.
8. Make character the center of your story.
9. Avoid cliches, always. If you come up with a really clever line check to see if the line is a cliche.
10. As many have said, “You don’t always have to write what you know, but you should always know what you write.”
11. Show. Don’t tell.
12. Keep a note pad with you, always.
13. You don’t always have to know where you are going with a story. Sometimes it is best just to let it grow, line by line.
14. If you feel like writing something out of a dead sleep, late late, get up and write it. It will be good.
15. There are no new ideas, just old ideas that are rewritten better or worse.
16. Find someone’s opinion you can trust about your writing. You will know you can trust them because you won’t want to hear what they have to say.
17. Walk away from a piece after you have written it. Take time away. When it is first born it will dazzle you. Age is the real test of quality.
18. Never let a committee decide what you write. Majority vote usually equals mediocrity.
19. Try to publish your work.
20. Keep in mind writing is hard.
21. Read, read, and read more.
22. Edit, Edit, Edit, and edit more.
23. Rewrite, rewrite, rewrite.
24. Just because something happened in real life doesn’t mean your readers are going to believe it in your writing.
25. Don’ t be discouraged. Thrive in rejection. It happens to all writers.
26. Lie a lot.
27. Steal but do not plagiarize.
28. Make your work your own.
29. Don’t be a jerk help other writers.
30. Allow inspiration to come from anywhere.
31. Have big themes and big ideas.
32. Write just a little beyond what you are capable of, always.
33. Have a place to write, and then write anywhere you have to.
34. Know your favorite season for writing, and then write year round.
35. Read what other writers say about writing.
36. Try your best to find other writers in your life.
37. Don’t let what others want from your writing define it.
38. Don’t become attached to parts of your writing, cross them all out equally, no matter how much it hurts.
39. It will help if you write like you are on a deadline.
40. Trust your editor, most of the time.
41. The magic of writing is really hard work.
42. Sometimes you will have to sacrifice a lot of work for what you know is right.
43. You don’t have to be yourself in your writing, you can be whoever you want to be.
43. Don’t write your life story.
44. Writing is a craft.
45. Writing is the only lone act you do to be shared with the world.
46. Help other writers.
47. Know literary devices.
48. Don’t be boring.
49. Make it unique.
50. Don’t tell people what you are writing until they can read it. Tell a story tends to kill a story.
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