100 Writing Tips From Famous Writers

Embarking on the literary journey can be both exhilarating and daunting. Aspiring writers often seek guidance from the seasoned wordsmiths who have navigated the vast seas of storytelling. In this blog post, we've curated a rich tapestry of wisdom from renowned authors, each offering a unique brushstroke to paint the canvas of your writing adventure. From timeless tips on the craft to insights into the writer's mindset, these nuggets of advice are a compass, steering you through the labyrinth of creativity. Join us as we delve into the echoes of experience, discovering the artistry and resilience that define the path of a wordsmith.

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  1. "The first draft of anything is shit." - Ernest Hemingway

  2. "Write what should not be forgotten." - Isabel Allende

  3. "Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass." - Anton Chekhov

  4. "Cut out all those exclamation marks. An exclamation mark is like laughing at your own joke." - F. Scott Fitzgerald

  5. "Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on." - Louis L'Amour

  6. "A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people." - Thomas Mann

  7. "Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very'; your editor will delete it, and the writing will be just as it should be." - Mark Twain

  8. "The only way to do great work is to love what you do." - Ray Bradbury

  9. "Don’t tell me about your character, let him speak." - Henry Miller

  10. "The most important things to remember about back story are that (a) everyone has a history and (b) most of it isn’t very interesting." - Stephen King

  11. "Don't be a writer; be writing." - William Faulkner

  12. "You can make anything by writing." - C.S. Lewis

  13. "I try to leave out the parts that people skip." - Elmore Leonard

  14. "If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it. Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can’t allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative." - Elmore Leonard

  15. "The best way to predict your future is to create it." - Peter Drucker

  16. "The first and most important thing an aspiring writer must learn is to write tight." - Stephen King

  17. "Don’t get it right, just get it written." - James Thurber

  18. "You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you." - Ray Bradbury

  19. "Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open." - Stephen King

  20. "Easy reading is damn hard writing." - Nathaniel Hawthorne

  21. "The beautiful part of writing is that you don't have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon." - Robert Cormier

  22. "The only writer to whom you should compare yourself is the writer you were yesterday." - David Schlosser

  23. "A writer is someone who has taught his mind to misbehave." - Oscar Wilde

  24. "The difference between the almost right word and the right word is the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning." - Mark Twain

  25. "Don’t take anyone’s writing advice too seriously." - Lev Grossman

  26. "If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot." - Stephen King

  27. "There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed." - Ernest Hemingway

  28. "You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club." - Jack London

  29. "When writing a novel, that's pretty much entirely what life turns into: 'House burned down. Car stolen. Cat exploded. Did 1500 easy words, so all in all, a pretty good day.'" - Neil Gaiman

  30. "The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say." - Anaïs Nin

  31. "No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader." - Robert Frost

  32. "You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page." - Jodi Picoult

  33. "If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it." - Toni Morrison

  34. "The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading, in order to write. A man will turn over half a library to make one book." - Samuel Johnson

  35. "There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you." - Maya Angelou

  36. "The only writer whom you have to read is the one who writes over and over again about the same thing." - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  37. "A word after a word after a word is power." - Margaret Atwood

  38. "It is the writer who might catch the imagination of young people, and plant a seed that will flower and come to fruition." - Isaac Asimov

  39. "A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit." - Richard Bach

  40. "Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way." - Ray Bradbury

  41. "The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt." - Sylvia Plath

  42. "The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof shit detector." - Ernest Hemingway

  43. "The only way to do good work is to do a lot of work." - Ira Glass

  44. "Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind, is written large in his works." - Virginia Woolf

  45. "If a story is in you, it has to come out." - William Faulkner

  46. "Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia." - E.L. Doctorow

  47. "The only rule is to write what you think is interesting." - Neil Gaiman

  48. "Don't worry about what you're writing or whether it's good or even whether it makes sense. Just pour your words onto the page." - Natalie Goldberg

  49. "A writer is someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is." - Orhan Pamuk

  50. "Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way." - E.L. Doctorow

  51. "To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme." - Herman Melville

  52. "The hardest part about writing is writing." - Nora Ephron

  53. "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." - Kurt Vonnegut

  54. "Don't get discouraged because there's a lot of mechanical work to writing. There is, and you can't get out of it. I rewrote the first part of A Farewell to Arms at least fifty times." - Ernest Hemingway

  55. "I do not over-intellectualize the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story." - Tom Clancy

  56. "A writer's job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as memories." - John Irving

  57. "The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do." - Thomas Jefferson

  58. "If you want to be a writer, write. Write and write and write. If you stop, start again. Save everything that you write. If you feel blocked, write through it until you feel your creative juices flowing again." - Ralph Keyes

  59. "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." - Kurt Vonnegut

  60. "The beautiful part of writing is that you don't have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon." - Robert Cormier

  61. "The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words." - William H. Gass

  62. "There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein." - Walter Wellesley "Red" Smith

  63. "The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, shit detector." - Ernest Hemingway

  64. "You don't write because you want to say something; you write because you have something to say." - F. Scott Fitzgerald

  65. "I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering." - Robert Frost

  66. "If you're writing stuff, you're a writer. If you're not writing stuff, you're not a writer. Do you disagree? Fine. Change my mind." - Matt Haig

  67. "The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you." - Tim O'Brien

  68. "The only thing you have to do to be a writer is to write. Write every day. Forget the market, forget the editor, just write." - Faye Moskowitz

  69. "When your story is ready for a rewrite, cut it to the bone. Get rid of every ounce of excess fat. This is going to hurt; revising a story down to the bare essentials is always a little like murdering children, but it must be done." - Stephen King

  70. "When in doubt, have two guys come through the door with guns." - Raymond Chandler

  71. "If you do not tell the truth about yourself, you cannot tell it about other people." - Virginia Woolf

  72. "You don't have to be an intellectual to be a writer, but you do have to be able to think." - James Patterson

  73. "Writing is like giving yourself homework, really hard homework, every day, for the rest of your life. You want glamorous? Throw glitter at the computer screen." - Katrina Monroe

  74. "Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers." - Isaac Asimov

  75. "Don't say the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream." - Mark Twain

  76. "If you want to be a writer, you have to write. If you don't write, you're not a writer. If you stop writing, you're not a writer anymore." - Rod Serling

  77. "Write about what you're afraid of." - Michael Connelly

  78. "The more you leave out, the more you highlight what you leave in." - Henry Green

  79. "I would advise anyone who aspires to a writing career that before developing his talent, he would be wise to develop a thick hide." - Harper Lee

  80. "The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading, in order to write." - Samuel Johnson

  81. "You have to follow your own voice. You have to be yourself when you write. In effect, you have to announce, 'This is me. This is what I stand for. This is what you get when you read me. I'm doing the best I can—buy me or not—but this is who I am as a writer.'" - David Morrell

  82. "If you want to be a writer, write. Write and write and write." - Anne Rice

  83. "Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way." - E.L. Doctorow

  84. "If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write." - Stephen King

  85. "The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn't require any." - Russell Baker

  86. "To write well, express yourself like common people, but think like a wise man." - Aristotle

  87. "When you can't create you can work." - Henry Miller

  88. "It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat." - Theodore Roosevelt

  89. "There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you." - Maya Angelou

  90. "Write what you know. Write what you want to know more about. Write what you're afraid to write about." - Cec Murphy

  91. "It is perfectly okay to write garbage—as long as you edit brilliantly." - C. J. Cherryh

  92. "If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn't matter a damn how you write." - Somerset Maugham

  93. "The scariest moment is always just before you start." - Stephen King

  94. "Write to find the story, not to prove you can write." - André Gide

  95. "Write the kind of story you would like to read. People will give you all sorts of advice about writing, but if you are not writing something you like, no one else will like it either." - Meg Cabot

  96. "When writing a novel, a writer should create living people; people, not characters. A character is a caricature." - Ernest Hemingway

  97. "The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading, in order to write." - Samuel Johnson

  98. "There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly, and sometimes it's like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges." - Ernest Hemingway

  99. "Start telling the stories that only you can tell because there'll always be better writers than you and there'll always be smarter writers than you. There will always be people who are much better at doing this or doing that, but you are the only you." - Neil Gaiman

  100. "It’s none of their business that you have to learn to write. Let them think you were born that way." - Ernest Hemingway

Amidst the collective wisdom, the resounding theme is the necessity to write, to persist through challenges and self-doubt. So, armed with the insights of Faulkner, King, and the multitude of literary luminaries, embark on your writing odyssey. Remember, writing is a journey of self-discovery, a constant pursuit of stories that only you can tell, transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary.

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