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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"The first draft of anything is shit." - Ernest Hemingway
"Write what should not be forgotten." - Isabel Allende
"Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass." - Anton Chekhov
"Cut out all those exclamation marks. An exclamation mark is like laughing at your own joke." - F. Scott Fitzgerald
"Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on." - Louis L'Amour
"A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people." - Thomas Mann
"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
"The only way to do great work is to love what you do." - Ray Bradbury
"Don’t tell me about your character, let him speak." - Henry Miller
"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
"Don't be a writer; be writing." - William Faulkner
"You can make anything by writing." - C.S. Lewis
"I try to leave out the parts that people skip." - Elmore Leonard
"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
"The best way to predict your future is to create it." - Peter Drucker
"The first and most important thing an aspiring writer must learn is to write tight." - Stephen King
"Don’t get it right, just get it written." - James Thurber
"You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you." - Ray Bradbury
"Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open." - Stephen King
"Easy reading is damn hard writing." - Nathaniel Hawthorne
"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
"The only writer to whom you should compare yourself is the writer you were yesterday." - David Schlosser
"A writer is someone who has taught his mind to misbehave." - Oscar Wilde
"The difference between the almost right word and the right word is the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning." - Mark Twain
"Don’t take anyone’s writing advice too seriously." - Lev Grossman
"If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot." - Stephen King
"There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed." - Ernest Hemingway
"You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club." - Jack London
"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
"The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say." - Anaïs Nin
"No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader." - Robert Frost
"You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page." - Jodi Picoult
"If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it." - Toni Morrison
"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
"There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you." - Maya Angelou
"The only writer whom you have to read is the one who writes over and over again about the same thing." - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
"A word after a word after a word is power." - Margaret Atwood
"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
"A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit." - Richard Bach
"Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way." - Ray Bradbury
"The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt." - Sylvia Plath
"The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof shit detector." - Ernest Hemingway
"The only way to do good work is to do a lot of work." - Ira Glass
"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
"If a story is in you, it has to come out." - William Faulkner
"Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia." - E.L. Doctorow
"The only rule is to write what you think is interesting." - Neil Gaiman
"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
"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
"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
"To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme." - Herman Melville
"The hardest part about writing is writing." - Nora Ephron
"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
"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
"I do not over-intellectualize the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story." - Tom Clancy
"A writer's job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as memories." - John Irving
"The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do." - Thomas Jefferson
"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
"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
"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
"The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words." - William H. Gass
"There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein." - Walter Wellesley "Red" Smith
"The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, shit detector." - Ernest Hemingway
"You don't write because you want to say something; you write because you have something to say." - F. Scott Fitzgerald
"I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering." - Robert Frost
"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
"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
"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
"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
"When in doubt, have two guys come through the door with guns." - Raymond Chandler
"If you do not tell the truth about yourself, you cannot tell it about other people." - Virginia Woolf
"You don't have to be an intellectual to be a writer, but you do have to be able to think." - James Patterson
"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
"Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers." - Isaac Asimov
"Don't say the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream." - Mark Twain
"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
"Write about what you're afraid of." - Michael Connelly
"The more you leave out, the more you highlight what you leave in." - Henry Green
"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
"The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading, in order to write." - Samuel Johnson
"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
"If you want to be a writer, write. Write and write and write." - Anne Rice
"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
"If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write." - Stephen King
"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
"To write well, express yourself like common people, but think like a wise man." - Aristotle
"When you can't create you can work." - Henry Miller
"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
"There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you." - Maya Angelou
"Write what you know. Write what you want to know more about. Write what you're afraid to write about." - Cec Murphy
"It is perfectly okay to write garbage—as long as you edit brilliantly." - C. J. Cherryh
"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
"The scariest moment is always just before you start." - Stephen King
"Write to find the story, not to prove you can write." - André Gide
"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
"When writing a novel, a writer should create living people; people, not characters. A character is a caricature." - Ernest Hemingway
"The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading, in order to write." - Samuel Johnson
"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
"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
"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.