Eleven tips to help you become a better writer

"You have to sit down and do it and keep on doing it until you get there"

Illustration by Jennifer Tapias Derch

We looked back through our extensive archive of essays and podcasts on Collected to pick out some excellent writing tips from our RLF Fellows.

1. There are no rules

The first rule about writing is that there are no rules. Or, as Somerset Maugham apparently put it:

“There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”

Essayist Chris Arthur often opens with this quip when presenting to creative writing students. As he says:

"‘There are three rules for writing the essay’, I begin..." My audience waits in hushed anticipation as I observe the strategic pause that’s built into the assertion. Some have already written ‘1’ in their notebooks, pens poised to record my revelation of the first commandment.

There’s a mixture of reactions when the punchline comes. If it’s a good class, there will be wry amusement, and a ready grasp of the point that’s being made.

If it’s a weak one, students will be disappointed and frustrated. They believe I’m withholding some secret formula that, if only I would share it, would offer them a sure route to literary success.”¹

2. Create a messy first draft

Ernest Hemingway said, “The only kind of writing is rewriting.”

When they’re running writing workshops for students, our Consultant Fellows encourage the participants to create a messy first draft because then, at least, you have some words to rewrite. In her article, Teaching the teacher, novelist Sarah Butler wrote about the idea of writing being like sculpting clay, a metaphor the writer Tobias Woolf shared with her over twenty years ago:

“As writers, we don’t have any preexisting material, and so we must make our clay before we set about sculpting it. Writing a first draft becomes making clay: seriously messy. And then we can work with that lump of clay, gradually refining it over multiple drafts, starting with big structural decisions and only towards the end bothering about the details: the cadence of a sentence, the exact position of a comma.

I offer this metaphor to students, hoping that it will give them what it gave me: permission to write appalling early drafts and to know that there’s no point obsessing about the small stuff too early on.

3. Just do it

Novelist Penny Hancock’s advice is to just “sit down and do it”. Her favourite book on the craft of writing is On Writing by Stephen King.

She says, “The reason I love that book is that he’s so business-like about the whole process of writing. He doesn’t see it as a flighty, airy-fairy thing; he sees it as a job.

It’s the most practical and important piece of advice I’ve ever read. In the end, it’s a job. You have to sit down and do it and keep on doing it until you get there.”

4. Omit needless words

Popular with a number of writers is The Elements of Style. Originally published in 1920 by English professor, William Strunk, the guide was later revised and expanded by Strunk’s former student EB White. It was republished in 1959 and was listed as one of the most important and influential books in English by The Times.

One of Strunk & White’s most famous maxims is to “omit needless words:”

“Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer makes all sentences short, or avoid all detail and treat subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.”

5. Break through barriers

Although Strunk & White sounds pretty draconian, Chris Arthur says, “What I like best about The Elements of Style is its clear recognition of the limitation of rules.

“There is ‘no infallible guide to good writing, no key that unlocks the door, no inflexible rule by which writers may shape their course’.”

Strunk & White

As Strunk & White put it, ‘the purpose of writing, as well as its principal reward’ is ‘to break through the barriers that separate you from other minds, other hearts.’”

6. Cut pages

Many of us have heard the advice to cut words, but novelist Beth Miller suggests we cut whole pages. This advice originally came from an article called The Thousand Pages by JT Bushnell. (A thousand pages is around 300,000 words.)

Beth says she easily chucked that many during the ten years it took her to write her first novel. She asks, “Why are first novels such page-wasters? I think it’s because you’re learning how to write a novel.”

Yet, even six novels later, she still found herself throwing away pages. “Planning helps, of course—but there’s no substitute for actually writing the pages to see if it works.”

Illustration by Fran Pulido

7. Give your best energy to the book

Life writer Marina Benjamin says that this advice is for writers who don’t have the luxury of writing full time and originally came from her husband, who said to her:

“Give your best energy to your book.”

“It had a remarkable effect,” Marina says, “because it stopped me feeling swamped by multiple commitments and not knowing when to give attention to what. My best writing energy is in the morning and so I gave the mornings to the book. And the rest of the time, I divided up between my other commitments.”

Marina worried at first that this would lead to her other work suffering, but she says, “It had the opposite effect: it allowed me to allocate specific, focused time to the other tasks and the anxiety of not getting enough time for my book had been removed because I’d already given it my best energy.”

8. Dare to be stupid

YA author Zoë Marriott’s guiding motto has become, “dare to be stupid,” which she originally heard from YA novelist, Tamora Pierce.

“What that means to me is that sometimes you have to be willing to make mistakes; don’t go into situations that stretch you artistically and assume that you’ll be triumphant.

Sometimes you have to do things that will make you uncomfortable and are difficult in the full knowledge that you could fail because sometimes you have to fail before you get it right.”

9. Be daring

When screenwriter Nigel Cliff was in LA studying for a professional screenwriting course, he met up with Tom Sturges, the son of the great movie director Preston Sturges, a hero of Nigel’s.

“We went for burgers in a roadside diner. I was so engrossed that, at one point, I started eating the wrapping paper,” Nigel says.

Tom passed on his father’s advice to would-be writers: “Find the craziest, most unlikely story you’ve ever heard, it doesn’t matter where - steal it if you have to - and write it with such conviction that it feels inevitable.

It made me think about just how outrageous and far-fetched many of our most familiar stories are. We’re always looking for the unexpected, the dangerous, the unconscionable or the inconceivable that forces us to go further in search of a surprising truth about our lives. But whether you’re writing social realism or fantasy, whether you’re looking at the big picture or the attention you pay to each detail, I think it’s something to keep in mind. It certainly encouraged me to think more boldly and push more deeply.”

10. Read

Writers are often told to read and to read widely. In fact, as biographer Paula Byrne says, Jane Austen gave the following advice to her niece:

“I wish as a young girl I’d read more and written less.” Jane Austen

Paula says, “Read, read, read; read everything you can get your hands on. It makes you a better writer…I’m a very eclectic person in terms of what I read. I have four or five books on the go. I believe in reading all sorts of different genres; I think the variety is really important.”

11. Steer a steady course

Our final tip is from poet Alyson Hallett, who was given this advice from a man she met on a train. Alyson says he told her “to steer a steady course. It sounds like nothing, yet for me, it’s been everything.”

As Alyson points out, being a writer is “incredibly precarious. I’ve rarely had times when I’ve known what my income will be.” Living with instability is hard, as is dealing with the many rejections writers face while keeping faith that their book will one day be published.

Alyson says all one can do is “steer a steady course, keeping the ship somehow afloat and following whatever star or constellation it needs to follow to get where it’s going. There will be storms, doldrums, and rogue waves. There will be days when the sun is out, and the waves are glittering, and you feel like the happiest person on earth, and through all of that, steer a steady course.”

Do any of our writers’ suggestions resonate with you? Let us know your thoughts, and share your tips in the comments below.

1. Having said that, Chris does give some suggestions for authors to turn to for help:

Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life

Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing

Steven Pinker’s The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century

Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation

William Zinsser’s On Writing Well