Writing is thinking and arguably the best way to discover new ideas. But it’s also terribly difficult. Putting words on paper seems like a daunting task. Luckily, there are tips from those who’ve done it for a living that will help you in your eternal struggle for good writing. I’ve compiled the best ten writing tips I’ve come across so far; from the necessity of leaving polite society to the crucial difference between writing and publishing.
1. Leave Polite Society
Stephen King has been wildly successful in writing horror and fantasy novels. According to the author, there’s a condition for success that is often overlooked:
If you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second-to-least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects. If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered, anyway.
Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
To be fair, it’s much easier to leave “polite society” if you’re selling books by the millions. I guess it’s the leap of faith you have to take that makes King’s idea so fear-inducing.
2. Expect Hard Work
If at any time you’re struggling to put words on paper, remember how legendary author Ernest Hemingway felt about it.
I feel absolutely impotent every time I sit down to write. Writing is hard work. It’s the hardest work in the world. It is the world’s toughest racket. If it was easy, everybody would be doing it. All they’d have to do would be to sit down and write a story and send it off and get a check back. The only reason they pay good money is there aren’t many people who can do it.
Ernest Hemingway
I’m not sure about the “good money” though.
3. Have Many Ideas
Writing is all about thinking through our ideas and putting them on paper in a way that’s compelling and meaningful. What’s often underestimated is to what extent having good ideas is a numbers game. Here’s American chemist Linus Pauling on the secret to generating ideas:
If you want to have good ideas you must have many ideas. Most of them will be wrong, and what you have to learn is which ones to throw away.
Linus Pauling
4. Follow Orwell’s Writing Rules
Orwell’s Writing Rules are a set of guidelines on how to write with clarity. They originated from an essay by George Orwell in which he criticised politicians and bureaucrats for employing language to obfuscate and manipulate. The novelist recommended six rules to keep yourself from writing meaningless technocratic drivel:
George Orwell, Politics and the English Language
- Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
- Never use a long word where a short one will do.
- If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
- Never use the passive where you can use the active.
- Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
- Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
I broke the guidelines down further in my essay on Orwell’s Writing Rules: How to Write With Clarity.
5. Write Music
Discovering new ideas through writing is only the beginning. You may also want to present your words in a way that people enjoy reading them. American writer Gary Provost illustrates how:
This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety.
Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals — sounds that say, listen to this; it is important.
So write with a combination of short, medium, and long sentences. Create a sound that pleases the reader’s ear. Don’t just write words. Write music.
Gary Provost, 100 Ways to Improve Your Writing
6. Be a Toddler (and a Sergeant)
How do you go about throwing out the bad ideas and keeping the good ones? Here’s comedy legend Jerry Seinfeld on how to be a good writer:
The key to being a good writer, is to treat yourself like a baby, very extremely nurturing and loving.
Then switch over to Lou Gossett in An Officer and a Gentleman. And just be a harsh prick, a ball-busting son of a bitch: ‘That is just not good enough. That’s gotta come out, or it’s gotta be re-done or thrown away.’
So flipping back and forth between those two brain quadrants is the key to writing. When you’re wrting you wanna treat your brain like a toddler. It’s just all nurturing and loving and supportiveness. And then when you look at it the next day you wanna be just a hardass. And you switch back and forth.
Jerry Seinfeld
7. Copy Others
As naughty as it may sound, copying others can be a way to improve your writing (and possibly find your way out of writer’s block, too). Here’s a technique writer Gary Provost suggests:
From time to time take a few paragraphs from something that you enjoyed reading and sit down at the typewriter or with a notebook and copy them word for word. You will find yourself suddenly aware of the choices the writer made. You will look at the work from the writer’s point of view. In time you will feel like an insider, and you will say, “I know why he chose this word; I know why he made two short sentences here instead of one long one.” You will become more intimate with the writer’s words and with words in general, and your own writing will be better for it.
Gary Provost, 100 Ways to Improve Your Writing
On a similar note, I wrote about How to Get Better at Writing in 7+1 Steps.
8. SWYP
Dear Reader,
This sentence is a friendly yet slightly overexcited opener. Allow me to continue with a random commonplace statement. Here’s some more irrelevant information. Sit down, this will take a while. Now we’re five sentences in, and I still haven’t told you what I want from you.
Start With Your Point (SWYP) is a writing principle for drafting emails. It encourages us to state our key message early on in an email. Writing to give a compliment? Lead with that. Want to invite somebody to a meeting? Say it upfront.
This way the reader immediately understands the relevancy of our emails, which — let’s face it — is always extremely high. Only then do we flesh out all the details in order of importance. The principle can of course be applied beyond email openings. Use SWYP to keep your audience‘s attention at the level of a paragraph or sentence.
As a reader, you can apply the inverted principle to anticipate bad news. Search for those negative messages buried in throwaway lines under convoluted grammar and mountains of jargon. Somewhere towards the end of an email.
9. Overcome Writer’s Block
We’ve all experienced Writer’s Block, the excruciating inability to put ideas on paper. American singer-songwriter John Mayer has a pragmatic view on where it comes from and what to do about it:
Writer’s block is when the two people inside of you, the writer and the reader, when the reader doesn’t love the writer. Or when the listener doesn’t love the player. And so writer’s block is not a failure to write. It is a failure to catch this feedback loop of enjoying what you’re seeing and wanna contribute more to it.
So, writer’s block, for me doesn’t happen as often as it does for other people because I know when I’m ready to sit down and go for it.
John Mayer
10. Remember Dennett’s Writing Hack
“What If I’m Wrong?” philosopher Daniel C. Dennett asked in a recent essay about producing good scholarship. Here’s what he recommends when, in fact, you find out that you were wrong all along.
[I]f after many hours of red-hot thinking and writing you discover to your dismay a fatal flaw, something that you overlooked or underestimated, all is not lost. Go back to the first paragraph and write something along the lines of “It is tempting to think that . . . , because there seems to be a powerful argument to the effect that . . . , but as we shall see, this is an error.” Then make a few minor adjustments to the rest of the paper, pointing carefully to the error that you almost made, and you’re ready to submit it.
Daniel Dennett, What If I’m Wrong?
11. Forget About Publishing
Generating many ideas can give us the confidence to part ways with those that just don’t work. Because not every piece of writing has to be shared with the world. Humorist David Sedaris explains the difference between writing and publishing:
Don’t confuse publishing with writing. They’re two completely different things. Let the world take care of the publishing part. That’s not your job. I wrote every day for 15 years before my first book came out. That seemed normal to me. I throw away maybe a third of what I write. That’s normal to me. Sometimes it’s easy, but most times it’s not. That’s normal to me.
David Sedaris
12. Aim for Anonymous Creativity
Being rich and famous is often the goal for creatives; or at least a welcome byproduct. Indian philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti explains why they should strive for Anonymous Creativity instead:
Have you ever thought about it? We want to be famous as a writer, as a poet, as a painter, as a politician, as a singer, or what you will. Why? Because we really don’t love what we are doing. If you loved to sing, or to paint, or to write poems — if you really loved it — you would not be concerned with whether you are famous or not. […]
You know, it is good to hide your brilliance under a bushel, to be anonymous, to love what you are doing and not to show off. It is good to be kind without a name. That does not make you famous, it does not cause your photograph to appear in the newspapers. Politicians do not come to your door. You are just a creative human being living anonymously, and in that there is richness and great beauty.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
Closing Thoughts
There’s no shortage of writing tips. If you want some more, check out my article on how to get better at writing. But at the end of the day, all the writing tips mean nothing if you don’t commit to the hard work of thinking deeply and putting pen to paper. True progress comes from pushing yourself to rewrite that one paragraph for the umptieth time in the hope that it will eventually turn into something meaningful. And then do it all again the next day.