Anyone who has tried writing professionally knows writing well is hard work. You need to watch out for things like grammar, voice, spelling and sentence structure. Although tough, many of us constantly strive to improve our writing. Even if you’re not a “professional writer” per se, you’ll need to write well in e-mails, on blogs, and social media. Essayist Paul Graham observes: “Writing doesn’t just communicate ideas; it generates them. If you’re bad at writing and don’t like to do it, you’ll miss out on most of the ideas writing would have generated.”
In order to write well and keep improving, two golden rules are often offered to people: write more, and read more. Writing more has obvious benefits because practice makes perfect. Reading more, on the other hand, exposes you to other forms, styles, voices and genres of writing that you can learn from and emulate. If you are serious about improving your writing, it is important that you remember and heed to these two crucial rules.
In addition, advice about how to write well from those who have been down the writing path and excelled is important. 15 of our all-time favorite writers join hands here to offer classic pieces of advice on how to write well and snippets of inspiration and thoughts to make you a much better writer. Enjoy.
1. PD James: On getting started…
“Don’t just plan to write—write. It is only by writing, not dreaming about it, that we develop our own style.”
2. Esther Freud: On finding your routine…
“Find your best time of the day for writing and write. Don’t let anything else interfere. Afterwards it won’t matter to you that the kitchen is a mess.”
3. Sarah Waters: On being disciplined…
“Treat writing as a job. Be disciplined. Lots of writers get a bit OCD-ish about this. Graham Greene famously wrote 500 words a day. Jean Plaidy managed 5,000 before lunch, then spent the afternoon answering fan mail. My minimum is 1,000 words a day – which is sometimes easy to achieve, and is sometimes, frankly, like shitting a brick, but I will make myself stay at my desk until I’ve got there, because I know that by doing that I am inching the book forward. Those 1,000 words might well be rubbish – they often are. But then, it is always easier to return to rubbish words at a later date and make them better.”
4. Kurt Vonnegut: On finding a subject…
“Find a subject you care about and which you, in your heart, feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style. I am not urging you to write a novel, by the way — although I would not be sorry if you wrote one, provided you genuinely cared about something. A petition to the mayor about a pothole in front of your house or a love letter to the girl next door will do.”
5. Lee Wyndham: On loving your subject…
“Loving your subject, you will write about it with the spontaneity and enthusiasm that will transmit itself to your reader. Loving your reader, you will respect him and want to please him. You will not write down to him. You will take infinite pains with your work. You will write well. And if you write well, you will get published.”
6. Lawrence Block: On being willing to write badly…
“One thing that helps is to give myself permission to write badly. I tell myself that I’m going to do my five or 10 pages no matter what, and that I can always tear them up the following morning if I want. I’ll have lost nothing—writing and tearing up five pages would leave me no further behind than if I took the day off.”
7. Harper Lee: On perseverance…
“I would advise anyone who aspires to a writing career that before developing his talent he would be wise to develop a thick hide.”
8. Mark Twain: On language…
“Use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English—it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don’t let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in.”
9. Laurence D’Orsay: On readability…
“Make your novel readable. Make it easy to read, pleasant to read. This doesn’t mean flowery passages, ambitious flights of pyrotechnic verbiage; it means strong, simple, natural sentences.”
10. Hilary Mantel: On getting stuck…
“If you get stuck, get away from your desk. Take a walk, take a bath, go to sleep, make a pie, draw, listen to music, meditate, exercise; whatever you do, don’t just stick there scowling at the problem. But don’t make telephone calls or go to a party; if you do, other people’s words will pour in where your lost words should be. Open a gap for them, create a space. Be patient.”
11. Fred East: On making the reader believe…
“If you tell the reader that Bull Beezley is a brutal-faced, loose-lipped bully, with snake’s blood in his veins, the reader’s reaction may be, ‘Oh, yeah!’ But if you show the reader Bull Beezley raking the bloodied flanks of his weary, sweat-encrusted pony, and flogging the tottering, red-eyed animal with a quirt, or have him booting in the protruding ribs of a starved mongrel and, boy, the reader believes!”
12. Will Self: On not looking back…
“Don’t look back until you’ve written an entire draft, just begin each day from the last sentence you wrote the preceding day. This prevents those cringing feelings, and means that you have a substantial body of work before you get down to the real work which is all in… The edit.”
13. Bernard Malamud: On rewriting…
“I would write a book, or a short story, at least three times—once to understand it, the second time to improve the prose, and a third to compel it to say what it still must say. Somewhere I put it this way: first drafts are for learning what one’s fiction wants him to say. Revision works with that knowledge to enlarge and enhance an idea, to reform it. Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.”
14. George Jacob Holyoake: On checking what you’ve written…
“He who wants to know whether he has written what he wishes to say, and as he ought to say it, let him read it aloud to himself. Even his own voice will seem as apart from him as that of an auditor. Or let him do, as the shrewd Moliere did, read his composition to his cook, if no one else is at hand–read it to anyone who will listen–and the reader will at once become sensible of redundancies, omissions, irrelevancies, and incongruities, of which his own wit will never make him sensible. Even stupidity as an auditor will improve style.”
15. Bill Stout: On writing well in general…
“Whether or not you write well, write bravely.”
