The 4 Best Pieces of Writing Advice on the Web - and One That Isn't There

Sometimes, even those of us who teach writing have to remind ourselves of what is the best advice on writing.  From time to time, I find myself searching for what writers - successful and unsuccessful, famous and obscure, literary and not-so.  In my recent searches, I found the following four to be the best pieces of advice I found. There are links to the articles in which I found all four pieces following each.
So here are the top four (and one more) in ascending order.


4)  Stop when you're at a high point - when the writing is flowing.
I first got this advice from a wonderful book called "Writing the Natural Way" by Gabriele Rico.  This author (Gladstone) puts this particular piece of advice further down his list than I would have done, but  I love his quoting of Hemingway on the subject:

I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.

Many have noted the positive impact of sleep and the mind's Beta-state on creative process, so there's no need to belabor that here. What is worth saying is: take this advice.

There is nothing quite so satisfying as coming to your writing table and knowing just where the scene is going as you sit down.  If you stop at a lull, or a "blocked moment," chances are that's where you'll be when you sit down to write again the next day.  And, of course, Hemingway was right - over the night, the ideas at the height of energy will grown and deepen in your mind, making the writing deeper as well.

The 5 best pieces of writing advice I didn't get in school 


3) Write the book you want to read.  
Seems obvious, but the author here (Chuck Sambuchino)  is quick to caution about the difference between  and, what a lot of would-be writers unfortunately hear:  the book you want to write.  The difference, as seen here, is largely in motivation.  You need, when you get to the bottom of it, to put yourself in the reader's place - what would motivate them to devour a book, to love it, to want to pass it on to others to share the joy?  That is the book you should write, not the one that gets you to an image of yourself as a writer.

What is the essence of a book that makes you want to curl up with it, that keeps you up hour after hour, turning pages - what is the core of that energy, that pull, the story, that draws you in and won't let you go?   The answer will be different for every writer, and it is that energy, that purpose, that you should write to.



The Best Piece of Writing Advice I ever Got - and the Worst


2)  Just Do It
This article (by Sarah Anne Johnson) contains many good pieces of advice, but this one is the most essential.  We writers are a whiny lot - we like to blame lack of writing on everything imaginable - work, kids, bills, a bad cold, a misbehaving dog.  The reality is, however, that  we find time to feed the cats, do the laundry, wipe the kitchen counters, stare out windows, go shopping, etc., etc.  To be a writer  is about making your writing a priority, or, as another contributor to this piece said, make it a way of life.  
Sit down and simply write.  Just do it.
There is even a quite funny meme circulating from the popular television show  How I Met Your Mother's character Barney Stinson on this very advice. (at the left)
(Note: many, many other pieces of advice in this article are also worth reading and taking to heart.)
Get to Work: Writers on the Best Advice They Ever Received



1)  BE BRAVE
Every writer - nay, every creative person - is riddled at some point or at some level of their being  with doubts.  They are the bane of our existence.  We question the worthiness of this draft, or this page, or this sentence, or, for God's sake, this word.  More than that, even, though, we question our own worthiness to write something anyone else would want to read.  So many writing students over the years have said these words to me:  "What could I write that anyone would want to read?"  In this piece, the advice comes from Eudora Welty:  
“No art ever came out of not risking your neck.”  
I tell students that they should think of the last thing they learned to do and ask themselves if they did it perfectly the first time. Universally, the answer is no - it took practice. And so does writing.  We are all going to write things that are bad - that's the risk.  But, in the end, we will find that moment when something we have written touches both us and the reader - we succeed at #3, above - writing the book we want to read. But only if we take the risk.

I always thought that I couldn't write science fiction, in spite of the fact that I loved it.  Then, a few years back, women in a writing group I was in at the time dared me to try.  I chose to do so during NaNoWriMo, the annual write-50,000-words-in-30-days challenge, giving myself deadline pressure in addition to the challenge issued by my friends.  The resulting book, Somewhere Never Traveled, became the best-selling book out of the seven I have published, not to mention that it freed me to pursue a genre which I have always loved.

All of the pieces of advice in this article (by Maria Popova) are wonderful, and worth reading.

Famous Advice on Writing

And, the one piece of advice I did not find on the web in lists or articles? 

#1-A:  HAVE FUN

Let yourself go - don't take yourself or your writing seriously at every moment.  Let playfulness seep in - not only to the stories you write, but to your choices of subjects and stories and characters.  The book I had the most fun writing, Somewhere Never Traveled, is also my most successful to date (not counting the sales of my two textbooks, which I would not want to compare to fiction sales).  Will it last? Will it meet the challenge of #3, above?  Time will tell, but I have no regrets.  I have never felt so liberated as when I finished that story.  And that matters. 

One Character Development Activity Every Writer Should Try

Have you ever been in a writing workshop where the instructor/leader gives an exercise to do, and everyone gets excited and gets beautiful results they can't wait to share, while you sit there like a dolt looking at your blank sheet of paper? I have. It ain't fun. All of us who write have tried methods, strategies, workshops, etc., that are wildly touted, and just don't work for us. It's wildly disappointing and more than a little humiliating. In my writing classes, though, I tell students not to forget those activities, the ones that don't work for them -- because they might work, later, for something else. I've had that happen to me. I sat in a writing seminar in my graduate creative writing program while everyone went nuts over a mind-mapping exercise, and I got exactly nothing. However, years later, in the midst of a huge block preventing me from finishing a book, I remembered that day, drew a mind map, and finished the manuscript that became my first book, Two Mothers Speak. I don’t usually talk about books on this blog - I’m not a book reviewer;   I don’t review others’ books.  I’ve also taken to being sure any political posts I put up go on my other (personal) blog, because the purpose here is about documenting and sharing a writer’s journey to create, sharing strategies, thoughts, and methods.  But, today, I AM going to talk about a book.

The current manuscript I’m working on has an underlying theme that deals with maps - maps and cartographic terminology function as metaphors throughout the story.  So,  being the insane research geek that I am, early on I immersed myself in learning about maps - interviewed cartographers, dug out 20-year old notes from when I worked in a county map room, and, of course, read books.  I ordered a number of books about maps from Amazon, and, as they do, Amazon made me recommendations on that basis.

One of them was titled Personal Geographies:   Explorations in Mixed-Media Mapmaking.  It sounded like it might be about making “art” maps, and I thought one of my characters would be very interested in that, so I ordered a copy.  Personal Geographies, however, is more of a how-to book on making maps as keepsakes.  It’s fun- there are instructions and color plates and the whole thing is very eye-appealing and inviting.  I was about to set it aside as possibly a gift for someone else when I took a closer look at two of the sections.   Titled, Mapping the Self and Mapping Your Experience, these sections encourage you to use the projects in the book, while suggesting a few more approaches, to explore yourself and your experience - in order to solve problems, relieve stress, understand yourself better, etc.  

It struck me that, while I’d done many similar exercises in the past for myself, I’d never considered them an activity for exploring and deepening a character.  In the following days, I mapped to the outline of a head memories and secrets and trials and joys of one of my main characters.  It’s not particularly artistic, (not the point of it, anyway)  but I came out of it, through this mapping and the both visual and kinesthetic experience of creating it with a much deeper understanding of what drives this person, and what haunts him.

This may have worked particularly well for me for this character because of the fact that maps are a frequent metaphor in this character’s story, but I think it could work in exploring the depth in character’s in any story, and I highly recommend it.  Besides, it’s fun.

A link to the book for your consideration:

Personal Geographies: Explorations in Mixed Media Mapmaking