Monday, March 16, 2009

10 Tips for Aspiring Writers

  1. Keep writing. Write all the time.

  2. When you’re not writing, read the sorts of books or stories that you want to write. Every genre has a different tone and pace. Every writer organizes chapters and writes dialog a little differently. As you’re reading, pay attention to these details and it’ll be easy to find your style.

  3. Despite what they taught you in school, it is okay to start a sentence with “and” or “but” when writing fiction, and it’s okay to end a sentence with a preposition. Write the way you talk, not the way they taught you to write in school.

  4. Write down great ideas for stories or characters or essays, or even just great combinations of words, whenever you think of them. I carry a small notebook in my purse that is filled with random thoughts, alongside grocery lists and the model number of my printer because I can never remember it when I’m at Office Depot and need ink. In my extra bedroom, I have a huge cedar chest that is full of these notebooks. (I’ve been doing this for a long time.) When I get stuck and need some inspiration, I pull out a notebook at random and begin to read. There is always something cool there that will help me. For example, yesterday I was writing a 1000-word essay for my writing group and I needed a few words of advice for an old person to give the bride at a wedding reception. I was completely blank. Could not think of any slightly negative, completely random words to start this conversation. I dove into the trunk, pulled out an old notebook, and the fourth or fifth page said, “Bad luck follows bad choices,” which was absolutely perfect for the conversation I had in mind, since my goal was for the bride to then burst into tears and run out of the room.

  5. Get into a writing group. My group is actually just a few friends who all aspire to write fiction but make our livings with other things. Every week, one of us sends out a “prompt” which is just three random words or concepts. The exercise is to write 1000 words that uses all of those key words. Then we compare essays, and we are always astonished at how we used the different ideas. You can do this by yourself, but it’s more fun with writerly friends. (Our prompt last week was "camera, tears, yellow", so naturally I wrote about a wedding.) There are some great discussion groups for writers on Facebook, if you need a place to start.

  6. If you have something written that you want to have published, send it to a publisher. Start collecting rejection notices now so you can learn from them and become a better writer. And, you just might get published.

  7. Don’t close yourself off from writing opportunities that are not your “dream job”. I have always wanted to write fiction, and I’ve written a lot of it, but I’ve never been paid for a single word. (Might partially be because I’m afraid to risk rejection, so no one has ever read my stories.) I started out in my career as a technical writer designing training manuals for software. Then, I switched to consulting documentation and proposals. Now, I have one book on Amazon and two more coming out in the next two months – all of which are business how-to books. I have been paid for my writing, and for talking about writing, for nearly 20 years, but when I started, I thought the technical writing gig was temporary. I was sure that I’d be a famous novelist before I turned thirty.

  8. When my little publishing company gets our Writers Workshop going in Austin, sign up. We’ll teach you everything we know about writing and getting published, and then we’ll read your work and try to help you get it into print. (I’ll tweet and blog about it when it’s on the calendar.)

  9. Ask questions. Don’t hesitate to talk to every writer you meet about your goals and dreams. Writers are extremely generous with their time and advice.

  10. Set goals for yourself. If you don’t know exactly where you want to end up, it’ll take a lot longer to get there.