I leave you now at the bottom of your own stairs, at half after midnight, with a pad, a pen, and a list to be made. Conjure the nouns, alert the secret self, taste the darkness. Your own thing stands waiting way up there in the attic shadows. If you speak softly, and write any old word that wants to jump out of your nerves onto the page, your thing at the top of your stairs in your own private night may well come down. ~ Ray Bradbury
fiction writing tips
Ray Bradbury’s Writing Wisdom #8
Be certain of this: when honest love speaks, went true admiration begins, when excitement rises, when hate curls like smoke, you need never doubt that creativity will stay with you for a lifetime. ~ Ray Bradbury
11 Writing Tips from Henry Miller Tip 9
Tip 9: Discard the Program when you feel like it–but go back to it the next day. Concentrate. Narrow down. Exclude.
11 Writing Tips from Henry Miller Tip 8
Tip 8: Don’t be a draught-horse! Work with pleasure only.
11 Writing Tips from Henry Miller ~ Tip 1
Tip 1. Work on one thing at a time until finished.
Tip 6 of William Faulkner’s 7 Fiction Writing Tips
Don’t exhaust your imagination.
The only rule I have is to quit while it’s still hot. Never write yourself out. Always quit when it’s going good. Then it’s easier to take it up again. If you exhaust yourself, then you’ll get into a dead spell and you’ll have trouble with it.
Source: Open Culture
Tip 4 of William Faulkner’s 7 Fiction Writing Tips
Know your characters well and the story will write itself.
I would say to get the character in your mind. Once he is in your mind, and he is right, and he’s true, then he does the work himself. All you need to do then is to trot along behind him and put down what he does and what he says. It’s the ingestion and then the gestation. You’ve got to know the character. You’ve got to believe in him. You’ve got to feel that he is alive, and then, of course, you will have to do a certain amount of picking and choosing among the possibilities of his action, so that his actions fit the character which you believe in. After that, the business of putting him down on paper is mechanical.
Source: Open Culture
Rule 10 of Elmore Leonard’s 10 Writing Tips
Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.
A rule that came to mind in 1983. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them. What the writer is doing, he’s writing, perpetrating hooptedoodle, perhaps taking another shot at the weather, or has gone into the character’s head, and the reader either knows what the guy’s thinking or doesn’t care. I’ll bet you don’t skip dialogue.
My most important rule is one that sums up the 10.
If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.
Source: New York Times
Rule 5 of Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules for Writing
Elmore Leonard’s 5th Rule for Writing
Keep your exclamation points under control.
You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful.
Source: New York Times
